Company Information:

Digital Workshop History

leading the way in multimedia authoring since 1993

Digital Workshop evolved from a graphic design and puzzle-development business run by founder Paul Harris. With a copy of the very first version of Corel Draw, Paul was one of the first designers working with vector graphics at the time, producing high quality renditions of customer logos for presentations. In 1992 Olivetti asked him to produce an interactive electronic brochure for their innovative new laptop - the Quaderno. Believing that Olivetti would not be alone in wanting interactive multimedia marketing materials, Paul brought in his brother, Philip to write an application to enable anyone to put together electronic brochures.

Illuminatus

The original Illuminatus was a simple program restricted to simply putting content into fixed frames in a wide range of preset templates. We took it to the Windows Show at Olympia and despite being hidden away on a small stand near a fire exit we got enough interest to know we were onto a winner. It wasn't long before customers wanted to go beyond the rigid template structure so we quickly developed a template editor. However, it was not until Illuminatus v3 was launched in 1995 that the product truly became recognisable as the multimedia authoring tool we know today.

Partnering with Paint Shop Pro

It was about this time that we took on the UK distribution of Paint Shop Pro and, in return, JASC agreed to present Illuminatus to the US market. Both companies enjoyed amazing growth and success saw the development of ever more sophisticated versions of Illuminatus as Dave Emberton took over the reins of development in 1996, culminating in the huge success of Illuminatus v4.5.

The product won the Perseo d'Oro at the Florence Festival of Multimedia as well as several magazine awards in the UK. It was translated into several languages and distributed across the world from Australia to Brazil, Canada to Malaysia. It even reached French Polynesia ! Indeed Illuminatus was so ahead of its time and so popular it is still being used effectively years after it should have been consigned to the digital scrapheap.

Opus

At the turn of the millenium, we decided to celebrate with a complete rewrite and by changing the name to something people could pronounce a little easier and so, Opus was born.

The company and it's flagship product continued to go from strength to strength blossoming into a group of companies including software distribution, create services and development.

When Corel bought Jasc in 2004 it felt it no longer needed Digital Workshop to distribute Paint Shop Pro and so the other businesses in the group closed.

Thus a small team of Opus die-hards were left to rebuild the product once-again into the world-beater you find in the latest release. Taking feedback from users and collaborating on real-world projects and even customizing Opus if required to provide not just a piece of software but genuinely effective solutions.

Opus continues to provide flexible and cost-effective interactive multimedia communications to help with...

Active development of the products was ended in 2017 when both Creator and Opus Pro were considered complete - as any further expansion of features was available to end users using javascript. However, Paul continued to develop elearning modules and act as contractor to new and existing customers alike via the ProSolve service.

With more and more people turning to remote learning during and after the Covid pandemic, Paul is now also offering his considerable experience as elearning consultant via the ProView service.

-->

The products will continue to be supported via this website for the foreseeable future and remain the copyright property of the founder.