Design and Production Overview

Course Description:

This course is designed for those working in publishing who do not regularly use design or page layout programs but need an overview of what these programs do and how they fit into the process of digital production.

The course will give you increased confidence when dealing with designers, printers and publishers and will demystify the often confusing terminology involved giving you a good grounding in the basic principles and process of digital design and production.

This course includes the following modules:

Introduction

• An overview of the digital production process
• Planning a document
• How programs work together
• An overview of Adobe Bridge

An overview of professional publishing software

• What do Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress actually do?
• How are they different?
• Creating a simple page layout
• Importing text from a word processing program
• Importing an image
• Using the basic text features

An overview of Illustrator

• What does Illustrator actually do?
• Creating text and images
• Understanding vector-based illustrations

Fonts

• Everything you wanted to know about fonts but were afraid to ask

An overview of Photoshop

• What does Photoshop actually do?
• Scanning an image
• Cropping an image
• Exporting images from Photoshop

Demystifying terminology

• Different file formats � EPS, TIFF, PDF, JPEG etc
• Understanding image resolution
• The relationship between resolution and image size
• What does digital proofing mean?
• What are pixels and vectors?
• What is a clipping path?
• What is transparency?
• Estimating production time

Printing considerations

• What problems can occur when digital artwork is sent to bureau?
• What does Adobe Acrobat do?
• Common problems
• A print checklist

Questions and answers