Creating Faux Bold with Strokes—the Catch


Many of you probably know that if you don’t have the bold or italics version of a font installed in your system, you shouldn’t use your DTP application’s option to make it bold or italics, because that will simply result in a simulation which might work on screen or with a desktop printer, but that can cause problems once your file is sent to an external printer using a RIP.

A solution to this can be adding a border around type. Applications such as Illustrator, Corel Draw, InDesign and others allow you to do that. However there is a catch, which I discovered not long ago while working a my company’s logo (that I didn’t design).

Changing Screen Angles in Duotone Images, Part 2


I advise you read the first part of this tutorial, so you understand the reason of this ste-by-step tutorial. Wrongly set screen angles and frequency can cause your job to print incorrectly. Most designers won’t need to deal with those settings, as printers will most likely do that themselves, but extra knowledge on this won’t hurt.

You are required to have Adobe Acrobat Professional, Adobe PS or any other driver that will allow you to make PostScript or PDF files. You will not be able to use the built-in Export to PDF option in InDesign or Export Layout as… in QuarkXPress to do what is described in this tutorial. With InDesign and Illustrator you will also have to produce separated files to be able to change screen angles.

Changing Screen Angles in Duotone Images, Part 1


Sometimes, when printing Duotone images, the printed result isn’t what you expected. Your images seem to have a strange dotted pattern which wasn’t in your digital file. This is caused by wrongly set screen angles. To understand this, it is necessary to understand what a screen is in printing.

Ink is layed on paper in form of tiny little dots that, combining each other, give you the illusion of continuos colour. You have a number of black dots, cyan dots, magenta dots and yellow dots that are printed on paper and combine to produce your orange, your brown, your red and all the other colours that can be obtained by mixing CMYK.

Create a Portfolio in 6 Days


Self promotion is very important for freelance designers. If you want to get clients, you need to let them know you exist, you need to tell them what you can do, and, most of all, you need to show it to them. To that end having a portfolio is not an option, and it is the only tool that will actually tell the tale about your ability to design. Even if you don’t plan to work as a freelancer, you still have to show your work to the companies that will hire you.

Jacci Howard Bear has written a 6 day course that will give you guidelines, tips and directions that will help you put together a portfolio which will speak for itself. As she puts it:

“Desktop publishing or graphic design portfolios should be more than just a few samples thrown into any old folder. Potential employers or clients use examples of your work to help determine whether they want to hire you. The samples you choose for graphic design portfolios and how you present them can affect whether or not you get the job.”

This is an email course with lessons sent to you daily, however you can do the course at your own pace.

Remember that if you can’t present a good image of yourself, others won’t be compelled to put theirs in your hands.

Adobe CS3 Overview


Adobe released Creative Suite 3 today, which is probably their biggest release ever. Since the merge with Macromedia a lot of speculation has gone on about which programs were to make it into the Suite and which ones were to be ditched. For the web designers who were wondering, GoLive has been replaced by Dreamweaver, for starters. You will find Acrobat 8 in CS 3 Design Standard Edition (finally!) and Flash in the Premium Edition. Yet talking about CS 3 as 1 suite is a mistake. There are 6 different suites, which address the needs of print designers, web designers and video editors.

Sue Chastain of About Graphics Software presents us a comprehensive and very hard to beat overview of the Suite, so I am not going to repeat what she has one, and, without any more delay, I encourage you to see the overview for yourself.

Previous Articles

How Big Is Big in Pixels?


Italy Like You Have Never Seen… Or Like You’ll Ever See


Function Comes First


Find the Design Element that Is Just Right


Checking Files for Printing


Find tutorials about Desktop Publishing, Graphic Design and even some Web Design stuff which I deem interesting.

And just for kicks, you can have a look at some fun things that have nothing to do with the above.

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