Tag: Adobe

Adobe gets creative with new data visualization product

Adobe company logos are seen in this picture illustration taken in Vienna July 9, 2013. Picture taken July 9, 2013. To match Special Report TAX-BIGTECH/ REUTERS/Leonhard Foeger (AUSTRIA - Tags: BUSINESS SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY LOGO) - RTX11VPB

VB INSIGHT:

Adobe is a strong and active player in the marketing tech landscape. We’ve studied their solutions in market across marketing clouds, mobile analytics and acquisition tools, and marketing automation tools at VB Insight. Frankly, with so many digital marketing solutions across so many areas — audience targeting, campaign management, social media, etc. — the company has to have a sturdy analytics platform integrating those disparate, but related marketing functions. Today, the company is introducing Analysis Workspace in Adobe Analytics, a reporting and data visualization tool to better help companies communicate what’s happening across all of these channels.

Data analytics is really tricky for most companies. But it’s a critical means to an end. You can’t have great marketing — social marketing, online advertising, even customer service — without great analytics. And since marketing is increasingly becoming wildly data dependent while taking on more responsibility for the overall customer experience, the use of data analytics across any organization simply needs to proliferate.

Except there’s one big, hairy problem there.

From VentureBeat

Most companies don’t have the skills in house to make sense of all the data. McKinsey is projecting that by 2018, demand for data scientists may be as much as 60 percent greater than the supply. Suffice it to say, companies are struggling to fill this gap with adequate data talent.

In our own recent report on marketing analytics, we asked over one thousand marketers two questions on this topic:

  • How effective is your marketing organization at generating insight?
  • How effective is your greater organization — outside of marketing — at translating that insight into action?

Unfortunately, for most marketers, this confidence level falls somewhere between “somewhat” and “not very” effective.

analytics effectiveness

Adobe is hoping its new visualization product, now available to all customers using Adobe Analytics suite, will mind that gap and help companies create better dashboards with broad business appeal — stitching together disparate data sources into a single view that makes sense for multiple lines of business — to more than just data analysts.

In a demo of the Analysis Workspace product yesterday, I saw a dashboard that’s flexible, can be built by non-data analysts, and could meet endless marketing insight functions for a business.

Adobe Analysis Workspace Screenshot

Above: Sample Adobe Analysis Workspace

Analysis Workspace — Highlights:

  • Simple, Photoshop-inspired Workflows: Analysis Workspace lets users simply drag and drop dimensions, metrics and segments to create any type of report.
  • Intuitive Data Visualizations: After dragging relevant components into an Analysis Workspace table, visualizations are applied to the table data set in real time. These visualizations can be easily manipulated, allowing users to resize, rename and swap between different charts and graphs with interactive elements — while introducing new sharing functions to better communicate insights.

Marketing dashboards are a dime a dozen. With over 800 tools in market supporting marketing data analytics, and plans for companies of all sizes to massively increase spend on analytics, one can’t overstate the importance of making sense of all this data. Adobe is hoping its latest product will help the non-data scientist come up to speed with marketing data.

More information:

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Adobe Illustrator Basic Techniques For Transformation Of Objects

Since Adobe Illustrator is a vector-based drawing environment, each Illustrator drawing consists of independent elements or objects. Much of the process of creating a drawing consists of transforming objects, either to customise them or to derive other objects. In this article, we will examine some of the key techniques used when carry out such transformations.

Since Adobe Illustrator is a vector-based drawing environment, each Illustrator drawing consists of independent elements or objects. Much of the process of creating a drawing consists of transforming objects, either to customise them or to derive other objects. In this article, we will examine some of the key techniques used when carry out such transformations.

First of all transformations can be carried out in three different way: using the selection or free transform tool, using the transform tools (scale, rotate, shear and reflect) or using the options in the Transform sub-menu of the Object menu. Using the selection or free transform tools is very much like transforming vector and other objects in most non-specialist programs such as Microsoft Word or PowerPoint.

Moving objects is one of the simplest forms of transformation. To move an object with the pointer or free transform tool, simply position the cursor over the object, click and hold down the mouse button and drag the object to a new position. If you hold down the Shift key as you do so, you will constrain the movement of the object to the horizontal, vertical or diagonal plane.

Another technique is to select the object and then use the cursor keys on your keyboard to move it up, down, left or right. The amount of movement is dictated by one of the settings in your preferences. To change this, choose Preferences from the Edit menu (Windows) or choose Illustrator from the Apple menu (Macintosh). In the general category, enter a setting for “Keyboard Increment”. (The default setting is 0.3528 mm.)

When moving elements via the keyboard to move an object, you can increase the amount of movement by a factor of ten by holding down the Shift key in conjunction with any of the cursor keys. Also, bear in mind that keys repeat; so if you keep a cursor key down, the object will move continuously. You don’t have to press the key repeatedly.

Illustrator also offers a more precise way of moving an object, using the menu command Object-Transform-Move. This displays a dialogue in which you can enter the precise distance that you would like the object to move. There are four settings: horizontal, vertical, distance and angle. Any of the four can be modified and the other three will be automatically updated. For example, if you enter 10 for horizontal and 10 for vertical, Illustrator will automatically enter 45 degrees for the angle and 14.1421 for the distance. If you then enter 10 for the distance, Illustrator will change both the horizontal and vertical settings to 7.0711; and so forth. The Move dialog also contains a preview option, so that you can verify that the object will end up where you want it to as well a Copy button allowing you to duplicate and offset the original object.

If you would like to learn more about Illustrator training courses, visit Macresource Computer Training, a UK IT training company offering Illustrator training courses at their central London training centre.