Chapter Two: What is Adobe Creative Cloud and How Does it Work?
Chapter Two Overview
This chapter has three parts:
- 2A: What is Creative Cloud?
- 2B: The 5 Principles You Need to Know about Using Creative Cloud
- 2C: The 5 Elements You Need to Know about Every Creative Cloud Workspace (Interface)
2A: What is Creative Cloud?
If you are completely new to Creative Cloud and don't know much about what it is, then Part A is a good place for you to begin. If you have some sense of the different applications in Creative Cloud, but are just beginning, then you might want to skip to Part B and Part C.Adobe Creative Cloud is a collection of connected software applications. Think of Creative Cloud as a toolbox for making media for others to experience and interact with. You've probably heard of Photoshop, which edits photographs. Illustrator creates graphics and drawings. Premier Pro edits video. Spark makes it easy to create simple pieces of social media.
In Chapter One, you saw the matrix below, which is like a menu for the most widely used Creative Cloud applications. This menu/matrix is the heart of Chapter One because you want to focus on the first column to get started -- you want to focus more on the intellectual work you want to accomplish rather than the individual applications themselves. The purpose of Adobe Across the Curriculum is to encourage critical digital literacy, which means that you learn more about how meaning and media work as opposed to functional digital literacy, which is more about which buttons to push. Critical digital literacy explores why you want to "push the buttons" in the first place, whereas functional digital literacy is only about how to operate the software. Critical digital literacy is a capacity that you continually develop as a lifelong learner. Functional digital literacy is skill that you learn once that doesn't evolve much.
So, to understand Creative Cloud, first look down the first column that list some of the things you can make, and then look across the rows to see the different menu choices you have for creating those things. If you want to make a video, Chapter 7 will help you decide which Creative Cloud application to use: Spark on your mobile device or Premier Pro on your computer? If you want to make an interactive website, Chapter 8 has got you covered: do you want to use Muse to create a website using a template or Dreamweaver to write some of your own code for the website?
Across the matrix/menu you will see all of the colorful, square “icons” each of which represent a different Creative Cloud application. Many of these icons appear in a number of columns and rows, because they are so powerful and adept that they can work in a variety of ways and do many things at once. If you are completely new to Creative Cloud, then the very first thing you see is that it is a large collection of digital tools – it’s an incredibly powerful digital toolbox, as represented by all of those different icons.
Of course Creative Cloud is much more than just the sum of its many parts – it’s much more than just a couple dozen pieces of computer software. Creative Cloud is also synergistic networked platform – which means that it is a system of applications that are engineered and designed to work together seamlessly, which make the individual tools collectively that much more powerful. So, once you get the basic idea the Creative Cloud is a collection of media-making tools, then you need to zoom out to see how the system works together – to see the entire menu of possibilities and capabilities.
Once you have that general sense of the collection, the next step is to start using the tools themselves to see how they work. Because Creative Cloud is an integrated system, each of its applications has similar a similar logic and similar tendencies. Each application is designed according to some fairly consistent principles and elements, and it’s very helpful for you to have a sense of these universal aspects of Creative Cloud. In fact, you might call Part B and Part C that follow next “The Ten Things You Need to Know about Creative Cloud.”
