Intuitively easy

Posted on by
Reply

When I'm teaching people how to create something like a logo, newsletter or whatever, the response I often get is "I didn't think it was going to be that easy". And that is the point - things are often easier than you think. That's not to say that there may not be hard work involved, but part of it can be getting past how we think we have to do things. My favourite video on the subject is of Tim Gallwey teaching a woman tennis who knows she can't play - but is surprised to be finding herself playing anyway. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzR8x5MgvDw&NR=1

 

Using Guide Objects in Illustrator

Posted on by
Reply

A key skill in Illustrator is being able to align objects accurately. Most of the time Smart Guides take care of this quite happily, but occasionally you could do with some other guides. Whilst Illustrator allows you to drag guides from the rulers like you can in Indesign or Photoshop, it has a really old,  rarely used, really useful feature that the other programs do not have: guide objects. This is the ability to turn an object into a guide. A good example of where this might be used is when a fashion designer is creating a button (a button for a shirt, not for a website!) To align the holes in the centre of the button would be very fiddly, but with the simple addition of a square aligned to the centre of the button, turned into a guide, it's dead simple.

 

With the circle and square correctly sized and aligned, select the square and choose Guides>Make Guides from the View menu. This guide will be locked in place if guides are locked - if not it can be selected like anything else. But as it's a guide, it won't print, and it's really easy to align things to.

A quick way to straighten crooked horizons in Photoshop

Posted on by
Reply

Photoshop's ruler toolIf the horizon in your image isn't as straight as it should be, you don't need to resort to guesswork to fix it. Choose the Ruler tool (called the Measure tool in much older versions of Photoshop) and click and drag across the horizon to measure it.Using Photoshop's ruler tool

Then from the Image menu choose Rotate Canvas>Arbitrary and you will see that the angle you've measured is already been inserted there. In Photoshop CS5 once you've measured the angle you might notice a "Straighten" button on the control panel. If you press this it will not only rotate the image but crop it too (eliminating any extra pixels).

Creative resizing for web images

Posted on by
Reply

Photoshop's Crop tool optionsIf you've got to save copies of your images to a regular size for the web, the most intuitive way to do it is with Photoshop's Crop tool. Having chosen the Crop Tool enter the width and height you want your web image to be in the Control Panel, eg 70px by 50px and then drag the tool over the part of the image you want. As you drag you'll notice that you are constrained to the shape that's in the ratio of the numbers you typed in - meaning you can crop with your exact constraints in mind. An additional bonus is that when you press Return your image is resized as well.

Creating a triangle in Illustrator

Posted on by
Reply

It might not be immediately obvious how to create a triangle in Illustrator, but as a triangle is a polygon, that's the tool to use. Choose the Polygon tool and click and drag on the page - but don't let go of the mouse button yet.

Illustrator's polygon tool With the mouse button still down, you can press the Up or Down Arrow keys to add or subtract the number of sides. So if you continue to press the down arrow until you only have three sides - and you have a triangle. If you keep the Shift key held down as you let go of the mouse, the base of the triangle will remain completely flat.

If you want to specify the exact size of the triangle, you could alternatively simply click on the page once with the Polygon tool, and enter your desired radius (as well as "3" for number of sides).

Adjust curves whilst drawing them

Posted on by
Reply

Whilst drawing with the Pen tool (whether in Illustrator, Indesign or Photoshop), if you want to adjust the curve you've just drawn you might think you have to leave the Pen to do it. However if you hold down the Command / Ctrl key you get temporary access to the last Selection Tool you've used. If that tool was the Direct Selection Tool (the white arrow) then you'll be able to temporarily use it to drag an anchor point or handle. So next time you're about to use the Pen tool, choose the Direct Selection tool first.

Check all your links at a glance

Posted on by
Reply

Indesign's Links Panel options

Whilst it's a good idea to use on the Preflight Panel to pick up on the errors that might have crept into your document, sometimes it's good to be able to look at all of your images at once.

One tweak I would highly recommend to the Links panel is to allow it to show you the colour space and the resolution of all your images at once. To do this, go to the Links panel menu and choose Panel Options.

 

Indesign's Links panel with more information showingNow when you show your links panel you should clearly see the information for all of your images at once (you might need to adjust the widths of the columns to see everything clearly). If you're concerned which images might be low resolution, click on the icon at the top of that column and the links will be listed in order of their effective resolution.

 

 

 

Humble, pink, invaluable

Posted on by
Reply

One of the most useful features in Indesign is one of the most overlooked - the humble pink margin guide. By some people it's ignored completely and others  feel they have to stay religiously within its boundaries. But when it's used deliberately it can provide an invaluable structure to your document - making what would  otherwise be very difficutl very simple. This postcard is a good example. I can be confident that everything on the front and reverse of the postcard is aligned to 5mm from the edge - simply because I put a 5mm margin around the edge of the document when I initially created it. Without those humble guides it would have been a great deal more difficult to achieve.

Margin guides make the creation of this postcard much easier

Margin guides made it much easier to create this postcard

Why this blog?

Posted on by
Reply

I'm Peter Bone, and I've been working in the world of print, design and training since the early 1990's. For the past 15 years I've trained many thousands of professionals and beginners across the whole spectrum of the design world. In the past year or so I've noticed a huge shift in the type of people that I'm training, and what they want to learn. More often than not these days I'm training complete beginners, who have no background in any aspect of design or print, and they need to learn very quickly how to do something, whether it's to create a logo or design a newsletter, often because their department or company has decided to cut costs and bring all that work in house.

So I've seen a growing need for people to learn: 1)How to do very specific things quickly. 2)An understanding of the various programs like Indesign and Illustrator and how they fit together. 3) A solid foundation in the world of design.

Because I'm aware of the sort of things that people need to learn and how they generally learn these things best, I've decided to write a series of brief, concise, focused tutorials that I will make available in multiple formats: on the web, on the iPad, the Kindle and of course in printed form too. Watch these pages for news of upcoming titles. Of course I'll be blogging about all this stuff too...