Digital Workflow - Creative Design (I)

When people talk about digital workflows, they often pay close attention to how this technology will affect printers' daily production. But in this era of cross-media publishing, printers also need to go back and think about the workflow of their customers (ie creative designers). The need for digital graphic content and the corresponding adjustment and modification work has led many creative design companies to abandon the analog-digital workflow and move to a fully digital workflow. This will have some impact on the original creative design, image capture, text production and management of these digital assets.
Digital graphics data is also increasingly emerging from non-traditional technologies. Mr. Bruce Zeng, the president of Adobe company (Adobe), said at the seminar in Seybold that recent research shows that 73 million digital cameras will be put into use in 2003. In addition, the number of digital scanners is also increasing and the cost is decreasing.
Software that supports these tools is constantly being introduced and used on the core operating systems of computers (such as Mac OS and Windows XP). These digitized graphic content will soon appear in your production process. The workflows of printers and customers increasingly interact and influence each other.
Creative Design and Graphic Recognition Professional software tools for creative design are constantly being updated to meet the professional needs of non-printing ideas. Adobe's Photoshop software is both an important image editing and processing software used in print production and an important application for non-printing graphic content. There have been many new changes in the scope of application of graphic design ideas, including the addition of Web-based ImageReady image processing tools to Photoshop software. Subsequently, the Flash processing function was added to Macromedia's Freehand software, and the SVG file creation function was added to Adobe's Illustrator software.
Creative designers and their printers should also be able to identify the above graphic content in order to apply these graphic content in a more automated production process. Many data and graphic content management systems provide users with many effective ways to identify original data and attach it to graphic content. Users can search by automatic system or manual operation through any features assigned to graphic content resources. In most cases, application software can communicate directly with these graphic content management systems that use SQL data structures. It may be more beneficial to use this technique for processing operations in creative design. For example, Macromedia Inc. has added content required by the International Press Telecommunications Committee (IPTC) to documents used by the news media. Third-party applications compatible with the IPTC standard are able to search for IPTC header content. Examples include copyrights, credits, captions, search words, and other data used to classify image files.
Recently, Adobe has introduced an extensible original data platform (EMP). In addition to supporting an extensible markup language mark, EMP can also facilitate the original data exchange process between Adobe applications. All Adobe applications will eventually support XEP.
In the creation of digital text, Microsoft word is currently the most widely used professional software. Word and other Microsoft office software support original data tags through Extensible Markup Language (XML). In addition, Chicago-based Hypervision Co., Ltd. has also introduced worX Microsoft Word Add-on Tool to improve this function. Obviously, the basic technology of tagged graphic content for the entire operation process is becoming a mainstream technology, and it will certainly promote the further development of the creative design process.
After the content of the layout design tool is created, it must also have a certain layout. The graphic design software supplier has improved many necessary professional software to meet various output needs. Quark's software, QuarkXPress, is the most widely used full-page imposition software for printing. XPress 4.1 supports XML raw data with the avenue quark extension, while XPress 5.0 has independent support. This will make XPress an automatic cross-media layout design tool.
The recently introduced Adobe InDesign 2.0 is an integrated cross-media layout design software that is very representative. With InDesign 2.0's XML input and output capabilities and new XML support capabilities, users can use manual or automated workflows to input and output graphic content, produce prints, or publish content on the Web.
Users who plan to create longer or technical documents during cross-media publishing may prefer to use Adobe framemarker. This application software supports XML, HTML, SGML, and structured PDF with a high degree of flexibility, though it is not as designed as Quark or InDesign software.
QuarkAPS and Adobe InScope belong to the new professional software that supports layout work, and can create and manage graphic content in a collaborative environment (but in order to ensure that the graphic content is successfully exported, some issues related to process support must also be resolved). Although QuarkAPS and Adobe InScope software can be used in many different production environments, their primary role is in the layout of product catalogs and periodicals.
For online graphic content distribution, layout software such as Adobe Golive and Macromedia Dreamweaver can be used. Once the tagged data has been processed, many tools (in addition to the standard full-page imposition software) can be used to arrange graphic content for online output. Many of these applications can meet the needs of large-scale publishing. Publishers using standards such as XML can also build their own data publishing system.
Process Support In order for each software tool to be combined in a file format to function as a whole, any level of professional support is indispensable for any production process. The most critical part is the data management system for graphic and text processing (more recently such a system has developed into a graphic content management system). Developers continue to add other process management tools to the above system to solve some of the problems encountered when adopting a fully digital workflow. Many of these systems help improve image conversion efficiency. Because the production process for printing images is different from the production process for online images, the printer and its customers must make the images meet the actual needs of the end. The operating requirements can be divided into many types, mainly related to the color and graphic structure. Data and graphic management systems usually support the conversion of file formats. Using a stand-alone or integrated ICC standard color management system often means that the image color space can be transferred to a specific output device if necessary. (To be continued)