Adobe ImageStyler shows promise as a companion application for Web designers, but it doesn’t quite live up to its price tag. Since it’s a version 1.0 release, we can cut it some slack, but in its current state (lacking a few critical features) ImageStyler would have worked better as a plug-in to Photoshop or Illustrator rather than as a stand-alone apphcation.
The idea behind ImageStyler is to provide Web professionals with a tool for getting graphics ready to go into Web pages — just as the application’s name suggests. By and large, the application does a good job of this. With just a few clicks in the various palettes, Web gurus can add drop shadows, JavaScript actions, blends, embossing effects — pretty much any Web effect you’ll see out there today, short of animated flames on a logo (thank goodness).
As well as adding style and functionality to Web graphics, ImageStyler has some great quick-access effects. Attaching URLs to graphics is as simple as entering the URL in tihe appropriate palette. ImageStyler also comes with a great HTML search-and-replace feature, allowing you to substitute your own custom graphics for generic header tags. With the Active Preview feature, designers know at a glance just how big their images are. When exporting a graphic, ImageStyler can do everything from saving a simple JPEG to creating an entire layout, slicing the image into appropriate pieces for fast download and generating the HTML code (complete with JavaScript) to render the sHces as parts of a table. ImageStyler’s HTML is pretty clean, and it even fills in the Alt tags for text — a nice touch. The program does seem a bit slice happy, though. During an export, for example, ImageStyler sliced our sample graphic into 44 pieces, when no more than 20 would have done the trick.
ImageStyler’s interface is clean, and you can easily access most of its features through the plethora of onscreen tabbed palettes — if you have a large enough monitor. Oddly, though, the interface seems slow and sometimes reacts unresponsively, even on a 400MHz G3. Drags often lag behind or may not produce a clean active drag of the element; you get a bounding box instead of the element itself. This is hardly a deal-killer, but in these days of the high-speed G3, live drags of small vector elements shouldn’t be difficult to do.
More important, ImageStyler doesn’t go far enough with its features, especially given its price. Rather, it relies on other applications to create all but the most basic elements of Web design. For a sample project, we created a circle divided into quarters, with each quarter devoted to a link. We also wanted a JavaScript to implement a rollover that would make each quarter change color when a mouse moved into the quarter’s boundaries. Simple, eh? That’s what we thought. It took us a while to figure out that to draw a straight line, you have to trick a rectangle into acting like a line. Fair enough. The next step was to produce four quarter circles by masking four circles with four squares so that a quarter of each circle would be visible. No luck. After puzzling over this for a couple of hours, we were faced with the choice of giving up and changing our design idea, or creating that part of it in a more capable application.
There’s the crux of the problem with ImageStyler. If users have to change design ideas or switch to other applications to complete simple tasks, then they’ll probably use something else for most of their Web work. By including a couple of common vector-graphics capabilities (such as basic Bezier and clipping tools), ImageStyler could be so much richer than it is.
The program is missing some key features that would enable it to work as a simple Web graphics application. Without them, ImageStyler feels incomplete. Perhaps the next version will fill in those gaps and make the program worth its hefty sticker price.
Reynolds, David. (June 1999). ImageStyler 1.0. MacAddict. (pg. 54).
Adobe Systems, Inc.
Applications
out of 10 (1 vote)
25 / 
2020-09-15 / 
2020-01-31 / 
b5e1cac22cc285a86fe084f41476a8c4719f5711 / 
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ImageStyler.zip
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
