macgrunt is all about workflow optimisation, with an emphasis on automation, particularly applescript. some people may think “oh, I’m a Designer, you can’t automate design.” — which is absolutely correct. but there are many many tasks in a studio which are NOT design. and if you can get those done and out of the way quickly, it gives you more time to do the creative stuff.

imagine you have to take all the content from a sales flyer and copy it into a designed calendar template, scale and place all the elements throughout, then duplicate those elements to the back cover, update the colour, add the product code and barcode, and save the new file with the correct filename in the correct folder. got that? ok, now imagine you have to do that for over 60 calendars — every year.

calendars is a quick animation which shows an actual script performing a real-life task in a fraction of the time it would take a real-life human. the animation is built from screen grabs from the actual workflow — so those dialog boxes showing how long the script took to do each job are real and accurate (testing was done with CS2 on a G5 PowerPC running OSX 10.5.7).

if that doesn’t convince you to start learning, stay tuned, more to follow.