QuarkXPress Passport files can be saved so that the standard single language QuarkXPress can open and read it. When saving a file, QuarkXPress Passport offers you the option to save the file as either “multiple language” or “single language”. If you choose “multiple language” only QuarkXPress Passport will be able to read the file. If you choose “single language” then the standard version of QuarkXPress will be able to open and read it.

Make sure that the QuarkXPress Passport file is saved in a compatible version. For example, if you have QuarkXPress 5, the person using Passport has to save the QuarkXPress document as version 5 or earlier, or you won’t be able to open it.

But, What is this “Multiple Language” Option?
QuarkXPress Passport allows you to use different languages in one document. This means that if you have Italian, German and Spanish in the same document, you will be able to apply the correct hyphenation as it applies to those languages. So you won’t wind up hyphenating German words following Italian grammatical rules or vice versa.

You can also read this article and related ones on About Desktop Publishing.

Luckily I came across a handy article about how to convert text to outlines in InDesign on InDesign Secrets. As David Blatner says:

Here’s the whole tip in a nutshell: Don’t use Convert to Outlines at all. Instead, use InDesign’s transparency flattener to convert the text automatically for you when you export a PDF.

I encourage you to read the rest of the article to see how to go about that. It’s a very nice tip that will make you save a lot of time!

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).

When I was first hired by this company I was told that sometimes the logo looks thinner than it should. They had asked the designer to make it bolder when it was designed, so he added a stroke around the text since he had no bold version of the font (Andale Mono). The text in the logo is outlined by the way. Despite this the logo often just looked thinner than it should have.

One day I was making some tags for a packaging project and I used the logo. Since the tags were small, I had to shrink the logo. I made my PDF, did my preflight checks in Adobe Acrobat Professional and no matter what I did I kept getting an error about a stroke being less than 0.25 pt. For those who don’t know, printing a stroke or a line that is less wide than 0.25 pt often will not print because it’s too thin. Finally I figured out that the stroke was around the logo. In the original file, since the logo is bigger, the stroke is wider than 1pt, but once the logo is resized it becomes a hairline, thus being ignored by the printers’ RIP once it goes to press. That was why the logo was thinner sometimes. It wasn’t the designer taking “artistic license” it was just a technical problem.

Moral of the story: don’t use faux bold or italics, and when you use a stroke around text to simulate the bold version make sure you keep in mind how the design, logo, whatever you are doing may be used in the future. If the logo/graphic will be made very small, then try not to use strokes around text as it may not be printed.

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.

Take this example: you have an image that is 300 x 400 pixels. When you view that image on screen it will always look like an image that is 300 x 400 pixels indipendently from the resolution. And you say: “D’oh! OBVIOUSLY it will.” Have a look at what that means though: if you view an image on screen that is 300 x 400 pixels with a resolution of 72 ppi (pixels per inch) it will look the same on screen as an image that is 300 x 400 pixels with a resolution of 300 ppi.

The size in inches has to do with the printed size of your image. An image that is 300 x 400 pixels with a resolution of 72 ppi will print bigger (5.5 inches x 4.1 inches) than an image that is 300 x 400 ppi with a resolution of 300 ppi (1.3 inches by 1 inch). However the image at 72 ppi will look worse than the image at 300 ppi (this is taking in consideration the fact that you are resizing and NOT resampling your image).

To know how big your image will be in inches take the dimensions of your image and divide them by the resoultion. So with an image that is 400 x 300 pixels with a resolution of 72 ppi do the following:

400 / 72 = 5.5 inches
300 / 72 = 4.1 inches
So your final size is 5.5 x 4.1 inches.

Fear not, however, because BoDo (Business of Design Online) has just launched. This is one of the most brilliant ideas I have seen. I’ll let the people behind BoDo tell you what this new blog is about.

Many designers setting up shop have searched for answers and assistance by posting questions on various design forums, emailing pros for advice, reading everything on offer and googling when it’s not.

Forums, books and blog postings are helping to address this issue, but from our vantage point, concentrated help was needed. Help that would bring it all together, in one place. Easy to find.

As a Creative Latitude response, the Business of Design online (BoDo) was created.

Conceived and developed by Catherine (cat) Morley, Neil (nt) Tortorella and Jeanette (jay) Wickham (the BoDo team), BoDo’s aim is to provide a focused wealth of information, tools and techniques for successfully managing and marketing a design practice.

That’s right, there won’t be a Photoshop tutorial in sight.

On BoDo you’ll find continuously updated resources for running a design shop, including select e-books, business forms, excellent articles and more.

Although the team will contribute regular blog posts and the occasional series, we feel a big part of our strength will be the growing list of visiting authors.

On the design side, BoDo’s visiting author line-up includes Creative Latitude’s Graphic Make-overs host Alina Hagen of Alina Design. At Alina’s In-sights, Alina will post about life in-house. At Erin’s Review, studious Erin Harris of Sanguine Theory will share thoughts on various business of design books. As they happen, at Bean’s Biz, Stefan Bean of Pulse Creative Partners, Inc., will mull over the experiences of a new(ish) business start-up. Sometimes weekly, always monthly, Thomas (Tom) Stephan will have us grinning away in the work place at Dyer Straits.

As designers do not run their businesses in a vacuum, rounding out the discussion will be non-design authors such as writer and blogger ME “Liz” Strauss of Successful Blog, Letting Liz Be, Liz Strauss.com, The Blog Herald, and Performancing.com. Liz will talk about all things business writing at Write with ME. At Creative Conversations, Dr. Tammy Lenski of I Can’t Say That! and Lenski Strategic will share wisdom about conversations and conflict on the client and colleague front. At Creative Coaching, trained psychotherapist and creative coach Mark McGuinness from Wishful Thinking will instruct on the subject of creative thinking, communication and collaboration.

To get things started, we’ll begin with a bite, a nibble, a BoDo Niblet if you will, the “Starting Out and Setting Up” series. The two week series, pulling in advice from Abhijit Nadgouda, Alina Hagen, Chris Tomlinson, Danita Reynolds, Tammy Lenski Leslie Burns-Dell’Acqua, ME “Liz” Strauss, Mark McGuinness, Stefan Bean and of course Cat, Neil and Jay, will tackle knowing when you’re ready, managing money, equipment, location, etc.

Coming after will be two series running side by side – “Top 10 Marketing Missteps” (by Neil), covering marketing faux pas. And “Designer’s Working With” (by Cat). The “Working With” series talks about how to effectively work with other creatives such as writers, photographers, marketing professionals, illustrators, programmers, printers and pre press specialists.

In between will be Podcast Humpdays (wink, wink for all you Australians and Europeans out there), Resourceful Fridays, Weekly Recaps, Sunday Stressbusters, and a poll. Jay will come in with, what else, Ask jay, to answer individual business questions.

Starting out with a full schedule, the team looks forward to your comments and input on BoDo. It’s a win-win offer actually, as it’s our goal to help others wade through the new design business quagmire.

So come on down,
The BoDo Team
cat – nt – jay

While I definitely know what a slug is since quite a while I thought I’d share this short forum discussion with you, where we see that “slug” has actually several definitions, yet the ones I am interested in because of my job are related to writing and desktop publishing.

Over the past several years, there has been a disturbing increase in the number of spec-based “contests,” particularly in the area of logo design. In addition, more and more companies are requesting that creative projects be done on a speculative basis. Spec projects are those that provide no guarantee of payment for those submitting work. In essence, a creative (graphic designer, photographer, illustrator, writer, etc.) is asked to invest both time and resources into the project with the client only paying for the design they prefer. In many cases all intellectual property rights to the work by the creative are also forfeited to the client.

Contests, or creative competitions, are a particular concern as they offer the allure of notoriety and potential cash prizes. The trend has even moved into the corporate world where large companies, with more than adequate resources to pay fair market value, are holding competitions to procure their creative needs. Typically, the winner receives a prize that is below market value for their design. In many cases the contest sponsor takes ownership and all rights to all submissions.

Through its site, NO!SPEC provides resources and information for creatives about the nature of spec work, how to identify it and how to take a stand against it. In addition, the site provides businesses with information about why making speculative work requests is both harmful to the creative community and potentially dangerous for their business. NO!SPEC also provides information about how buyers of creative services can ethically procure creative services.

The NO!SPEC initiative includes contacting designers, educators, businesses and organizations, creating NO!SPEC promotional materials, protest letters, and developing petitions. In the future there will be NO!SPEC material for educators to use in classrooms, and more.

With the international support of NO!SPEC, we ask that you please join us in promoting professional, ethical business practices by saying NO! to spec.

NO!SPEC crusade
www.no-spec.com
Contact NO!SPEC

Technorati Tags: design, business, graphic design, desktop publishing, web design, creative, communications, visual, photography, illustration

They also report how desktop publishers often required to know web design and I can tell that the report holds true also in Italy and probably in other countries. Looking through job ads, I see many requests for designers who basically have to be able to do print design and web design, while bigger companies tend to leave the two separate.

Print and web design are very different and bigger companies seems to either understand this more or to have more resources to hire professionals who are specialized in those two fields.

There are also other interesting points in the report, but I’ll let you read Jacci’s article on it as she has done a really good job in summarizing it already.

Technorati Tags: DTP, Desktop Publishing, design, web design, jobs, business

On this note I’d like to point you to an article I wrote on Designorati, Printed VS Online Communication, Which One Is More Important?

What’s your opinion on this? What’s worse (or best): Having a free site supported by ads, or an ad free site, which you can only read on paid subscription?

Technorati Tags: RSS, blog, blogging, print design