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 elements extra punch.

A sierra box is a piece of packaging is regularly used for computer games where the CD or DVD is packed in a jewel case or sleeve inside the box. It is an established bit of packaging that offers a large range of design possibilities and promotes itself with its attractive appearance and size.

An amaray case is a keep case or plastic box for a DVD. One well known manufacturer is Amaray hence it’s name. It’s height is similar to the height of an old VHS cassette and was originally designed to fit shelving intended for videos.

A jewel case is the common plastic case that houses a music CD.

It was a great bit of work to be involved with. Check out the original montages I did for the packaging.

Here (below) is how the flat artwork looks.

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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 up over the years of doing this.

Make sure you import your client’s text into InDesign and Quark rather than copy and paste it

Why? Because it keeps the formatting (bolds, italics, heads, subheads, notes, etc). If your client has gone through the document and done this there’s no need for you to do it again. OK, you may not like your client’s choice of formatting or font, you can change that globally over the whole document in seconds. Use the Style Sheets or Utilities > Font Usage in Quark and Paragraph Styles or Type > Find Font in InDesign to turn the sow’s ear into a silk purse.

If you want a presentation to look good don’t do it in PowerPoint

I know this isn’t always an option as all the world and his wife seem to want to use PowerPoint for any purpose but, if you can’t persuade the client to go for Premiere or Keynote, there’s always the PDF. The good old PDF will give you an excellent presentation with vectors supported, movies played and excellent interactivity.

You’ve got to do it PowerPoint, now what do you do?

In PowerPoint go File > Page Setup and that’ll give you the size of the slide. Then go to Photoshop go File > New and type in the same height and width values from PowerPoint, create your attention-grabbing masterpiece, save it as a PNG (transparency is supported) and then back in PowerPoint go Insert > Picture > From File… and select your PNG.

OK, so you can do that for every page of a 40 slide deck if your client wants to edit the text, but it’ll add a bit of extra fizz to the proceedings.

Get your client to provide you with the source files

If there’s a blurry bitmap graph or chart that you need to beautify, ask if it exists as a PDF or ask for the source files. Even if it was the ugly result of a PowerPoint-Excel partnership the chances are it can be copied and pasted into Illustrator and the type can be changed and the excess crud can be deleted.

Similarly a PDF can be opened from within Illustrator with the type and the vectors editable, if the wind is blowing in the right direction, if you’re lucky!

For both of these routes you may find all the elements refusing to be ungrouped. If this is the case go Object > Clipping Mask > Release and Object > Compound Path > Release and then ungroup and see where that gets you.

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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 a Live Trace option. However, I like to see all the options first off by going, Object > Live Trace > Tracing Options…

Here you can choose Color, Greyscale or Black and White from the Mode drop down menu of the Live Trace pop-up box. Marilyn Monroe below was done by colouring up Live Trace with the default, Black and White option.

This is the Illustrator/vector equivalent of Photoshop’s Image > Adjustments > Threshold…

The drop down menu next to Presets: in the Tracing Options dialog box gives you thirteen different tracing presets. However, if you ignore the presets and choose Color from the Mode drop down menu and enter a value in the Max Colors box you will see an identical effect to Posterizing in Photoshop – a finite number of tones within a colour picture. There are only 5 colours in the illustration of a dog below.

Photos are made up of pixels and making them larger makes the pixels larger too and the result can be blurry and jagged or “pixellated”. They are bitmap images and their file formats are .BMPs, .JPGs, and .PSDs. Vector images are composed of mathematical formulas that consist of curves and points. They can be resized without losing quality. Vector’s file formats are usually .EPS (although EPSs can be bitmaps) and .AIs (Adobe Illustrator’s native file format).

You may find the colours chosen by Illustrator are a little dull. Hit the Trace button and go Object > Expand… to turn your pic into Vectors. At this point you cannot go back and edit your trace (only with a Cmd/Ctl-Z). Another advantage of these resulting vectors is the ability to re-colour them as above with Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Towers.

To re-colour: simply select one of the colours you want to change with the Direct Selection tool (A) and go Select > Same > Fill Color and move those sliders!

Lastly, play around with the blurring option in the Tracing Options panel in order to create more figurative, impressionistic illustrations as with Big Ben below.

Overview: Go Object > Live Trace > Tracing Options once you have Placed or pasted your image into your Illustrator document. Make sure you have the Preview check box checked so you can see your chosen options before you hit Trace. Remember you have to go Object > Expand to turn the trace to outlines/vectors.

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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 used to create a printed product.

Now, an artworker is someone who produces a print-ready product.

Artworkers get a concept from a designer (either in drawing or digital form) and use the appropriate software to create it.

An artworker would understand the basics of printing (cmyk, line screens, spot colours, etc.) as well as design, typesetting, formatting and colour correction. It would be rare to find an artworker with no eye for design.

They should be highly proficient in a number of basic graphics applications, such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Freehand, QuarkXpress and InDesign as well as having a basic grasp of how to sort large amounts of information in Excel and Word. Knowledge of JavaScript and XML is also handy in creating automated work flows and negating the need for repetitive tasks.

A “traditional artworker” means someone who – maybe a compositor in the past – has the necessary craft skills to cut, fold and glue paper in order to mock up packaging or other design visuals.

A “creative artworker” is someone who is perhaps half way between a designer and an artworker. They would be required to design print-ready artwork on the fly or be called upon to apply a certain design style across a range of printed material.

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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 like, with the bracketed figures (negative numbers) aligning with the figures not in brackets (positive numbers)? If producing the tables in normal tabbed text in both Quark and InDesign the solution is to select the tab icon that looks like an arrow with the decimal point after it in both applications. This not only lines your numbers up on the decimal point if you have them and also “hangs” the brackets outside the numbers.

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The table below is for the default shortcuts.

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X and Y You can choose where your x and y measurements for page objects are taken in the Control bar – top left, top centre, top right, middle left, middle centre, middle right, bottom left, bottom centre or bottom right. With Quark it’s top left – and that’s it!

Duplicate spread You can add a new spread or page exactly the same as another one, in Quark you must add a page and then copy the elements.

Fill frame proportionately (Command (Ctrl for PCs) Option Shift -C) Get a picture to fit into a box without the edges showing. After this go center content (Command (Ctrl for PCs) Shift -E) and you’re just about there with most photos!

Interactive PDFs Put buttons on a master page to go to next page, previous page and contents/home page. InDesign has the ability to add numerous other interactive options to PDFs that Quark doesn’t. More about this here.

Print ready high resolution PDFs Export direct from InDesign, don’t even think about exporting them from Quark for final artwork – you have to print a PostScript file and distill it. More about this here.

Constrain proportions You have the choice to constrain proportions of boxes in the control palette by clicking on the chain/broken chain icon, you can’t constrain proportions in Quark’s measurements palette. This is so handy!

Change case Everything in caps and you want it in lower case? Can’t be bothered to capitalise words? It’s a time-saver.

Overprint preview Ever set white-out text to overprint? I have. Wish I didn’t!

Data merge Order fields from a spreadsheet direct to your document.

I haven’t even talked about drop shadows, object styles or transparencies – let alone importing AIs and PSDs.

On the other hand I still prefer the way Quark handles type and I haven’t found reliable quick keys for editing point size, leading, tracking and baseline shift in InDesign. I’m also still getting to grips with the way InDesign handles hyphenation and justification.

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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 well as design discussion. Lastly there is Creative Guy who has numerous mac and design tricks.

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But there’s no need to keep the high resolution you would for ordinary print files. Some Photoshop files I’ve made have been 3 metres by 8 metres at 120 ppi and have printed out fine. A lot of these spaces are printed on white backed acetate or plastic translite which is back lit.

The results can be beautiful and won’t crash your computer!

And another thing. Don’t worry too much if you get the spinning wheel of death, the multicoloured pizza or umbrella or whatever you call it. Even when working on a souped up G5 Photoshop can still freeze – even saying (not responding) when one choses the force quit option (Command-option esc). But when this happens don’t force quit! Chill, make a cup of tea or coffee, it will spring back to life and you won’t have lost anything!

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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 can this be prevented? Once converted to CMYK Photoshop will display its interpretation of how it will be printed. Further investigation should be made by using the Info palette and observing the CMYK values whilst hovering the mouse over certain areas of the image. Remember Photoshop can only give you an approximation both on screen and with its conversion values. Printed materials will never look the same as they do on screen.

The other thing you can do is change the CMYK values to make it look good. Look above. Picture number 1: How the website was, a black background with blue type. The blue was R80 G80 B252 (Hex: #5050fc).

Picture number 2: Look at the difference! That RGB colour when converted to CMYK is re-interpreted to a muddy, dull blue, C76 M70 Y0 K0. Almost illegible against the background black.

Picture number 3: The only possible solution. Lighten up the blue to a cyan dominated one, C64 M11 Y0 K0. Maybe not in the style of the website but at least punchy and legible.

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And, while I’m about it, I might as well include some digital print quotes.

Here is the caveat: “Remember these are estimates and may be revised downwards if less than expected work is needed.”

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Work from home. Use of house as business means that you can put some of the cost of home improvements and numerous other things to offset your profit and therefore pay less tax. Meet clients in swanky cafés. Try to get them to pay(!)

Don’t do colour lazers. Get your client to proof read from PDFs. They’re faster, look better and, of course, cheaper. If they need to see something on paper get a printer to do it as a sample. Buy a simple inkjet desktop printer that has a scanner, photocopier and fax (for under £100). If anyone needs to see proof of ID or certificate of incorporation you can scan it and send it by email. Email your invoices, estimates and contracts – everything – to save on ink, paper and postage.

Don’t buy Apple monitors. OK, they’re pretty but there are others that are just as good and half the price.

Don’t buy anything new. Secondhand computers are like secondhand cars – much better value. I’m running everything on a couple of souped up G4′s I got for £200 each. If one breaks down I can use the other. Work is backed-up off site by my website host. No need to spend money on the latest software. Wait for them to patch up the bugs. Use old versions of software as long as it’s compatible with the system you are using.

Don’t use Getty. Buy monthly subscriptions to shutterstock.com or other royalty free photo libraries. Download as many images as you can.

Remember the CS versions of Adobe Illustrator have a live trace tool which can re-draw any image in vector form which you can present as an illustration negating the need to commission.

Get webspace. I have secured thousands of pounds worth of business from my website, host many more and store all my work – all for under £100 a year!

The only other thing I’d spend money on is Christmas or birthday cards for clients. It’s the single best way to ensure repeat business.

Don’t get greedy. Reflect all these savings in the price you charge your client. It’ll be worth it in the long run, trust me.

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Here are some icons I designed for a friend’s website. He asked me to make them at three sizes: 20 pixels wide, 80 pixels wide and 300 pixels wide.

There’s a real skill to designing icons. You have to make them simple enough to be understandable at small sizes but interesting enough to be beautiful when bigger.

I used a well-known aqua or jelly technique for the background. Basically it is a gradient with a series of superimposed arcs to give an impression of translucent 3d shape. The arcs are intersections of two circles, squeeze or stretched slightly where appropriate. I blurred the arcs at the top but at the bottom they remain sharp to give an ultra-modern feel.

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I would advise anyone who wants to make money and find more work to get blogging.

I was encouraged to get a WordPress blog by a friend but I didn’t really realise what blogging was at first. I thought, what’s the point of writing “I woke up this morning, had breakfast …”? I really only started taking it seriously in November 2006 about two months before I started to get results.

There are plenty of ways to make money from your blog from advertising but that’s not what I’m discussing here. And, personally, I find blogs that are peppered with adverts really ugly.

Blogs are, for me, a great way to find work and make contacts through searches. But, because of the illogical and secretive way search engines in general and Google in particular work, you will never know how to be top of the list on certain searches. So the trick is go for every conceivable search you can think of.

You should write about what you know. Write about your work, your way of doing things, practices that other people might find useful. What sets you apart from others.

Take me as an example. If you search for “freelance graphic designer” on Google, I’m number 22. That’s the third page. Not so good. Even worse is “London graphic designer”, number 68 on Google. Pretty bad. However, one day someone – now a client of mine – wanted a PDF newsletter designed in InDesign so searched for “freelance InDesign London”. Guess what? I’m number 3!

How did that come about? Because I wrote a blog discussing PDF design, newsletters and InDesign amongst other things.

My point is I never would have guessed that someone would search specifically for that. It was only by writing about the nature of my work that I got work! And it is the blog that makes that process so easy.

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Independent freelancers often outperform agencies in quality, price and timeliness.

To some the word “freelancer” may have a certain stigma of a maverick who ignores rules and misses deadlines. In reality freelancers have usually been around the agency block already and know their stuff. Nobody starts work as a freelancer.

There used to be advantages in employing large agencies for big jobs. Economies of scale, strength in numbers, experience and access to resources were benefits of the big boys over a lone ranger. Nowadays, this isn’t true. All a freelancer needs is a computer and broadband.

Now large files can be moved around quickly, huge jobs – series of billboards, brochures, books, presentations, videos, websites – can sit on secure servers anywhere in the world. The designer has the work on his computer at home so in the unlikely event of data loss there is always a copy. Viruses are unheard of as well – it’s a Mac thing.

If the scale of the job is too much for one freelancer they can simply call on someone else to help. Files can be downloaded from the freelancer’s FTP site and uploaded when finished. Every freelancer has a network of contacts each with their specialities.

So what of using an agency? Well, the design agency or consultancy have their premises to pay for and add to the bill. They also have directors, account managers, senior creatives and junior designers each with their own ideas, spins and interpretations to confuse the message. They also have attitude, and can be full of precious personalities with an “us and them” relationship with the client.

When a client enlists the help of a creative freelancer they are creating a one-to-one relationship with a professional. They now know who to phone or email about the project and will get a quick answer without getting stuck in the corporate maze of finding the right department. Last minute changes to a job before it prints or goes live are quicker and cheaper with the freelancer.

Also the freelancer has his reputation on the line with the job and it means so much more to him than to individuals in an agency.

I’m doing a colour 120 page A5 booklet for my client, Accenture, at the moment and they are very happy. But when they asked the previous agency to amend things slightly they were met with tuts! Incredible! In my opinion, the client is always right. It has to be that way.

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The advantages of PDF publishing over internet publishing are:
1 No need to worry about browser and platform differences or about being standards compliant – if you can view a PDF properly in Reader the chances are that everyone else in the world can.
2 You can use any font you want.
3 Vector graphics appear pin sharp at any magnification.
4 You don’t need an internet connection to read or print it.

Ah, I hear you say, the web is interactive but PDFs aren’t. Wrong again!

More about this subject and how to create them in InDesign.

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Take navigation. Everybody loves to click on articles in a contents page to go to that page, or click on an icon to get back to the contents page, or click “next page” or “previous page” to move through the document. Set up a master page in InDesign with a button set to the bookmark of your contents page and left and right “page turners” set to previous page and next page and, bang, you’ve done it! No need to mess around with your PDF in Acrobat Professional tediously setting all the links.

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I’ve also been very impressed with their design guidelines, typeface and logos that were set up by Wolf Olinns a few years ago. Elements of Tate design can be seen on my main design page.

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But what if you want some text boxes to wrap around images and others to flow over? Move to front like Quark? No! Go Object > Text Frame Options and check Ignore Text Wrap whilst having the text box selected. However, if you do want Text Wrap to work like Quark‘s Runaround in Preferences (Command/Control -K), under the Composition tab, you can check Text Wrap Only Effects Text Beneath. Text beneath an item with Text Wrap applied will flow around the object – move the text to front and it will flow over the object.

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This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

Creatives are paid fortunes to think laterally, to come up with a word or an image that no one else has thought of. But now we have the most amazing lateral thinking resource at our fingertips – the internet.

You have dictionaries and thesauruses to help you with words. There are directories of English idioms and expressions which are particularly helpful with advertising copy. But, my personal favourite internet aid to lateral thinking is image searching.

Illustrating abstract notions is one of the most creative and fun things. Try putting an abstract term that complies with your brief (like, empty; separation; togetherness; contrast; love; big; help) into a stock photography site’s search engine and see if it gives you any ideas. Don’t forget normal search engine’s images searches like Google or Yahoo! They are getting better and better and give you a different option to the staid stock image.

Computers don’t have the associations with words that we do. They just dispassionately match the word we type in. Think of all the times you’ve had a search fail. It’s these “failures” that can spark an un-thought-of angle that could really make a campaign.

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You can still use most of the keyboard shortcuts, including F7 to show and hide guides, command-shift , and . to increase and decrease both type and pictures within a box, command-option-shift ; and ‘ to increase and decrease leading by 1 point, command-option-shift [ and ] for tracking/kerning, command-option-shift – and = for baseline shift. (Shift) F5 for move to front (back). Command (PC Control) -I to view/hide text invisibles.

However, setting the Step/Repeat is command-option U, and opposed to command-option D in Quark. Whereas command- D is still duplicate.

There’s a speedy shortcut for editing text in InDesign (Illustrator users will be familiar with this). When you’re using either selection tool, just double-click on any text box—your cursor will immediately change to the Type tool.

Quark users migrating to InDesign will find the master page items behaving differently. Elements on master pages appear locked on the normal pages. To edit an item on a normal page, command-shift click on the object. Beware! This also moves the item to the front. Use layers to keep it behind other elements if that is desired.

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The Quick Mask Mode is a much overlooked method for making selections. In particular, “burning” or darkening skies more at the top of the image than at the horizon. To do this, go into Quick Mask Mode, either by clicking on the icon at the bottom of the tool bar or by pressing Q. Immediately, the foreground and background colours will go to the black and white default.

Select the Gradient Tool (G), make sure it is a linear gradient and black to white, and draw a verticle line from the horizon upwards. The picture will then look something like the one on the right. Don’t worry about the red, a 50% opacity is the default setting of the masked area. To make absolutely sure what you have selected switch back to Standard Mode (Q) and you will see those familar “marching ants”. Command -H to hide those destracting insects and Command -M for curves of whatever you prefer to increase contrast, colour or saturation to the sky.

Because this selection has a lovely seemless gradient border to it, you can now use it for the rest of the picture. Command-Shift -I to inverse the selection and you have the rest of the picture selected. For my picture, the London landscape at the bottom was selected, then gradually selected less and less upwards towards the horizon and the sky deselected. Adjust this selection accordingly to create a nicer more contrasty image.

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This is about the very basics of improving landscape photography. For years I’ve been taking rather bland photos of both natural landscapes and cityscapes and then pushing those pixels to bits in Photoshop.

One of the most important things to learn in Photoshop is selecting areas of pictures. For example, in the Tower of London above,  you select the sky (without leaving tell-tale white lines along the horizon) and add contrast to it.

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The Dodge, Burn, Sponge, Brush and Clone Tools all have a blending mode option and the same quick key will work in the same way when one of these tools is selected. I got this from the Creative Guy here.

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If, however, you are cutting out a person with frizzy hair, then softened edges are needed. Feather selections by a few pixels or create an extra channel and paint with soft brushes.

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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 5Mb.

What did I do?

Answer: Go: Advanced > PDF Optimiser.

You then have more ways to downsize. Hints: Make compatable with Acrobat 7 – the later the version the smaller the file size. Put all the images down to 72 if you haven’t already. Leave the Scanned Pages unless you have, erm, scanned pages. There maybe some fonts to discard. Leave the Transparency bit alone (I found it increased the size!). Under Discard objects and Clean up – tick everything in sight!

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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 much better overprinted. Problem is, further down the production process, maybe the black type gets changed to white and promptly disappears!

Two things you can do (assuming you’re printing from PDFs).

One. Check the file with Overprint Preview ticked in Acrobat 6 and above.

Two. Instead of locating the offending element and switch the overprinting off, simply go in to advanced settings in Distiller and uncheck the Preserve Overprint box.

Simple, eh?

I’ve only just found out about it!

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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 been causing me some problems recently and I wonder if anyone has anything to add on the subject.

Say there is an innocuous text box or picture box that is lounging around behind a bigger non-opaque object in Quark or any other application. Fine, no big deal. No one’s gonna see it when you print out, you think. Wrong! Sometimes it is visible on the PDF. Even worse, visible on some people’s machines but not others!

Any thoughts?

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