River Design saves time, improves precision with Adobe software

By SearchSMBAsia Editors | Jan 27, 2010

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Speed and accuracy are very important to River Design, a Singapore-based design house with clients across Southeast Asia. Since its founding, its designers have relied on Apple computers running Adobe software to work on design projects.

However, Fong Ban Meng, executive director of River Design, was amazed at the performance of a system packed with a NVIDIA Quadro CX graphics card running Adobe Creative Suite 4 (CS4).

“I was very impressed with the Adobe-NVIDIA combination, which ran Photoshop about 10 percent faster than my existing systems. Though this may not sound like much, a 10% time saving can translate to increased productivity,” he said. “Moreover, this solution delivers greater accuracy in our design, enabling us to be more precise in choice of texture and colour.”

Established in 2000, River Design started out by serving the fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry.  It has since added to its portfolio clients in other industries, including government, quasi-government and healthcare in Southeast Asia. Such clients include Gardenia, FoodXervices Inc, National University Hospital, and QBE. The company delivers a range of design services, including branding, packaging, environment, and print matters.

Technology is very important

River Design has been using technology since its inception. “Technology is very important to us as we need speed and accuracy. Technology helps to save time and improve quality of work,” said Fong.

Design work is done using Adobe’s suite of applications, such as Illustrator, In-Design and Photoshop, running on Apple Mac machines powered by NVIDIA GeForce GT120 graphics cards.

The need to find ways to do things better and faster prompted River Design to try out Adobe CS4 powered by NVIDIA Quadro CX. The card accelerates Adobe CS4 features and video encoding, giving creative professionals the performance, tools, and reliability they need to maximise their creativity.

Fast and accurate

With this solution, image rotation is a breeze. The Rotate View is fast, smooth and comes out very clearly, according to Fong.

“We can grab the image and spin it to our preferred orientation without feeling any lag from conversion wait times,” he said.

The same goes with zooming, where images can be zoomed in and out with ease and clarity. While zooming, the Pixel Grid ensures accuracy of highly magnified images, enabling designers to tweak and touch up with precision.

Image and text look clear and sharp, making jagged edges history.

Brush can be resized with a simple drag of the mouse. Designers can also preview brush strokes before they make them.

“These features are very good as we can do our work with better accuracy. We cannot do without such tools in our business. In fact, the Quadro CX and Adobe CS4 combination would be great for photographers, digital imaging and animation agencies,” said Fong.