For those of you who have to slog through clip after clip of stock footage just to find the right nugget for your creative inspiration, you'll be happy to hear Thought Equity has released Speed View, a helpful feature on their website that shows full motion previews when the mouse is rolled over a still image in their clip gallery. Roll off the image, the preview stops. Roll back, it starts again. With 12 images per page, that's a lot faster than clicking and waiting for bloated video files to download and play. Check it all out here.
It's time to snoop into the financial status of your cubicle mate. For the sixth year, Aquent and the AIGA, along with Communication Arts magazine, have teamed to offer the AIGA|Aquent Survey of Design Salaries. This year marks the second consecutive year the report is available as a free, online, interactive database.
Based on a return of more than 3,600 respondents from eight geographic regions containing 15 major metropolitan markets, this year’s results indicate an improvement in salary gains for the first time in several years. This annual survey, according to the press release, is "considered a benchmark and valuable compensation gage across the industry and provides a current and specific reflection of what a significant share of those in the design profession are currently earning." Couldn't they have simply said, "the survey tells you what everyone else is making"?
Apparently, everyone's overloading it trying to find out what their boss makes. It refused to tell us what an art director in Boston working at an agency makes.
Replace Meaningless Words
If you write copy, marketing plans or white papers, you know the power of well chosen words. You also know how excruciatingly difficult it can be to come up with those words. A company called ThinkMap feels that pain and has created a thesaurus on steroids.
ThinkMap's Visual Thesaurus uses a graphic interface to animate the English language in a unique way, revealing the meanings, origins, pronunciations and relationships between words. After entering a word it creates a matrix of type, colored dots and floating lines to display the meanings, parts of speech, synonyms, antonyms, and the relationships between 145,000 English words.
aQuantive's Atlas, well known for its online campaign management capabilities, is stepping into the world of On Demand television with the launch of a new division called Atlas On Demand. The new division will focus on providing campaign management and measurement metrics for On Demand viewership.
Atlas On Demand applications will be incorporated into the existing Atlas digital advertising management solution providing an integrated On Demand advertising media platform. Current Atlas clients include Doner, Mediaedge:cia, Euro RSCG, Hill Holiday, Avenue A / Razorfish, Camelot, ID Media, Initiative Media and OMD. Atlas On Demand is led by Senior Vice President and General Manager Scott Ferris, who joined Atlas in 2003.
Adobe Tuesday announced the release of Adobe Creative Suite 2. Adobe Creative Suite 2 Premium Edition integrates new full-versions of Adobe Photoshop CS2, Adobe InDesign CS2, Adobe Illustrator CS2, and Adobe GoLive CS2. The recently released Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional is also included.
Adobe Creative Suite 2 includes the enhanced Version Cue CS2 and introduces Adobe Bridge, which provides a dashboard into projects and direct access to the new Adobe Stock Photos service and a Help Center link to Adobe Expert Support. Creative Suite 2 includes mobile authoring capabilities, creating and making content readily available for the Web and handheld devices.
In addition, Adobe InCopy CS2, a professional writing and editing program that integrates tightly with Adobe InDesign CS2 software, shipped Tuesday as well.
