Adobe Creative Cloud Across the Curriculum: A Guide for Students and Teachers

2c: The 5 Elements You Need to Know about Every Creative Cloud Workspace (Interface)

  1. ACC interfaces and menus -- settings, preferences, templates, and art boards
When you first launch a Creative Cloud application, you need to establish settings and preferences before you create a new project.  If you are first beginning, you probably want to rely on the original settings and preferences and not change them, but, even so, you need to know that they exist and can be revised.  For example, in InDesign, you might want to set your “units & increments” for either millimeters, inches, picas, or pixels, depending on your purposes.  In Premiere Pro, I like to set the default on the still images I import to 10 seconds instead of 5 seconds.
Creative Cloud becomes increasingly user-friendly with each update and each new version, and one of the things it now does better than ever is to provide templates that anticipate the most common formats that beginners want to use – and it makes it easy to switch between them.  These templates handle a number of settings and preferences so that you don’t have to worry about them, although you can almost always override such “pre” settings (“pre-sets”) when you need to.
In Photoshop and XD, these templates are called “art boards,” and there are pre-set art boards to choose from when you start a new project such as web, mobile, and tablet.  In many cases, you can save your work in different formats with different settings.  For example, In Premier Pro, you can save your sequences in standard definition for quick streaming or you can export in high definition (HD) or ultra-high definition (4k).
Chapter One of resource asks you “What do you want to create today?”  because you should always ask that question as you begin any new project in Creative Cloud.  What genre or format will you use to publish and circulate your final work?  You need to have some understanding of the final destination in order to start a project in Creative Cloud using the right settings, preferences, templates, and art boards.
  1. ACC interfaces and menus -- workspace, saving, sharing
Workspaces are very personal.  Just look at someone’s desk at work, at home, in an office, at a studio, or in a cubicle.  We each have individualized ways of working.  Some people like to have photographs of their family nearby.  Others have artwork or cartoons.  So it is with the workspaces or “interfaces” within each Adobe Creative Cloud application: they are individualized of the nature of each task.
Each workspace, in each different application begins with a standard arrangement, but these can be highly customized, depending on the “tools” you use most.  Each interface does have some things that don’t change very much such as “tools” (#8 below) and menus (#9).  The tools such as the selection arrow or cropping tool are typically in a vertical stack against the left edge of the screen, and the main menu functions are horizontal across the top of the screen.
The space in the middle, in between the menus on the edges of the screen is like a table-top, canvas, or pottery wheel – it’s where you pull things together, work on them, and create.  This central “panel” or “pane” is where you actually get the work done, but the entire “interface” including all of the menus and tools is called the “workspace.”
All of the Adobe Creative Cloud “workspaces” and “interfaces” have a similar look and function so that once you learn one application, it’s much easier to pick others.  Creative Cloud workspaces have consistent functions, names, and tendencies so that you can more easily move from one to another – including putting the main tools on the left, the main functions in a pull down menus from the top, and allowing you to customize the organization of your workspace.
On the other hand, each media format is so unique that they workspaces will have some important differences.  In some ways a film is like a photograph, but in others it’s very different, which is why Photoshop has a different interface compared to Premiere Pro. 
There are many aspects to these workspaces, but two of the most essential are you saving and sharing your work.  Many of the applications have automatic save features; even so, it’s a good idea to save your progress regularly.  I use the keyboard shortcut commands (command-s) probably about once every minute or two.  Sharing your finished work during the development stage as well as once it’s ready to be published, is essential as well.  Most Creative Cloud applications have a “share” button or menu at the top of the screen.  You must figure out learn how to share and export your work in your first days working with any application.
  1. ACC interfaces and menus -- main tools
Every Creative Cloud application workspace/interface has a column of its main tools, represented by icons, typically in a vertical stack toward the left edge of the screen. Thing of this column as your “toolbox” for each application.  You grab a hammer to drive a nail.  Then you use a paintbrush to paint.  Next you might drill a hole using a different tool.
These toolboxes can look intimidating at first.  Photoshop and Illustrator have over a dozen tools in the standard toolbox – in fact, many of the tool icons can be clicked to reveal different varieties of each tool to choose from.  Don’t be intimidated, because most of us, novices and professionals alike tend only use a couple of these tools at a time – never the entire toolbox at once.  You can basically use 2-4 tools in each application that will get about 90% of your work down, at least at first.
Further, the tool icons are self-explanatory: the arrow selects things, the straight line draws lines, the paint brush paints strokes, the letter “T” is the text tool for typing, etc.
Like all software, Creative Cloud applications have pull-down menus of the most common functions across the top of the screen.  When you are new to an application, you will be going back and forth between the toolbox on the left of the screen and the function menu across the top.  Those are your “home” – those are the places to go be safe and secure.
The best way, of course, to really understand how the workspaces, menus, and tools work is to actually put your hands on the applications and play around with them.  The explanations here can help orient you in general, and the tutorial can show these principles in action, but you really need to try them out on your own to get the picture.
  1. ACC interfaces and menus -- panes, panels, inspectors
Topic 7 above talked about the Creative Cloud general workspaces, and topic 8 described the toolboxes and menus.  You will also encounter a number of panes, panels, and inspectors throughout these applications.
A pane is rectangle in the workspace that holds a variety of other tools and panels.  The toolbox in each workspace is a panel that holds a collection of tools.  A panel is a smaller pane -- a panel is like a sub-pane.  A panel typically has a list of things or options.  An inspector is smaller than a panel – an inspector gives some kind of detailed information within a panel, often a numeric value for something.
So, within the structure of the Creative Cloud workspaces, panes, panels, and inspectors are nested, which means that one is located inside the other.
Not all panes, panels, and inspectors are always visible. To make them appear or disappear, you typically click on the “Window” pull-down menu at the top of the application screen and then select the pane, panel, or window you wish to see.  Sometimes there are arrows to either expand a panel out or to shrink it back.  And sometimes inspectors include numbers, sliders, or selection devices to reveal or change those values.
Until you watch a tutorial and experiment with panes, panels, and tutorials, it’s difficult to get a sense of what they are and how they work.  But you do need to be aware that, like all aspects of the Creative Cloud workspace/interfaces, panes, panels, and inspectors can be customized in terms of the ways they appear in your own workspace.  You might conceal certain panels and reveal others.  You can often shrink or expand the sides of a pane to make your workspace manageable and visible.  You can close panels and make them disappear and open new panels through the “Window” pull down-menu.
  1. ACC interfaces and menus -- getting help, solving problems
Chapter One describes the goal of helping you become more of a knowledge producer than a media consumer.  And, in order to become a media producer, you will need to learn how to solve technical problems on your own and with the help of others.
If you have a problem with your hardware or software functioning as it should, then that a question for a computer consultant.  And, by the way, 90% of those problems can be solved by saving your work regularly and rebooting your computer when you hit a dead end.
 
So, when the problem is purely just not knowing how to operate the software, then below is a list of the list of steps I take when at first I cannot solve a problem, find something within the application, or run into a glitch:
  1. Spend at least five minutes trying out different solutions on my own, because doing so develops your instincts and abilities for tackling future problems.
  2. Use the “help” feature in the Creative Cloud menu itself – this is particularly helpful in locating functions or commands that you know exist but cannot find at first.
  3. Go online and search for advice regarding the problem – type in “Adobe” and the name of the application as well as “how to,” and then describe what you are looking or in as few words as possible.
  4. Search YouTube for advice on the problem, in case there’s a tutorial on that issue or function.
  5. Educational services like Linda.com often have detailed tutorials on specific functions in all Creative Cloud applications – but you may or may not have access to those resources.
  6. If you simply cannot solve the problem on you own using steps 1-5, it’s time to consult your local Creative Cloud expert.  This could be a friend, a media lab attendant, a librarian, or perhaps your instructor.
  7. If you still cannot solve the problem, return to the concept of principle number 2 above: since there are “many paths to god,” try going at the issue from a very different approach, using a different app or different functions to accomplish approximately the same thing.
 
 

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