Today’s post is geared towards some tutorial websites that I have seen lately. I hope this is helpful. Let me know.

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This website spans graphic design, web design & social media:

http://www.noupe.com/category/tutorial

Here is a rather well-known tutorial website that provides detailed steps:

http://psd.tutsplus.com/category/tutorials/

Some websites like this dedicate categories to Photoshop:

http://www.tutorial9.net/category/photoshop/

Here we have a website that believes it has the best Photoshop tutorials: 

http://bestphotoshoptutorials.net/category/tutorials/

This website is focused on web design:

http://www.thewebsqueeze.com/web-design-tutorials/

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ABOUT PROJECTCENTER:

ProjectCenter is a single-source service company providing marketing and document solutions to small, medium and large-sized businesses in the U.S. area. ProjectCenter is based in Phoenix, Arizona and its services include graphic design, web design, printing, copying, scanning and mailing. For more information, please call (602) 252-6655 or visit www.makepapereasy.com or follow us at http://twitter.com/ProjectCenter.

I had to write the blog just so that I could keep track of the information, and good information it is. Another blogger does the research for us. Check out http://loremipsumblvd.com/blog/2008/12/23-quality-free-stock-photography-sites/.

ABOUT PROJECTCENTER:

ProjectCenter is a single-source service company providing marketing and document solutions to small, medium and large-sized businesses in the U.S. area. ProjectCenter is based in Phoenix, Arizona and its services include graphic design, web design, printing, copying, scanning and mailing. For more information, please call (602) 252-6655 or visit  www.makepapereasy.com.

RGB is for viewing and CMYK is for printing.

Color Modes and When to Use Them:

Bitmap: 1-bit color. Pixels are either black or white. Good for simple line art with no shades of gray, no fuzzy edges. If you are saving to EPS format, remember to check for “Transparent Whites” if you want the black areas to be solid but the background to be “clear.” Be VERY careful messing with the Halftone Screens. If you want a cool T-shirt, silk screen effect, go for it, otherwise be prepared to see you work mangled beyond belief. To make this format more workable, you can convert it to Grayscale (then to duotone, or CMYK or RGB, etc.). If you have something in another format you have to convert it to Grayscale first, then Bitmap will become an option. Bitmaps are good for line art, doesn’t always need trapping, and can be colorized in programs like PageMaker into solid inks.

Grayscale: 8-bit color. Pixels can be black, white, or any one of 256 shades of gray. Good for black and white photos and illustrations. Full color images can easily be converted to grayscale for publication. (But if you want to see a full color–CMYK or RGB image as a grayscale, without actually converting it.

Check out ProjectCenter at www.makepapereasy.com, or call us at 602-252-6655.

Helvetica and Arial- two reasonably good san serif fonts that are often mistaken for one another. Here are a few hints to keeping them separate in your mind.

A little bit of history to begin with:

Helvetica was born in Switzerland in the 1950s. Created by the Haas Foundry, it was quickly adopted as the “new modern and clean” typeface of the corporate world.

More people have PCs than Macs and suddenly Arial is more popular than the “original” Helvetica.

Some other tips:

-The capital C in Helvetica has horizontal cusp ends. Arial’s are angled.

-The capital R in Helvetica has a curled leg. Arial has a straighter (though variable weight) leg.

-The lowercase t in Helvetica’s top is straight. Arial’s is trimmed at an angle.

-The number 1 in Helvetica has a flat underside to its “nose.” Arial is a simple stroke.

-The ampersand in Helvetica has a slightly taller end arm. Arial’s is a snip tighter.

Check out ProjectCenter at www.makepapereasy.com or www.projectcenterprinting.com.

‘Print-ready’ refers to a graphic design file being formatted to a printer’s needs, so that the printer can make their adjustments in order to print the file appropriately. Although all printers have a pre-press department that can fine-tune files and batch up jobs to a printer, and broker/client must make sure certain actions are taken before it goes to a pre-press department.

The first action is to include “bleed” in the artwork (previously described in post http://projectcenter.wordpress.com/2007/11/01/what-is-full-bleed/), which is about 1/4″ of extra border on the background of the artwork, so that the printer can then print and cut down to size, resulting in a page where the color goes to the edge of the printed piece.

If a PDF is not being sent, but rather an EPS file, Illustrator file (AI), InDesign file (INDD) or PhotoShop file (PSD), then it is recommended that the artwork be outlined (Select > All, then Type > Create Outlines). Outlining is a function that embeds the fonts in the artwork, so that a receiver of the file does not need the incorporated fonts in order to open the file.

Check out ProjectCenter’s services at www.makepapereasy.com.

As mention in a past posting (http://projectcenter.wordpress.com/2008/04/10/web-design-flash/), Flash is an animated component that is usually used as intro to a website, but can be implemented within web pages as well.

Keep in mind that entire websites can be created from the Flash software, but there are big issues with that approach. First, it means that your site will probably need more bandwidth over the internet for a viewer to load the website. Second, once the Flash website is created, it is cumbersome to make any changes at a later time. Third, if a client needs to change designers (i.e. the designer goes out of business or does not provide good customer service), the client needs to have and give access to the Flash source file. Without the source file, Flash needs to be recreated rather than revised, which increases the cost of the project.

As a suggestion, it might be a good idea to ask a prospective designer what softwares they will use to create a client website.

Check out ProjectCenter’s services at www.makepapereasy.com.

If you are new to Design and the print industry, you may already know how frustrating it is to find the right software to keep up with the industry standards and know what each program is designed for since definitions tend to be very vague.

Adobe has long been the industry standard and become synonymous with print. While there are many programs available that offer similar features, sticking with Adobe products will ensure consistency with most print shops. That being said, knowing the differences between the programs and what they are designed for can save a lot of wasted time in preparing artwork. Below is a list of the 3 most commonly used Adobe programs as well as a brief description of each.

Adobe Illustrator:
Adobe Illustrator is a vector based program meaning it is designed to create line art graphics and drawings. It is great for creating logos, graphs, and intricate artwork with higher precision and execution than other programs. As long as the artwork was created in Illustrator (as opposed to being imported) it can be reduced/enlarged to any size without quality loss and the file will remain small. While it has some of the features that other programs have, it does not support them as well . For instance, it has effects and filters but they are much harder to manage and tend to make the file much larger than necessary. It also has type features but doesn’t support multiple pages so it is more complicated to create layouts.

Adobe Photoshop:
Adobe Photoshop is a raster based program. It is designed to apply effects and filters to existing artwork and photography. It is a very powerful program for creating realistic textures, artwork and effects and is equally as good for creating web graphics. Like Illustrator, it combines some of the features that the other programs have, but also like Illustrator, it does not support them as well. In order to achieve the quality and resolution of a vector image, the file could end up being 20x the size of a vector file, so it essential to know what the file will be used for before creating (ie; print or web). Once it has been created at a certain size, it cannot be enlarged without the quality suffering. It also does not support multiple page documents, simply because of the file size constraints.

Adobe InDesign:
Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing program which basically compiles and links artwork, graphics and text into one file. It is designed to layout single and multiple page documents for print. It has a preflight feature which diagnoses any issues you might have before sending to a printer. It also has a collect for output feature which collect all linked artwork and photos along with the file itself and fonts used into one folder. It supports style sheets, rules, page numbering, etc. As with the others, it has several outside features but does not support them as well.

In a nutshell, each program has similar features to the other programs, but is individually designed with one core function that works in tandem with the other programs. If used to their full potential, they will compliment each other rather than compete.

Check out ProjectCenter’s website at www.makepapereasy.com