For our March meeting we have at least two presentations set for the Lightning Round. This is the portion of our program where we offer our members a chance to share a few quick tips on various Adobe apps without having to do a full program. For this Lightning Round we already have Photoshop tips in place from Dan Kaufman and David Foto and we’re looking for more. If you have an Adobe tips or series of tips and can present in anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes, please contact LAdobe with your Lightning Round ideas.

For our main presentation, we have last year’s Photoshop Idol winner, Martin Bruinsma, who is back to show off some of the latest techniques from some of the best billboard designs. With all the latest advances in billboard design thanks to the controversial digital billboards sprouting across LA, this is going to be a very interesting session.

We’ll have a number of Photoshop and other design books to give away from all our major publishing sponsors and free food and beverages from Key Code Media and Function. So we hope to see you in Santa Monica at Key Code Media on the 25th!

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This month, Adobe is celebrating the 20th anniversary of one of the greatest graphics applications of all time, Photoshop and Adobe is getting together with the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) to celebrate the anniversary of the software that changed the face of photography and design forever.

The Photoshop 20th anniversary celebration on February 18th at 7:30 p.m. pst will be streamed LIVE and feature Photoshop luminaries including NAPP’s Scott Kelby, John Loiacono, Adobe Senior Vice President and General Manager, Creative Solutions Business Unit, NAPP Photoshop gurus Dave Cross and Matt Kloskowski, Adobe Photoshop star Russell Brown, and other key members of the Adobe Photoshop team. This fun-filled night will feature a walk through Photoshop history, a glimpse into the future, and celebrates all things Photoshop.

LAdobe will be present a live big-screen presentation of the webcast and we’ll be celebrating all night. Share your Photoshop stories on how Photoshop has changed your life the last two decades to win great prizes and as always, there will be Function beverages for you that evening. In addition, the first 25 people to arrive and sign our sign-in sheet that night will win a special photo editing tool we’ll preview after the webcast concludes called Citrify. Because of the limited space of Calumet’s offices, we can only accept the first fifty attendees that evening to watch the webcast with us. So make sure you get there early! We hope to see you for the celebration this Thursday night in Hollywood!

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For our first meeting of 2010, we’re launching a new initiative. With our new location in a new decade, LAdobe wants more new speakers and presenters than ever before. We know a lot of our members would love to share their advice with their fellow peers but are always afraid of presenting due to anything from stage fright to thinking they have talk for an hour to not getting anything in return.

To that end, we’ve launched a new feature called the Lightning Round. At the beginning of each of our meeting, we’ll have as many as four members who’ll share their Adobe application tips with our audience. The presentation can be on anything. From Photoshop to Illustrator to Flash to Dreamweaver and Soundbooth to After Effects. Even legacy apps like Director or Freehand. Anything is fair game. You can even choose to present that night if our lineup isn’t already full. And you only need five minutes minimum for your presentation! No PowerPoint slides, no fancy visual effects. Just anywhere from 5-20 minutes will do it. Best of all, each of our presenters will be able to choose a prize from our monthly stash before we open up the prizes to the regular drawing. So how would you like to come to an LAdobe meeting and actually be guaranteed to win something and something you probably want! The only exception to this is large prizes like conference admissions or expensive software. But all books, clothing and all other swag are fair game. And you know by now that LAdobe has one of the best libraries of books out there in SoCal! So if you’d like to present this month, or any month (special events like MiniMAX or an Adobe speaker tour excluded), please contact LAdobe with your idea so we can promote it in advance and that you get guaranteed to present on the 28th.

From there, we’ll revisit a topic we first covered over 2 years ago. AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It powers a lot of the most popular websites today and you see it’s effects everywhere from drop-down menu to photo galleries to slideshow and data grids. Many people say it will replace Flash as it does a lot of the same things but it native to most web browsers, it’s visible in most cases on the iPhone and other smartphones and mobile devices and it’s much more friendly to search engines. Adobe has had its’ own AJAX framework called Spry for many years but has been depreciated over time due to a lack of development at Adobe Labs. It’s still very useful though and there are now other frameworks that have free  components for Dreamweaver available for download at the Adobe Dreamweaver Exchange.

For this presentation, our user group manager, Adam Bell of dataTV, will start by revisiting Spry and then showcasing the components for JQuery, Yahoo’s YUI and Mootools that all work inside of Dreamweaver. While these components are not as flexible as Spry is, he’ll show you how you can make them work and create dynamic presentations using Dreamweaver in a data-driven webpage.

We’ll have a number of Web Design and Photoshop books to give away from all our major publishing sponsors and free food and beverages from Key Code Media and Function. So we hope to see you on our return to the Westside at Key Code Media on the 28th!

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For our final meeting of 2009, we’ll be looking at more of the news that came out of the Adobe MAX Conference in LA last month, as well as looking at some of the new betas now available at Adobe Labs including Adobe Social which is a new way to incorporate Social Media from Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo! into your Flash and Flex applications.

From there, we’ll look at an exciting piece of collaboration software called Flow from Gridiron Software, It’s 1 a.m., you’re on an insane deadline, and you’ve already saved over the earlier version your client now wants to use. Local designer Alan Gilbertson (G&G Creative) will demonstrate how GridIron Software’s Flow application works with typical InDesign workflows to simplify organization and be a life saver when you need it. Alan was involved in the beta testing of Flow from quite early in the development cycle, and if pressed will swap war stories with anyone interested. In the normal course of things, he works with and occasionally teaches Photoshop, InDesign, Flash, Dreamweaver and Illustrator.

We will have two exciting prizes to giveaway along with our usual assortment of swag. We will have a pass to attend Editors Retreat 2010 in Miami, FL in late January. You will be responsible for travel expenses but the conference admission itself is over $1600 so this should be an excellent chance to network with new colleagues and learn all sorts of editing features in one of the greatest cities out there. You must be able to commit to attending Editors Retreat in order to win this prize. In addition, we will have a copy of Flex Builder 3 to stuff into your virtual stocking for the holidays as well. So we hope you will be able to celebrate the holidays a little early and be part of our first meeting in our new home in NoHo on the 19th!

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Special thanks to Michele Weisbart for these photos.

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