Malaysian company the Asiastream Group is a diversified entity that focuses on information & communications technology (ICT), WebTV, and events/communications.

Its team is experienced in handling each of the industries and also has the capability to cross integrate  services for maximum value impact to clients, and  provide end-to-end services together with business partners.

The group currently includes Aleph One, a full service event management company; Catz Maya which does web portal development, e-commerce applications, workflow applications, customized systems development, consultancy – usability, e-branding, e-marketing and search engine optimization; and ADTV which develops, produces, transmits, manages and distributes for terrestrial tv, satellite tv, IP-TV, the Web, narrowcast networks, mobile networks, and wireless networks.

Designing for print

An associate company Intercipta’s core businesses is in creative design and communications, as well as brand communication design; and has been using Adobe software for over 10 years, with its main focus areas being in print and the Web.

Intercipta has used Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop over the past 10 years to create banners, buntings, brochures, newsletters and annual reports, mostly for big clients such as Petronas, Khazanah Nasional, the Iskandar Regional Development Authority, the Ministry of Tourism Malaysia and others.

A fully Apple Mac based design house, Intercipta uses Adobe Illustrator on Mac G5’s newer iMacs and Mac Book notebooks to do layouts, makeup and prepress of these print media.

The text and boxes are laid out using Illustrator and where a picture is required to be inserted, a link in Illustrator calls a picture which has been manipulated in Photoshop and which are saved in JPEG, TIFF, PNG or some other raster format.

Illustrator is the integrator which calls objects into its file and it saves it in its native AI format.

Intercipta previously used Adobe Creative Suite 2 and 3 and now uses Creative Suite 4 (CS4).

Creative Suite 4 includes about 20 different Adobe creative applications, including Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver and others.

“New to CS4 are Tab Navigation and Blob Brush. Tab Navigation lets designers switch between different documents or images which we are working on, while Blob Brush lets us scribble and it’s much clearer,” said Helendri Bujang, a creative designer with Intercipta parent company, the AsiaStream Group.

“CS4 is also faster, its file sizes are smaller, it auto-optimises files, is nimbler and requires only 2GB of RAM on a Mac to install,” he added.

Illustrator’s files use vector graphic images, which are very compact compared to their raster graphics counterparts, such as digital photographs, and they can be easily sent by e-mail without exceeding size limits.

Vector graphics consists of line graphics with a picture and it’s based on mathematical formulae which let the size of images be enlarged or reduced without loss of quality, such as the pixilation visible in photos which are enlarged beyond a point.

CS4 has a facility to do a livetrace – ie. to scan a raster image and import it into an Illustrator file as a vector image and the save AI file mostly comprises mathematical equations.

“For example, our principal and group creative director, Nur-Ruhizan bin Dato’ Noh Abdullah once created a 25 x 13 foot backdrop for a stage, including pictures and graphics which was to be printed on a large format printer and he sent it as an e-mail attachment,” said Helendri. Typically, such files are under 1 MB is size.
 
Since Illustrator is used so widely, it’s so much easier to find people who know how to use it, its barriers of entry are much lower, and designers can work faster and more efficiently with it.

…and for the Web

Catz Maya uses Adobe Dreamweaver and Photoshop to design web pages, mostly on Windows PCs and one Apple Mac.

Dreamweaver is a website creation program which outputs in HTML and there’s a tight integration between Dreamweaver, Illustrator, Photoshop and Flash for video and banners, and for video encoding.

Catz Maya has been using Dreamweaver since version 3.0, seven years ago, and before Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2006.

It has created websites for big customers such as Petronas, the Sarawak state government, the East Coast Economic Development Region and Standards Malaysia.

The website it created for the Kapit Division, Resident’s Office, www.kapitro.sarawak.gov.my won the Best Government Website award from the Sarawak government, while the website created for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Selangor (SPCA), www.spca.org.my was listed among the top 10 on Google.

The main tools it used were Dreamweaver and Photoshop, and the latter also lets it manage Flash videos, where Flash files can be opened in Photoshop and vice-versa.

The AI file complete with pictures from Illustrator can be imported into Dreamweaver CS4 and converted into HTML format, and the pictures can also be cut into smaller pieces for quicker loading.

Catz Maya also handles smaller clients but they can also do these creations on their own using these tools.

More organised

“In CS4, Illustrator is more organised and lets designers switch between documents faster and to make comparisons,” said Lauralyn Silva, Intercipta creative associate.

“It more easily arranges documents automatically, is faster, more user friendly, so we can view all documents in one screen,” she added.

Another function lets designers make several art boards, such as logos, name cards, bunting and so on, all in one file and it’s easier to switch between different versions of documents.

A new feature in Dreamweaver CS4 is Livesite, which lets designers edit text and graphics since they are tightly integrated.

Also, if changes are made in Photoshop to an image which has been called by Dreamweaver, the tight integration between them results in the image in Dreamweaver also being updated when the same image in Photoshop is saved.

There’s also tight integration with Web 2.0 components, with the Web 2.0 processing done on the client side.

Files can also be saved in ASP, PHP, XML, WML or other online scripts, so it basically lets web designers perform tasks previously done by web programmers and it lets them see their web page take shape in real time.

A new feature in CS4 also lets them view their creation as it will appear on many specific models of mobile phone.

Catering to the mass

It may seem strange that Catz Maya mostly uses PCs, when the prevalent impression is that the Apple Mac is the preferred designers’ tool.

Well over 90% of Catz Maya’s customers use PC, which run either Windows or Linux, while over 90% of designers indeed use Apple Macs but since its customers view websites on PCs, Catz Media likewise decided to develop their web pages on PCs, especially since Adobe provided the same tools and has rationalised the same shortcuts on both Mac and PC platforms to make integration easier and faster; and using PCs also makes it easier to hire designers.

The Asiastream group of companies and Intercipta are in-house functional affiliates of Inter.asia Communications, a regional public relations agency.

“These Malaysia-based affiliates provide specialist design expertise for our regional clients as and when required, and they also let us realise budget savings,” said  David Gibson,  Inter.Asia managing director (www.inter-asia.biz).