Thoughts for a New Year

I've been running courses for Publishing and Graphics software for a bit longer than I care to remember now – over twenty years – during which time as you can imagine I've seen a good many changes. When I first set out on this path in 1990, the IBM 8086 was the basic processor, hard drives offered about 20 megabytes of storage if you were lucky, and RAM was stated in kilobytes, not megabytes. Gigabytes were unheard of and I suspect were the stuff of nerdy dreams. If you were really lucky (and could afford it), you might stretch to a whole megabyte of RAM, but many software applications didn't support the use of what was referred to as "extended" or "expanded" RAM, i.e anything over 256kb, so there wasn't a lot of point. Aldus  PageMaker (acquired by Adobe in 1994) had revolutionised publishing; QuarkXPress existed on the Macintosh only; and Ventura Publisher had earned a reputation that it spent the next ten years trying to shake off but never really managed. (Although it remains my preferred publishing software of choice when I get the opportunity to use it.) We could only publish in black and white, with grayscale images, and we thought it was fantastic.

WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) was one of the great urban myths, along with "your cheque's in the post" (yes, that is cheques and post, no internet banking and email); Microsoft Windows had created a GUI (Graphic User Interface) to rival that of Apple on the Macintosh, which meant you could now use a mouse to select commands from pull-down menus instead of typing commands onto a blue or green DOS (Disk Operating System) screen. WordPerfect 5.1 (now Corel WordPerfect) was the most popular word-processing application in the world, and was remarkable in that it allowed you to include grayscale images which you could see if you switched to "Print Preview" mode. Thus began the greatest revolution in publishing since the invention of the printing press.

With all the technology at our disposal, it's sad to note that the overall standard of published material has declined significantly. I think in part this is due to the fact that anyone can "self-publish", either online or in print, as the costs of doing so have made it more affordable. However, I'm constantly dismayed by the quality of much of the junk that I receive and the layout of web pages to which I'm sent links (and not just the rather distasteful ones that are so prevalent). Standards and conventions in typesetting and publishing have been developed over the years not just as academic exercises, but because they help us to communicate effectively.

Publishing and graphics software do not represent some kind of magical melting pot into which you can just throw all kinds of garbled text and graphics, and out of which will mysteriously arise beautifully composed and well laid-out documents. So, for 2012 may I make an appeal to everyone who has responsibility for publishing any sort of information, to please take a little more care over what you expect us to read?

For information about publishing and graphics training courses visit http://www.ppatraining.co.uk/

January 2012 

When the strawberries turn purple... 

 

You know it has to be Photoshop. Of course the strawberries aren't really purple, it's just one of the multitude of effects you can create in Adobe Photoshop.

During this month's Photoshop course in Dublin, the thorny subject of layers cropped up in conversation over our morning coffee. It reminded me of when I was studying maths at school and the whole class had worked itself up into a frenzy about calculus, because the year group above us had done a great job of convincing us how difficult it was and how much we were going to hate it. When it came to it, of course, we found it wasn't nearly as bad as it had been made out.

It's much the same with Layers in Photoshop. It isn't rocket science, and much of the time you find yourself working with layers without even realising it, since many of the operations you carry out create a layer for you and it just becomes part of the normal working environment.

Imagine placing a piece of cling-film over the top of a conventional photograph to protect it from superficial damage or scratches. Now imagine taking a felt-tip pen and drawing on the film. Anyone who doesn't realise the cling-film is there might think you've just drawn on the photo, and it would certainly look that way. However, remove the cling-film and the photo is undamaged and looks just as it did before.

That's exactly how layers in Photoshop work. By creating effects on layers rather than on the image itself, you protect the original image, and work in a non-destructive way, so that the original image can be restored at any time. You can create multiple layers with different effects on each, and you can use the Layers palette to hide and show any of the layers at any time.

Of course this is only one example of how you might use layers in Photoshop, but it explains the basic principle and if you've grasped that, then you won't have any trouble understanding the many other implications of Photoshop layers.

I told you it wasn't rocket science.

If you want to know more, my next Photoshop course is on January 5th & 6th in Dublin, and January 12th & 13th in Guildford. Click here to see the course content or here to contact me for more information.

December 2011

My Christmas present to you —
Half Price Courses Offer

In these days of reduced budgets and fears of a "double-dip" recession, we all need to do our bit to help kick-start the economy and try to stimulate demand. We all stand to benefit if we can get the economy growing healthily – and in a sustainable way of course – but it's really difficult when business and consumer confidence is at such a low ebb.

So here's my effort and I hope you like it. If you book a place on any scheduled course before December 31st, you can bring a colleague or friend along to the same course for half price, saving you up to £207.50, depending on the course.

For more information about PPA courses click here or visit http://www.ppatraining.co.uk/

November 2011

 

Back to School – and not just for the kids!

The long summer break is coming to an end and all over the country can be heard the moans of kids not really wanting to go back to school, and the sighs of relief from frustrated parents who can't wait for them to do so.

This is a great time for adults to think about refreshing or updating their skills too. If I had a pound for every time I've heard someone say "I wish I'd known that before..." during a training course, I probably wouldn't be sitting here writing this now. And it's so true – the amount of time that people spend trying to find complicated work-arounds for problems that have much  simpler solutions can be staggering to hear about. Not many people calculate the cost of this time, but if they did, in many cases they would find that the cost of a couple of days training would pale into insignificance by comparison. Sometimes, of course, there is no simple solution to what they're trying to do - but even so, there's a time-cost involved in finding that out.

Pete, a customer who attended a recent Business Objects course with me, needs to send a monthly report to his team, on the first Monday of each month. For the last two years, he has run the report from Business Objects, exported the resulting data to Excel, and then emailed the Excel spreadsheet to everyone in his team. It has to be in Excel because not everyone has Business Objects. He reckons this takes about an hour and a half every time. After I showed him how to schedule the report in Business Objects, he doesn't have to do anything – Business Objects runs the report for him, and emails a copy as an Excel file to everyone in the team, even when Pete is on holiday or off sick. I don't know what Pete's hourly rate of pay is, but even if he was on the minimum wage of £5.93 per hour, the cost of producing his report for the last 2 years is £925.08. The cost of my one-day training course was £299, and he learnt a heap of other stuff that will save him more time and make him more productive in the years to come as well. (Pete's not his real name, but all the other stuff is true!)

And sometimes, just a little re-assurance that you're working along the right lines can go a long way towards boosting your confidence and making you more productive. Budgets are tight for everyone these days, but set the cost of training against the time-saving achieved by being more-productive and you might be surprised.
For more information about PPA courses click here or visit http://www.ppatraining.co.uk/

August 2011

QuarkXPress 9 – To Upgrade or Not, that is the question....      

Perhaps it's just me but I've always been a bit cynical about so called "upgrades". Far too often they seem to be nothing more than an opportunity to stick a new logo on a product, add a few new features that most people don't notice and even fewer people use, and then charge an extortionate amount for what is essentially the old product re-branded. And of course each upgrade forces people like me to spend hours going through each menu and dialogue box, item by item, to see if modifications need to be made to my course notes and screen-shots. Perhaps that's the real reason I'm cynical about them!

The last two QuarkXPress upgrades however, have not been like that. Web Layouts in addition to Print Layouts have been a feature of QuarkXPress for some time now, but to be honest I never found any great incentive to use them in preference to the tool I've been using for years to update my website.

QuarkXPress 8 changed all that. The addition of Interactive Layouts provided the boost that was needed to make me want to use it. The idea that I could create Interactive Flash elements to incorporate into a design-rich web page also created in Quark gave me quite a buzz (but then I can be a bit nerdy like that). And the realisation that I didn't have to learn any fancy HTML code, or get involved with timelines or frames per second gave me all kinds of ideas about how I could add interest to my web pages. Now all I need is the time to put the ideas into practice.

Then along came QuarkXPress 9. So now I can publish eBook versions of my existing Quark documents as well as publish for the iPad, almost as easily as I can publish to PDF from older versions of QuarkXpress. Whether we like it or not, the internet is the way forward for publishing and the opportunities for engaging audiences with rich interactive content are enormous. We'll ignore them at our peril. But honestly with design-rich, interactive content for eBooks and iPad Apps all from a familiar interface (if you're an existing Quark user), what's not to like?

For information about public and tailored QuarkXPress training courses click here or visit www.ppatraining.co.uk/QuarkXPress_Courses.htm

August 2011