While Chizen highlighted the ever-changing opportunities and needs in cross-platform publishing, Narayen explained how Adobe researchers are examining and exploring those challenges.

He presented the company's upcoming ideas as well as the release of the highly anticipated Adobe Creative Suite 2, which features upgrades to all of its applications: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, GoLive and Acrobat.

"There's never been a greater opportunity for designers to put their ideas to work in provocative and intriguing ways than right now," Chizen said, citing statistics ranging from the 22.8 billion text messages sent in 2004 to the 75 billion e-mails exchanged each day.

"More than just making the right artistic choices, you have to put that power to work to solve business problems and communicate essential concepts, which has you participating at the strategic level with your colleagues and clients."

Chizen also detailed new publishing opportunities on a variety of devices, from cell phones to PDAs to video walls. "With all these new devices, the opportunity is enormous for those talented individuals capable of cutting and dicing their best ideas into new, exciting shapes."

He noted that designers, photographers and fine artists are now selling unlimited editions of their work for cell-phone screens, as well as original art for use on large, flat-screen displays.

"Which is not to say that we're going to see a diminishing demand for what we call 'enduring' media—the text, illustration and photography on the printed page," Chizen said. But, he added, demand will increase for online versions of those pages.

Read more here about Adobe's Creative Suite 2.

Noting the rise of Weblogs—which are multiplying at a rate of 23,000 a day—and TiVo, he said great design and branding opportunities have yet to unfold within these two forms of personalized content.

"Today and for the foreseeable future, the challenge is to be able to create, manage and deliver visually rich, personalized content anywhere, anytime and on any device," Chizen said, adding that Adobe's five-year-old vision for "network publishing" has finally come to fruition.

"You'll be able to create that content once and then present it directly the way it was intended, for a Web page, a cell phone, PC or, of course, the printed page."

Narayen, Adobe Systems Inc.'s president and COO, then took the stage to introduce current research and the forthcoming Adobe Creative Suite 2, both of which address the issues of seamlessness and the need to publish to a variety of media.

To read a review of Adobe Creative Suite 2 Premium Edition, click here.

Some of the suite's features include photo imaging applications that feature tagging options as a way to refine image management, as well as a video application that will offer an editing and commenting component, helping to enhance collaboration between multiple contributors.

"We heard you say how important it is for you to be able to get into the flow of ideas and not get bogged down with details, that you don't want the tools you work with to get in your way," Narayen said. The new CS2 addresses those design needs with its impeccable integration, he added.

Although each application has undergone a significant upgrade, the uniting force behind all of them is a multifunctional graphical file browser, Adobe Bridge, which will let the user view all assets in a single location.

Replacing the browser in Adobe Photoshop, it also will work as an interface to a new online service, Adobe Stock Photos, which will sell royalty-free images.

"It makes the application invisible yet responsive to your needs," Narayen said.

Most exciting to attendees seemed to be the new Live Trace feature for Illustrator CS2, which will turn raster files into editable vector files. The new Live Paint feature, which includes gap detection capabilities, also brought applause when it was demonstrated. (One designer in attendance later referred to the feature as "sick.")

Click here to read an interview with Narayen about what's next for Adobe.

To demonstrate the mobile opportunities, an image was converted from raster to vector, "painted" and then sent via a Bluetooth feature to Narayen's PDA.

One upgrade to Photoshop is the Vanishing Point feature, a new pseudo-3-D editing mode for working on photos in perspective. InDesign CS2 now includes the Object Styles option, which is the ability to save groups of settings as a style that can be applied to other objects.

Adobe Creative Suite 2 will be released later this year.

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