[CONTENT DESIGN TIPS] A Few Useful and Low-Cost Content Design Tools

If you plan to produce some rich media contents by yourself, it is necessary to learn to use a few graphics and Flash animation tools. If you don't already have or know how to use tools like Adobe Photoshop and Flash, you may want to look into a few tools described here. Those tools may not have all the bells and whistles you can find in Photoshop or Flash, but they are easy to learn and cost a lot less.

Graphics Editing Tool
Real-DRAW Pro 4, a nice and powerful graphics tool for only $55.
Common tasks you can accomplish for Dynasign include:

• Scale your images to the right size for publishing
• Design attractive Dynasign screen background layout images
• Add text messages and apply special effects to your images
• Export images in JPG and PNG format for publishing

You can find more info at www.mediachance.com/realdraw/.

Flash Tools
This is a category of tools that can be used to produce swf files for publishing into Dynasign.

Sothink (www.sothink.com) has a couple of Flash animation tools. Again they're very low cost and pretty easy to learn. Sothink Glanda and Sothink SWF Quicker are 2 of the tools you should take a look.

Amara Flash Software (www.amarasoftware.com) produces a set of special purpose swf generation tools. Check out Flash Slide Show Builder, Flash Intro and Banner Builder and Flash Photo Animation. They may come handy when you need to produce some quick and easy animation effects for your content.

Although all of those tools were designed for Web publishing, you can use them for digital signage in most cases. As the digital signage market continues to grow, I expect that we will see some grahics and animation tools more tailored to digital signage content requirements.