Articles about Artwork:

ejay-sounds-sierra

Sierra boxes and amaray cases for CD and DVD packaging

Here (above) are three sierra boxes I did for a music creation software company. Also in this product range I did a DVD disc label, manual, jewel case and amaray case which are housed, obviously, in the sierra box. The sierra box was also printed with a spot UV or varnish which give the pictorial [...]

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word-pp-cs2

How to make PowerPoint presentations and Word documents look beautiful

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 [...]

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sunflower

How to turn a photo into an illustration

Remember Adobe Streamline? Adobe stopped upgrading its vector conversion application some time ago. But with the advent of CS2, Illustrator’s old Trace Tool became the new super Live Trace and opened up a new world of possibilities! As soon as you place or paste a photo into Illustrator a button on the Control Palette offers [...]

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artwork-comp

What is an artworker?

Many people have asked me this question and, in the absence of a Wikipedia entry, here’s my definition. The term pre-dates desktop publishing when “artwork” or “mechanical art” meant the material (photography, bromide, film, tranparency) or completed, camera-ready pages that could be photographed with a stat camera to make a same-size film that would be [...]

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numbers-table

Designing tables with a hanging bracket

It’s the joyous season of the dreaded companies’ annual report and accounts where artworkers and printers try to make money by producing horribly boring documents full of endless tables with horrendously dull titles like “Intangible Assets”. But, do you know the trick of how to get columns of figures to line up, as the accountants [...]

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Designing with keyboard shortcuts in Quark and Creative Suite

Remember you can choose the keystrokes of InDesign to those of Quark by going Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts… The table below is for the default shortcuts. Action Quark InDesign Illustrator Photoshop Show/Hide guides F7 Cmd(Mac)/ Ctrl(PC)-; (Cmd(Mac)/ Ctrl(PC)-H for boxes) Cmd(Mac)/ Ctrl(PC)-; Cmd(Mac)/ Ctrl(PC)-; Bullet point Option-8 Option-8 Option-8 Option-8 Show/Hide Invisibles Cmd(Mac)/ Ctrl(PC)-I Cmd(Mac)/ [...]

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indesign-icon

Things I love about designing in InDesign that I couldn’t do in Quark

I was thinking this was going to be a short post but the ideas just keep on coming. Maybe a little unfair, I’m comparing InDesign CS2 with Quark 6.5, but anyway! X and Y You can choose where your x and y measurements for page objects are taken in the Control bar – top left, [...]

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designer-blogs

Freelance graphic designers’ blogs

Here are my favourite three blogs of people who, like me, are graphic designers and write about it on the internet. Firstly, from Romania, I really like webee design blog. Webee has really helped me out with his tips and encouragement. Also a beautiful creative design blog by David Airey who has blogging help as [...]

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Working with large files in Photoshop

Preparing artwork for huge exhibition spaces or large point-of-sale displays in Photoshop can be a nightmare and can use up precious processing time on your computer. And this is even if you have a Dual 2 GHz G5 Mac with 3 GB of RAM! But there’s no need to keep the high resolution you would [...]

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RGB-to-CMYK-and-solution-thumb

Why RGB colours look bad when converted to CMYK

RGB can be seen in the dark. CMYK can’t. RGB shines out at you. CMYK inks absorb some colours and reflect others. Somebody wrote to me the other day whose website had lovely blue type on a black background. Fine. Unfortunately, the results when changed into CMYK and printed were dull, muddy and terrible. How [...]

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