Introducing Adobe Comp CC, your ‘digital napkin’ for layout ideas

Typekit desktop fonts + Adobe Comp CC = the best ‘digital napkin’ for all your layout ideas.

– Rufus Deuchler

Imagine this: you’re somewhere that’s not your desk, taking a break from a project and suddenly… you have THE idea for the layout that would really crack it! What do you do? You can try and keep it in your memory, of course, but at the risk of forgetting about it. You can sketch it out in your hand but maybe you’ll miss important details. You can sketch it on a piece of paper, but then you might get lost in translation when converting that into something you can use in Adobe Creative Cloud… Or you can use Adobe Comp CC.

Adobe Comp CC is a new free iPad app that lets you to rapidly create layout concepts for your mobile, web and print projects. It’s truly magical. Here’s a short video I prepared to help you understand what it’s all about.

Basically, using your iPad you can now create layout ideas simply by drawing placeholders with very intuitive gestures directly on the canvas. You can, for example, create placeholders for images, shapes, or even text frames. The key advantage: once you are back at the office, you can then easily continue to work with them in Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC or InDesign CC, to fine tune your ideas and prepare them for production. This really saves you a lot of time compared to making your layout comps on paper and recreating the whole thing on your desktop computer.

But it gets better. You can also import assets that you’ve saved to your Creative Cloud Libraries or images from your iPad, including those from Illustrator Draw, Illustrator Line, Photoshop Sketch and even Lightroom mobile. In a nutshell, everything you need for your layout ideas is right there at your fingertips.

When it comes to text, you can easily add headlines, sub headlines and body text into your layout using lorem ipsum or typing your own copy. You can even use Typekit fonts on your iPad to make the comp just perfect. Typekit desktop fonts + Adobe Comp CC = the best ‘digital napkin’ for all your layout ideas.

Once that’s sorted and you’ve captured your idea just the way you wanted, you can send your comp from your iPad to Illustrator CC, Photoshop CC or InDesign CC and continue the work there. It’s that simple.

I really like our new tool and hope you will too. Give Adobe Comp CC a try today and let me know what you think on Twitter: @rufusd.