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My son got his hands on the storyboard paper and started sketching a stop motion animation sequence in the cells. He just started his second session in a stop motion class. This is one of the things I used our printed graph paper for, but because that was printed in black/gray on our laser printer, I had a hard time knocking out the grid lines mixed in with his drawings. Now, since this is on the cyan grid, I can scan 6 cells on each page, cut/crop each box visually, then knock out the blues. Can't wait to try this out myself for something.

You can find the free printable storyboard graph papers in the tools section. Notepads are on sale here.

Ars rounds up the new features in the forthcoming release of the Adobe CS4 suite to be released sometime next month. I think I'll have to upgrade for the multipage docs in Illustrator alone.

Photoshop CS4

* GPU-based drawing of documents onscreen
* 64-bit for Windows
* Expanded 3-D paint, lighting and rendering tools

Illustrator CS4

* Multipage documents with different sizes
* Indesign-style separations preview
* Many updated tools like gradient and blob brush

Indesign CS4

* Live Preflighting
* Easy Flash document creation
* Smart guides and spacing tools

Flash CS4

* Powerful Animation presets
* H.264 encoding
* Expanded 3-D transformation and object support with inverse kinematics and bones

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080923-adobe-launches-cs4-suite-of-applications.html

37 signals gave the soapbox to crowdSPRING to justify the crowdsourcing and spec work platform and the debate ensued. I got through about half of the long rant, then half of the comments, and called it a day.

I've already chimed in about my opinion for crowdSPRING. I believe there is a place for this market, and if small businesses will support it with dollars, then it will continue to exist. As a lot of designers commented, market places like this don't threaten them. Someone going to crowdSPRING doesn't really expect depth of experience for what they pay. Like it or not, this marketplace appears to be thriving and a good number of designers of varying levels of experience are participating, much to the disappointment of AIGA. Nevertheless, the debate rages on.

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1253-the-nospec-campaign-vs-crowdspring