2017

Adobe Edge was released in August 2011 as a multimedia authoring tool designed for websites to replace Flash content with web-standard HTML and javascript. In 2012 it was renamed Adobe Edge Animate and adopted by Graphic News for the London Olympics graphics package. At the end of 2014, Adobe announced that support for Edge Animate was ceasing and that instead they were rebadging Adobe Flash Professional as Adobe Animate.

Graphic News continued to create interactive graphics in Adobe Edge Animate whilst they looked for a suitable replacement. The two main contenders were:

• Adobe Animate -- Adobe Flash Professional by another name. However, Flash seemed to be driven by “coders” rather than the needs of designers, and there was little enthusiasm to return to Adobe’s proprietary ActionScript, so changing to Adobe Animate was seen as a backward step. It also didn’t have the text handling capabilities needed.
  
  
• Tumult’s Hype -- was found to be a far more intuitive program for graphic designers and allowed the creation of responsive animations without bespoke coding -- Different layouts can be used for different screen widths as used to create responsive graphics in Adobe Illustrator (Ai2HTML)
  
  Hype also uses open source coding and can be purchased for a fraction of the cost required to license Adobe Animate. The only down-side is the fact that it is only available for Mac.

From 2017, Graphic News will create new graphics using Hype. For publishers using embed code there will be no difference. Editors that want to change or translate the words can still do so (using a .json rather than an .xml file), but where multiple layouts are used to give responsivity, there are multiple representations of the words. Publishers that want to modify graphics can do so using Tumult Hype Pro (available for Mac OS at a fraction of the cost of Adobe software). Although there is no version for other platforms, the graphic can also be modified from within the javascript file.

In addition to the tutorials on the Hype website, technical information is available for users of Graphic News interactives. | INTERACTIVES |

This move to a non-Adobe application is a milestone! Graphic News has been a strong supporter of Adobe since 1988 when following the introduction of Adobe Illustrator their founder, Duncan Mil, held out to use Adobe Illustrator for the Reuters News Graphics Service (rather than the better known Freehand or Mac Draw). As he said at the time: “Why use a computer to produce a graphic if it takes longer than using conventional techniques and the end result isn’t so good?” So he welcomed Adobe Illustrator.

Today, in the digital world, the team at Graphic News want to create beautiful animated graphics with interactivity ... within the constraints of news deadlines... but the software offered by Adobe seems to be designed by coders for coders. Now coders are invaluable in any digital team, but they are not designers and coding takes time. Do we really want the visual quality of web pages to be determined by coders and “words” communicators? Designers need applications that enable them, without compromising visual quality. We are looking forward to using Tumult Hype.