Project Comet it's called, and it promises to revolutionise the way we go about UX design.
Adobe is today announcing a radical new UX tool
So far in the run-up to Adobe's annual event in Los Angeles, Adobe Max, the announcements have been evolutionary not revolutionary. But there's one that promises to steal all the headlines this year, especially within the UI design community, and that's Project Comet.
Project Comet is not yet a completed website layout tool but an "end-to-end UX design solution" currently under development that will include a new Creative Cloud desktop app and a companion mobile app. It was announced earlier in this Adobe blog post.
The tool "combines wireframing, visual design, prototyping, and previewing all in one," explains Colene Chow, product marketing manager at Adobe for Creative Cloud UX products, in the post. "Comet is fast and fluid so it can scale with large and complex projects."
It's essentially aimed at making things easier for designers who create mockups in Photoshop and Illustrator then move to other tools to build wireframes and prototypes. Instead, the idea to offer a similar – but significantly faster and simpler – experience within one tool.
Perhaps aware of the frustrations some designers have with creaky old versions of Photoshop and Illustrator, performance is at the heart of the way Adobe has designed the app. "We built Comet as a native application using the latest rendering technology and hardware compositing techniques," says Chow. "As we continue to develop Comet, we’ll share how we’re crafting Comet for performance and what makes Comet a really fast and productive tool."
Cloud assets
Project Comet will of course be fully integrated within the Creative Cloud. As Chow explains: "You’ll be able to take advantage of any existing Photoshop or Illustrator asset by bringing them directly into Comet, and move seamlessly between tools to undertake specific tasks like bitmap editing in Photoshop or complex vector editing in Illustrator."
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Don't get too excited yet: Project Comet is still in development. But what the company have come up with so far will be shown off publicly for the first time at Adobe Max, later today, and it's probably one of the best reasons for watching the keynote live online (from 9.30 am Pacific Time/5.30pm UK time) here.
Meanwhile, we're here at Adobe Max all week so we'll bring you more details of Project Comet, and other Adobe announcements, as we get them.
Tom May is an award-winning journalist and editor specialising in design, photography and technology. Author of the Amazon #1 bestseller Great TED Talks: Creativity, published by Pavilion Books, Tom was previously editor of Professional Photography magazine, associate editor at Creative Bloq, and deputy editor at net magazine. Today, he is a regular contributor to Creative Bloq and its sister sites Digital Camera World, T3.com and Tech Radar. He also writes for Creative Boom and works on content marketing projects.
