Graphic and Web Designer London UK

I regularly make PDFs for clients that are designed primarily to be viewed on-screen. Of course, the person viewing the PDF may choose to print it out on a desktop printer or other device and this should be taken into account. And with everything there is a right way and a wrong way, so here [...]

Article filed under: Acrobat, PDF 4 Comments

If your client hands you a .PPT from MS PowerPoint or and .DOC Word and says: “The presentation/print deadline is tomorrow, make this look nice”, what are you going to do?
The answer is to use other programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Quark, Premiere or Keynote and get creative!
Here are a few tips I’ve picked [...]

Article filed under: Acrobat, Artwork, Design, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Quark 8 Comments

Question: How can you disseminate a graphically interesting, beautifully designed small book to a large number of people cheaply?
Answer: Email a PDF.
Almost every computer has Adobe Reader (formerly called Acrobat Reader) and PDFs are widely used as a way to present information with a fixed layout similar to a paper publication.
Question: Why make a [...]

Article filed under: Acrobat, Artwork, Design, InDesign 6 Comments

The first rule of making PDFs is easy… do it in InDesign, don’t even think of doing it in Quark. Navigation, linking to the web and even playing movies can be sorted out in InDesign first before the PDF is made. This way when the client has added his changes these elements don’t have to [...]

Article filed under: Acrobat, Artwork, Design, InDesign 4 Comments

Question: What do you do when you’ve got a PDF that’s too big?
Answer: Open in Acrobat, go File > Reduce File Size.
Correct, that usually does the trick. But I had a particularly cumbersome PDF and a client that really couldn’t handle files of more than 1Mb and it steadfastly refused to reduce down further than [...]

Article filed under: Acrobat, Artwork 2 Comments

Here’s a problem I’ve been getting a lot recently … and a solution!
Elements not printing out or printing out darker or fainter than they should. Why? The element – beit type or a box or anything – has been set to overprint.
Overprinting is great. Black type on a tinted or coloured background is [...]

Article filed under: Acrobat, Artwork No Comments

How do you make PDFs? Direct from an application or by distilling from a saved eps or postscript file?
Everyone has their favourite way, but whichever method is used there always seems to be some unforeseen errors creeping into the final file occasionally
Why are some elements obscured behind other elements visible in the final PDF?
This has [...]

Article filed under: Acrobat, Artwork 2 Comments