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Cloud design

Posted on 28 Jan 2009 at 16:53

Tom Arah is impressed by Microsoft Live Mesh, and wonders just what Cloud-based computing could mean for the designer.

The importance of the Cloud computing concept for delivering graphical content should be obvious enough, but I've always believed that it couldn't cope with creating graphical content, and the reason is simple: power, or lack thereof. Modern design applications demand colossal amounts of processor cycles, memory and data shovelling bandwidth: just think about what's involved in 3D rendering or video processing to see why. By comparison, the alphanumeric processing performed in most office productivity applications makes them a much easier proposition to "move into the Cloud", that is to execute on a remote server rather than your local CPU. Adobe's online word processor Buzzword (www.buzzword.acrobat.com) shows you just what Cloud-based RIAs are already capable of, but Adobe's equally Cloud-based Photoshop Express image editor (see issue 167, p159) was certainly impressive, but could never replace Photoshop itself.

High-end design will always require the most powerful computer and software you can throw at it, but that's not to say that the way we designers work won't change as a result of Cloud computing. This insatiable demand for power has already led to a major shift in working practice. As you replace your PC with ever more powerful ones, the old ones don't become useless, and you've probably accumulated several of them over the years: a couple in the office and a couple for home use. Then there's the notebook or subnotebook for travel, holidays, and "working" around the house or garden. It's often desirable to sacrifice the full power of the latest applications on your primary PC for greater working flexibility. But this new way of working comes with a major problem: data synchronisation.

Basically, how do you ensure you have the right data - where you need it - on each of these systems? This problem is particularly acute for designers, whose projects typically consist of many source files. The obvious solution is the USB flash drive. You're working on an InDesign project: simply use File | Package to copy your INDD and all linked files and fonts to your USB drive at the end of each working day, and carry it around in your pocket, copying the files onto whichever PC you use next as needed. At a cost of around £1 per gigabyte, in sizes up to 16GB, USB flash drives are the modern replacement for the floppy disk, accessible on any computer, although do look out for USB1.1 support for maximum compatibility.

However, manually copying files between devices in this way is hardly foolproof (even assuming you don't lose the drive). InDesign's Package command copies linked files such as EPS or TIFF pictures, but these might have been produced in another application such as CorelDRAW or Photoshop, and so won't be fully editable without their original CDR and PSD files that weren't copied. There has to be a better way, and this is where the Cloud comes in: rather than copying your files to a physical medium, copy them to and from online storage. This gives you an online backup if your office and house should burn down, or if your notebook battery were to explode. Moreover, you can access it from any device with an internet connection; for example, to view DOCs and JPEGs on your mobile phone. And the icing on the cake is that you can easily share such remote files and folders with other people.

If you're happy to pay for the service there's no upper limit to online file storage, and there are even plenty of more limited storage services available for free. I've tried a few of these, such as BT's Digital Vault and Microsoft's Office Live Space, but they all look horribly old-fashioned compared with the modern Flash-based front end you get with your 5GB of free space on Acrobat.com. Crucially, this also offers lots of dedicated tools aimed directly at designers. You can upload PDFs of any size to be downloaded by your output bureau or by reviewers, with all comments handled centrally rather than a tedious email-based round-robin. What's more, Acrobat.com acts as a central host for various other RIAs, such as a Flash paper-style viewer for file formats such as PDF and DOC, Buzzword for online word processing, and ConnectNow for small-scale video conferencing, chat and screen sharing.