June 27th, 2010
Tweaking Bleeds in InDesign for the Tri-fold Cut Line. Yes, I'll explain...
For openers, I have been reminded that if I want to keep people’s attention with a blog, I actually have to POST, at least more regularly than I have been doing. The current occasion is the Hudson Valley Business Edge 2010 Conference, an event that I highly recommend if you’re in the region and work in a small to medium size business, especially as an Owner, Proprietor or Principal. The presenters are all very knowledgeable, and the content is presented in a very dense manner, in short, accessible sessions. Last year I presented on “When Do You Need a Design Pro?”, and hope to do so again on subjects graphic. But to the point, while I fairly recently posted back on June 7th, the one before was March 20th.
I have been busy, hence the lean posting. So this time around I’ll talk about a recent client experience.
This is a long term client that I have been working with for many years. I’ve built and rebuilt his website, will do it again soon. This time around I was updating his brochure. This is a fairly standard tri-fold brochure, a pretty common and useful staple of business marketing. This item is usually not a terrific chore if you have a focused client, and their graphic identity is already in place. Typically brochures are put together after logo design and identity projects are complete. But what happens when your client is perhaps over focused
The short answer is: 63 design comps, seven candidate “final” versions. Three rounds of pre-press, PDFs and AAs. Hundreds of photo retouches and composites. 2.4 gigabytes of data. And sent the press proofs back to press… twice. What on earth happened here? Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Career, Creative Pro, design, Designers, Desktop Publishing, Graphics, Indesign Brochure, Marketing, Printing, Web Design
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June 7th, 2010
Taking Print content to the Web
Yes, it’s been months since I’ve posted here. And haven’t been that active in my Live Journal or Facebook pages either. The Studio’s been busy, folks. And have been shoving a number of projects through the house. And when you’re a self employed Creative Pro, paid bookable hours trumps blogging. I had been tempted to rant on about the evolving throwdown between Adobe vs Apple vs Google (sort of) vs Mircosoft, centering around the mobile market, web standards, web video, HTML5 and Flash. But the simmering war of words, with flaming fanboy camps tossing off on each side has grumped me out, and it can wait.
So I decided to talk about some of the under the hood tech that makes contemporary web sites work, with a bit of diversion about bringing print content online. I’m going to pitch this to the web user and business reader, so my fellow web pros will probably be bored to tears. But for the rest of you, we’ll demonstrate the main idea of the marriage of HTML and CSS by taking a look “backstage” with a print and web design project called, Living in The Petri Dish. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Blogging, Browsers, Creative Pro, CSS, design, Designers, Graphics, HTML, Web Design
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March 20th, 2010
Some of you may, and some of you may not know this, since I haven’t talked about it here. But I do have a Facebook account, then of course, like any good Design Pro, I have a Page for the Studio. And as more of my clients ask about *gasp* social networking, I have to become more familiar with some of the options and technologies.
Now this blog is powered by WordPress, WP hacks can tell from the very lightly modified default Kubrick page design. But one of the things I love about WP is that there is not only an abundant supply of themes, but also a HUGE zoo of plug-in to perform all manner of digital legerdemain. Since I have been manually posting notifications on FB about my Blog Posts here, I figured, with the rising popularity of Facebook, there was probably an app or plug-in that would allow Me to post notices to the page automatically. So after a bit of research, I’ve installed the WordBook Plug-in on the blog. This was literally it’s test flight.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Blogging, Creative Pro, design, Designers, Facebook, Social Media, Web Design, Wordpress, World Wide Web
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March 8th, 2010
No Snow Days
This is going to be a pretty random post.
Deal with it. But I’ll try to say something of interest. In the interest of learning more about using the WordPress back end, I had to apply myself to digging under the hood in the tech realm of server file permissions. Look it up if you’re curious. The issue I had was getting the image upload feature to work properly. It errored out with folder permission problems. And all the more irritating, since another installation I did for a client was functioning perfectly. So… WTF?
A trip to the WordPress Codex and Docs and I got enough info to fire up my FTP app and massage the permissions on my web server and got it working. Hmmm… guess it should test it? What to upload?
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Business, Clients, Commuting, Content Management Systems, Creative Pro, Facebook, home, Self-employed, Snow, Studio, Wordpress, Work
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February 15th, 2010
The Tech Media geek out over the iPad at Apple's Event - Photo c|Net
So, actually taking a moment from my labours to toss of a few thoughts about Apple’s latest foray into the world of cutting edge consumer computing. Rumors and hype over Apple’s tablet computer fried up the wires on the Intertubez for months, inflaming the hopes and opinions of technogeeks worldwide. Since I am currently the President of the local Macintosh User Group , which is more a function of not dodging fast enough than any particular sterling quality on my part, I am expected to know at least a thing or two about most things Mac. So I took in the Apple Event keynote via the live blog and later watched Steve’s keynote at our monthly SIG meeting. I am as I start to scribble this, in the waiting area of the Physical Therapy office during my wife’s PT session, a result of a dislocated shoulder in October, part of the reason for the slack in posts. Been a little busy! More on this later.
Anyway, the iPad, not the iSlate, iTablet, or iSlab or such… is actually a pretty impressive little box. The name is a little unfortunate, but Apple leans obsessively towards the simple. As many expected, and partially leaked, the iPad is much more a large iPhone/iPod Touch as opposed to a touch enabled MacBook. Not all the tech literate are thrilled about that, but it’s consistent with Apple’s current approach to their market, audience and product strategy. As a touch powered laptop, so not happening, but as an iPhone on steroids, pretty damn spiffy. And it looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun to play with.
Now let me get right up front about this thing right off. Apple didn’t make the iPad for me, or for most of the likely audience of this blog for that matter. I am a Power User by most standards, a Graphic Designer, a Creative Professional. And the iPad was not made for us. This is, to it’s last transistor, gutz to glory, a CONSUMER device, aimed squarely at the media-consuming center of the casual computing market. Read the rest of this entry »
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January 14th, 2010
This time, takin' on the wee beasties...
Sorry I haven’t posted in some time. The Studio has been very busy with work and my personal life collided with the business. My wife suffered a dislocated and fractured shoulder at the beginning of October. So I have been taking care of her and doing a lot of housework along with trying to well… work. So not a lot of time for writing blog items. But do have a little something for you.
In early-December I posted this in my personal blog…. And to complete the Tech Fail Trifecta [ joining the failed washing machine and water heater]… My faithful Canon printer started to funk out last night. It began to print thin pale streaks in nice neat precise 3mm stripes. UH oh. After the many cycles of cleaning and test prints, and then a 40 min ride with Canon’s tech support, pretty much convinced me the print head was probably hosed. And a replacement head costs near the cost of replacing the same class printer. So will take a shot at trying to fix it N1NJ4 style before I stick a crowbar in the wallet.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Brother, Canon, CMYK, color, Desktop Publishing, Hardware, home, HP, ink, Inkjet, laser, Lexmark, Mac, office, printers, Printing
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September 27th, 2009
Image size, Standard NTSC vs Broadcast 1080i High Definition Image source: RDP Video Productions
I know I haven’t posted in a while, but I’ve been busy. Being booked solid is a good thing for a freelancer. Being booked solid while having a number of real life issues… not as comfortable, but comes with the territory of home and family. Being booked solid and being paid somewhat indifferently. That is certainly… less good, but seems a function of the current uncertain economy. But that’s neither here nor there. I also promised a piece on data protection and backups and the like, but this is still fresh in the Studio. So hitting it while I can rant with good store of fierce.
A couple of months ago, one of my best and favorite clients approached me about a PowerPoint project that they were having some problems with. So I agreed to take a look at it. Some of the problems hinged on the destination of the presentation— a giant 40-inch plasma screen going into their freshly redesigned lobby. I did the specs on the actual LCD, and discovered that it’s native resolution was 1080i… yes, 1900 x 1080 pixels. Not huge by 300 dpi print standards. But HUMONGOUS at screen sizes. So I agreed to build the big graphics for the slides.
So far this is still straightforward. But was not destined to stay that way. The president of the company wanted some fairly upscale animation effects. And an animated title. So the project slipped into the Flash animation level. Recent versions of PowerPoint have the capability to display video on the slides, so I could export the Flash work to Quicktime or Flash Video files and embed them in the Flash Slides.
As things progressed. The client passed on another request. They want a scrolling type effect to run continuously at the bottom of the presentation, and have a picture-in-picture effect of CNN or something running in the bottom left corner of the screen.
This just became a Video Project.
Since it is going to an 1080i device, it has become a HIGH-DEFINITION Video Project. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Apple, Authoring, Blu-ray, Clients, DVD, Final Cut, Flash, Graphics, Hardware, iMovie, Microsoft, new media, Powerpoint, Video
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July 29th, 2009
HTML code in Text Wrangler. Want a piece of this action?
Hello everyone who may or not be paying attention.
I know it’s been a while but I was a bit distracted by some very consuming system issues with my workstation. But that cautionary tale is a subject for another post. Seriously. Cautionary. Tale. But not now.
One of the requests that I often get from clients is that they want to know how to do simple revisions and update their web site content for themselves. Of course they are concerned in this difficult economy about paying my fair, but non-trivial designer’s rate for what might be a trivial update or minor correction. I do have a minimum quarter hour charge. Which is seriously, just about how long it takes to read the email, take the call, jot a note or two, fire up Dreamweaver or a text editor, an FTP client, log into the hosting provider’s Control Panel, upload the fix, revision or update and then log it on the timesheet. So I do see their point. Or you might just want more control of your own content. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Adobe, Apple, Blogging, CMS, Content Management Systems, Contribute, CSS, Development, Hosting, HTML, Microsoft, Tools, Web Design, Wordpress, XHTML
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April 6th, 2009
Banging one out in InDesign. Yeah, I know what I'm doin'. Look! CMYK colors!
With the market shifting as rapidly as it has been in the Electronic Age – this is a question that often pops up in my dealings with clients, my colleagues, and especially potential clients.
When is it time to hire a Designer?
There was a time, it seems long ago now, when everything printed, from annual reports and catalogs, to matchbook covers and little league flyers, required the hands of creative pros – designers, draftsmen, illustrators, layout artists, darkroom technicians, typesetters, color separators, film strippers, platemakers, printers and pressmen. But that was circa 1980, B.C. – Before Computers. In the Mid 80’s the PostScript Programming language was being developed by John Warnock of Adobe, and Steve Jobs and was developing the Apple Macintosh computers. Eventually the combination of the Macintosh, the LaserWriter II and Aldus’s ground breaking page layout program, PageMaker, changed the publishing landscape forever.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Adobe, Apple, Creative Pro, Designers, Desktop Publishing, Graphics, Mac, Printing, Software, Tools
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