Design Techniques Graphic Design Techniques Training Courses

Design Language

• Form and space
• Negative and positive space
• Principles of layout
• Photography basics
• Composition

Layout

• Layout style
• Size and Format
• Using grids
• Layout style
• Contrast

From Concept to Visual

• Research
• Organising your thoughts
• Image Sourcing
• Photograph or Illustration

Colour

• Colour definitions
• Colour differences
• Colour associations
• Colour contrast and harmony rules
• Spot colours
• Printing colours

Typography

• Type history and type decisions
• Type families?* Typographical ground rules
• Tips and techniques for presenting type
• Special type effects
• Illustrative Typography
• Widows and orphans
• Formatting text
• Rivers of white space
• Inappropriate column spacing
• Claustrophobic pages
• Whispering headlines?
• Floating heads and subheads
• Too few or too many typefaces

Skills and Studio Tools

• An overview of the Adobe Creative Suite
• Using Bridge

Printing considerations

• Problems that can occur in a print workflow
• Using an Acrobat PDF workflow
• A print checklist
• Preflight options

Professional Pointers

• Advertising
• Corporate Design
• Editorial design

• Colour theory

• Complementary colours and the psychology of colour

• Keeping abreast of photographic fashion

• Using special effects

• What makes a good cover picture

• Choosing pix to show up cover lines

• Handling under or over-exposed pix

• Layout: getting the best from size and trim

• Planning colour and using spot colour

• Mixing colour

• What printers can and can’t do

Configuring rich black parameters

*Differences between 100K and rich-black

Packaging files for Hand-off

*Methods of compacting files for print
delivery in native application

Live Pre-flight

*Building a pre-flight profile
*Embedding profile into your document
*Considerations

Managing Missing Links and Fonts

*How to manage links and fonts
*New links panel and options

Preview separations

*Accurately control your colours
*Using the Ink Manager

Successfully overcome transparency issues

*Use object layering and stacking order to
overcome flattening issues (ref PDF/X-1a
and PDF/X-4)

Colour Swatches and mapping

*Build swatches in Pantone and CMYK colour
space and learn to troubleshoot

Configuring and sharing Presets

*Create and use intent driven print presets
for consistent output

Generating a PDF through Export

*Understand the different options for
generating PDF

PDF/X Standards

*PDF/X-1a, PDF/X-3 and PDF/X-4 standards
*Adobe PDF Print Engine

Configure Adobe Acrobat

*Page box geometry
*Overprint preview
*Page display options
*Smooth line art

Apply trapping

*Integrate trapping
*Trapping presets

Output Preview

*Simulation Preview
*Object Inspector
*Density readings
*Rich ink control
*Overprinting objects

Pre-flight and fix-ups

*Pre-flight templates
*Fix-ups options
*Build your own fix-up
*Building profiles
*Conversion to PDF/X
*Pre-flight and fix-ups
Droplets

Convert colours

*Conversion from one
colour space
*Tag objects with
output intent profile

Crop pages

*Enlarge PDF page sizes
*Configure page boxes
*Trim, bleed, crop, media and crop box

Page mark information

*Apply page mark data
*Adhere to page geometry

Fixing Hairlines

*Increase vector strokes
*Convey minimum stroke weights for Type3

Flatten Transparency

*Flatten live transparency
*Preview and conversion settings
*Transparency overview

• The psychology of design and visual codes
• Analysis of typefaces and page balance
• Designing pages with no pictures
• Use of colour and creating an appropriate palette
• Re-thinking your page ‘furniture’
• Dealing with large ads or heavy picture content
• Handling covers, inserts and specials
• Re-thinking the contents page
• Making sure you’re getting the most out of your DTP package

• Planning and preparation
• When evolution is better than revolution
• Using design to guide the reader
• Covers, spreads and special pages
• Making colour work
• Effective use of pictures
• Fresh ideas and style leaders
• The latest techniques
• Relaunching with confidence

Introduction.

• Learning the InDesign interface
• Saving a custom workspace
• Setting up InDesign preferences

Document Essentials

• Choosing the magazine size
• Column grid strategies
• Creating and working with master pages
• Sketching thumbnails
• Creating a template

Working with Images in InDesign and Photoshop

• Designing with bleeds
• Sourcing and evaluating images
• Image resolution and preparation for print and web
• Basic image contrast adjustments
• Basic image retouching
• Importing images into InDesign
• Fitting images with object styles
• Cropping images
• Creating a simple map or in Illustrator CS5

Working with Text

• Choosing fonts
• Copy fitting and calculating how much to write
• Importing and flowing text
• Establishing hierarchy
• Aligning text
• Hyphenate or not to hyphenate
• Consistent formatting
• Bullets and numbering
• Creating paragraph and character styles
• Using drop cap treatments
• Loading paragraph and character styles
• Using import options
• Cleaning up text
• Applying styles
• Designing pull quotes
• Creating captions
• Fixing spacing problems (widows and orphans)

Tabs and Tables

• Using tabs
• Importing tables from Word and Excel
• Formatting and styling tables
• Creating cell styles
• Creating table styles

Designing Page Elements

• Creating a colour palette
• Use of space
• Styling callout boxes
• Working with text wrap
• Fine-tuning the layout
• Creating a table of contents
• Adding hyperlinks and buttons for publishing online

Proofing and Output

• Managing image links
• Preflighting
• Creating PDFs for print and web
• Packaging