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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Article filed under: Artwork, Design on January 19th, 2008 1 Comment
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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Article filed under: Acrobat, Artwork, Design, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Quark on October 28th, 2007 12 Comments
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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Article filed under: Artwork, Design, Illustrator, Photoshop on August 14th, 2007 41 Comments
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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Article filed under: Artwork on July 22nd, 2007 6 Comments
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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Article filed under: Artwork, InDesign, Quark on June 30th, 2007 2 Comments
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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Article filed under: Artwork, Design on May 28th, 2007 2 Comments
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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Article filed under: Artwork, Design, InDesign on May 10th, 2007 6 Comments
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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Article filed under: Artwork, Design, Freelancing, Internet on April 24th, 2007 15 Comments
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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Article filed under: Artwork, Photoshop on April 20th, 2007 No Comments
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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Article filed under: Artwork, Internet on April 20th, 2007 No Comments
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