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.

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.

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.

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.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a short article entitled Things I love about designing in InDesign that I couldn’t do in Quark which, I’m afraid to say included a couple of mistakes.

Then I got an email from Quark Inc.!

Matthias Guenther, a Senior Product Manager at Quark’s offices in Hamburg, Germany contacted me. I couldn’t believe it! I was initially reluctant to talk to Quark, a large multi-national company who maybe seeking to compromise the integrity of my website. But I did and I had a great chat with him.

We agreed that maybe in this industry too many people have been too ready to jump on the “InDesign’s cool; Quark sucks” bandwagon. In a similar way people add human characteristics to huge companies like Apple, Microsoft and Google, branding them heroes or villains when their primary concern is to make money for their shareholders and sometimes they annoy us and sometimes they don’t.

Matthias conceded that at least some of Quark’s bad publicity is Quark’s fault. Bad customer service and complacency during their long period of market dominance are criticisms that have often been levelled against them. But since 2005, he tells me, Quark has been fighting back against the competition.

Is he right? Well, I’ve not used Quark 7 much in the studios where I work as take up has been slow and the industry reviews have been luke warm to say the least. But the introduction of drop shadows and transparency goes some way to catch up with InDesign and, in some areas, passes it.

Some of Quark 7’s main new features have limited appeal to me. Job Jackets enable the user to set job specifications providing control and consistency from job initiation to final production and Composition Zones let you specify an area of layout that can be used in multiple documents, or that another user can work on simultaneously. Both of these will help users from large work groups, newspapers for example.

Maybe Quark is concentrating on the traditional heavyweight areas of the industry as InDesign’s take up has been quicker amongst the smaller design studios.

Matthias was also keen to point out the PSD import of Quark 7 which is also available as a free Xtension for 6.5. It offers features InDesign CS2 does not offer, like changing the blend mode of layers and colouring spot channels.

We also talked about the well-received Quark Interactive Designer which allows you to export projects in SWF (Flash) file format intuitively without writing a single line of code. Particularly interesting for someone like me who’s been struggling for years with Flash.

Anyhow, it was very good to talk to Matthias. I’ve been using Quark for well over a decade and I though it was great that he would like to talk with this website. And if every employee shows this level of concern Quark will come back and the design world will be a better place.

In the future, I can see myself using InDesign for one-off creative jobs and Quark for other stuff but, one thing’s for sure, I’ll be using both Quark and InDesign for many years to come.

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.