Artisteer Turns Rapid Design into Rapid Prototyping

If you've been following me on Twitter you'd see I keep rambling about a program called Artisteer.  I was tipped of to Artisteer by Akbar Khouzani from the College of Ag.  He told me to check it out sometime and, now that there's a stable enough Mac Beta, I decided I would.  I have a little video tour as well as a before and after of a screenshot of a site in the college.  I'll boil Artisteer down into a few bullet points as to why you should probably at least download it and see if it's right for you:

• Template Driven design interface that's VERY self explainatory and easy to use
• Lets you build off templates that are randomly generated or create your own
• Export what you design directly to HTML, Blogger, Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, and a few others
• Tons of stock photos and design elements to customize to your liking
• Lets you import your own images for use in themes

Artisteer is like a photoshop tool dedicated to web design and it really caught my eye because of the "Export to Drupal" functionality in the Pro version.  And when I say export to Drupal, I mean litterally you click export to drupal and place the folder on your site and you're ready to go.  It also builds it out to be Drupal 5 and 6 compliant in the same theme.  I'll need to test them across browsers but thus far I'm very happy with the product. 

We plan to investigate the use of it for developing course interfaces rapidly or at least getting them 80-90% of the way there without nearly as much effort.   It's possible to even give this tool to staff and have them alter a template we (or they) generate.  They can then give it back to us in template form so we can make minor modifications.  It works great with Tweetboard and Wunderbar btw!