Design and Production Overview

Course Overview

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.

Course Outline

INTRODUCTION

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

AN OVERVIEW OF PROFESSIONAL PUBLISHING SOFTWARE

• What do QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign 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 and FreeHand
• What does Illustrator actually do?
• What does Freehand actually do?
• Creating text and images

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, PICT etc
• An introduction to image resolution
• What does digital proofing mean?
• What does Adobe Acrobat do?
• What are pixels and vectors?
• What is a clipping path?
• Estimating production time

PRINTING CONSIDERATIONS

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