The Reflex Blue Show, Season 4, Episode 10: I Have an Inkling for CS5.5
September 8th, 2011 | by Nate VossThis week’s show — new and recorded live while the microphones were on — is an operatic examination of Things. We spend a slight amount of time recapping our recappings of HOWlive twenty-eleven (presumably for the final time); the finer points of local AIGA awards shows; a magical pen that records your drawings and turns them into more drawings; finally begin to delve into Adobe Creative Suite Five Period Five (a conversation will continue, dear friends, as we endeavor to uncover its dark, dark secrets); and do a little, tiny bit of dribbbling. Maybe more?
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The Reflex Blue Show, Season 3, Episode 7: Russell Brown Interview
July 1st, 2010 | by Donovan Beery
The third of the seven interviews we recorded from the 2010 HOW Conference in Denver was with the first graphic designer hired by a company called Adobe.
Russell Brown, now the Senior Creative Director at Adobe, speaks a bit about the history of the company, the creation of Photoshop (he was one of four people listed in that first splash screen), CS5 and more.
He then answers the question presented to him from last week’s show. You know, “What is up with Flash?”
We’ll be back next week with Debbie Millman, see you then.
Download The Reflex Blue Show, Season 3 Episode 7 or, click here to subscribe to The Reflex Blue Show from the iTunes Music Store.
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The Reflex Blue Show, Season 3, Episode 2: Steve Jobs vs. Adobe
April 30th, 2010 | by Donovan BeeryWe bring Steve Gordon back (for the first time in Season 3) to discuss the HOW Conference in June (use Steve’s promo code SG10 to save $50 on registration) and the little fight Apple is having with Adobe in regards to Flash. Is Flash really crashing Macs at a rate that only Stitch was built for? Is Flash bad for iPhones and iPads, but good for Google? It’s so far around the Internets I’m not even sure which tube to link to.
But as important as all of this is, when walking though the local No Frills Wednesday evening, I ran across this year’s new flavors of Mountain Dew – so figured we’d start the show with another taste test. I guess you can vote for your favorite flavor online, but since the site is in Flash, it crashed my Safari browser and won’t show up on my iPhone. Strange. But are trying new flavors of Dew safe? We didn’t know either, so we brought Chris Kelly back to have him test with us.
Let us know your thoughts below, and enjoy.
UPDATE 5/3/10 from @iKitty Podcast pics show per track: http://twitpic.com/1kotfm
Download The Reflex Blue Show, Season 3 Episode 2 or, click here to subscribe to The Reflex Blue Show from the iTunes Music Store.
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The Reflex Blue Show, Season 3, Episode 1: The Amazing CS5 Launch
April 16th, 2010 | by Donovan BeeryThe Reflex Blue Show Season 3 looks to be starting just in time to get us geared up for the HOW Conference in June. Can we seriously be less then two months out to the biggest design event of the year? And the second biggest event? Probably the Adobe CS5 launch.
This episode we bring back Chris Kelly to talk about CS5, complain about Twitter’s idea to create intrusive ads into our feeds, and force Chris Kelly get a Twitter account (@amazingchrisk). Follow him!
Let us know if the embedded player we’ve added to the post is of any use, what you think of the new 36 Point site, or any other comments about the show below.
Download The Reflex Blue Show, Season 3 Episode 1 or, click here to subscribe to The Reflex Blue Show from the iTunes Music Store.
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We’re back! I had built myself a little bit of a buffer by writing Wednesday’s strip in advance, but then I saved over it while I was prepping this one for launch. So, if everyone would rather see more adobee, I can certainly keep it alive.
The game being run is specifically detailed here, and it was run like fast break. As much as I want to hold Adobe up as the bastion of great software design, there are far too many troubles and inconsistencies in it’s “suite” of software to do so. It’s little things, as it so often is, that are cause for concern. The way a window resizes when you zoom, the default direction of rotating objects. What “transparency” is called, or how to make a dotted line in different programs. I swear you need a Ph.D. in Illustrator to suss out how to make a dotted line if you were never explicitly taught how, and in InDesign you select from a drop-down menu that is always there.
These little inconsistencies between their programs, programs designed to be a family, are so minor that I can deduce not one reason besides apathy and/or hubris that they haven’t streamlined the whole package. Illustrator is, of course, the worst offender, and Flash, still holding onto a lot from it’s days as a Macromedia application, is a close second.
It’s like they just need to put all these teams together in a room, or something. Have an office lunch to say “You know, Illustrator, when you resize a window or turn on your rulers, the page should re-size and re-center, the way it does in InDesign, Photoshop, and everything else.” Until then I will always think of Illustrator as the dickhead jock of the group.





Nate Voss is a designer, illustrator, talkshow host and design journalist. Working in Omaha since 2001, Nate served four years on the Board of Directors for
Donovan oversees all creative development at