In this tutorial, we’ll be getting started with Adobe’s new animation tool, Adobe Edge Animate. Edge Animate harnesses the power of HTML5 animation, and allows the user to create dynamic, exciting web-based animations in a quick, easy and fun way, using a user-friendly timeline-based interface as opposed to blocks of daunting code.

In our first video for Edge Animate, “Getting Started”, we’ll be constructing our first animated banner. You’ll learn the basics of becoming familiar with Edge’s interface, as well as the following handy techniques to get you started on creating your own animations: using the key framing tools to bring your text and images to life; harness animation easing techniques to accelerate your elements on and off screen; grouping separate objects as an element, then animating them at the same time; we’ll also use actions to create a clickable button that takes your visitor to your desired page.

Once you’re finished, you’ll be able to apply these techniques to your own creations, allowing you to produce your own dynamic web elements.

Have you tried Adobe Edge Animate? How useful did you find it? Let us know in the comments.

Type & Grids: Responsive HTML5 Template – only $27!

Remember the good old days? You know which days I’m talking about; the days not so long ago when we used to design websites to fixed widths. Looking back now they seem like such a simpler time; a happier time; a time when I could recite every font that was available to use online without a second thought. The truth is that Responsive Web Design changed everything. The world was flat and now it’s round, I was blind and now I see, the web was pixels and now it’s percentages.

With the introduction of RWD, it is vital that we as designers evolve our workflow to better suit the demands of the new web. Many of us have voiced our frustrations on how Photoshop’s fixed pixel approach is unsuitable for designing the fluid layouts needed for a responsive website but no useful alternatives have been offered. The web design world is desperate for a bespoke software that is built from the ground up with RWD in mind. Products like Adobe Reflow are a great start, as it shows that Adobe are at least working on a solution, but after spending a few hours with it at the weekend, I can see that it still has a long way to go before it becomes a useful addition to my workflow. With us being in limbo between a pre-historic software and the promise of what’s to come tomorrow, we are having to create alternative workflows to accommodate the shortcomings of our current ‘design software’ by introducing other tools and procedures that will help bridge the gap between fixed pixel and fluid responsiveness.

The following is by no means a list of how RWD projects should be approached, but rather how I have adapted my workflow to suit the new landscape.

1. Use what you know

I have stood on the border between the Photoshop/Fireworks/Illustrator divide as each have battled for supremacy and have witnessed innocent people get caught in a crossfire of pixels. Designers tend to have their favourite and would rather die a slow painful death than admit that another software has a feature that they might actually want. My view is that you should design in any software that allows you to work at your most efficient and explore your ideas quickly, be it Photoshop, Powerpoint or Paint.

It’s almost irrelevant which you choose as it should just be a starting point for quickly experimenting with different layouts. Personally, I prefer Fireworks as it ticks more of the boxes of what I want in a software. I try not to get heavily stuck into details at this stage and really try to just make some preliminary decisions on layout and structure much like some posh wireframes.

2. Use real content

Everything that needs to be said about the use of Lorem Ipsum in site mock ups has been said so please just trust me on this one and where possible use real content to design from. Where not possible, use last years content, write your own content or use the lyrics to ‘Candle in the wind’ but don’t use Lorem ipsum. If you don’t use real content, it will be difficult to see at which break points certain elements need adjusting.

3. Start at 1000px wide

This is just the width that I like to start at as it is close to a small desktop experience, which is then easy to scale up for larger screens and down for tablet / mobile experiences. Some people prefer to start wider whilst others prefer to design mobile-first, it just comes down to what works for you.

4. Play the percentages

RWD is all about fluid containers that grow and shrink to fill the browser’s available area, so designing in percentages rather than pixels will ensure that your designs flow in proportion to the browser and require less break points than the equivalent pixel based design.

I tend to have In-Design open in the background so I can easily and quickly find out a percentage size of a pixel based element. InDesign is great at handling these kind of calculations and you can easily find out what size a 428px x 333px element will be at 46% of its original width, whilst keeping it’s proportions or maybe find out 27% of a 889px browser width in seconds. The results are still given to you in pixels so you can then go back into the software that you are designing in and create that container in pixels, knowing that it will be relative to the percentage of the workspace that you have defined.

5. Create your typography styles in the browser

If you think I bang on about using real content within your designs, you should hear me go on about designing typography styles in Photoshop (or equivalent). Typography will look vastly different in the browser than it looks in the usual Adobe packages which will mean more work for you tweaking the design once it’s built.

Save yourself the headache and use apps like typecast.com to experiment and create your font styles with. Once you are happy with the layout and style of your typography, you can export your entire workspace as a transparent PNG to place within your design mock-ups. You won’t need to have any of your chosen fonts installed onto your system as it will just be an image but you will also not be able to edit it without going back into typecast.

6. Create your grid

By now you should pretty much have your design at 1000px wide (or whichever width you chose at the start) completed with the widths of the containers that hold your various content translated into percentages. I would now start to create a bespoke grid that mimics the container widths that I use within my design. So if I have a sidebar that is 30% wide and a content area that is 55% of my browser with 5% padding either side, my grid may look something like 5%, 30%, 5%, 55%, 5%.

You can use apps like Gridset to build your bespoke grid but again, I prefer to use InDesign as you can group elements and have them resize in proportion to each other.

7. Time to break it down

I now take my grid that I have created using InDesign and paste it into a 1600px wide (or the max width that you want your site to be) document. I then start to resize my grid wider and narrower by increments of 100px all the way down to 300px wide. At every increment, I check the width of each content container and make sure it is still large enough to house its content. When I get to a width that I think makes a container too small, I simply edit the grid to fit. So if at 800px wide the sidebar that I had created at 30% of the browser width becomes too narrow, I could add an extra 10% to it, making it now 40% of my browser width and being wide enough to house its intended content.

The key thing to remember is that if you make a container wider, you need to make another container narrower by the same amount to maintain the 100% entire width. This is the best way that I have found to define break points (the point at which your layout will change) as you only add another breakpoint when the content breaks and not to the width of a new device. This procedure can be time consuming as you will end up with 14 different previews of your grid as it grows from 300px to 1600px wide but it is the best way that I have found to check how your design will look at different screen widths before it’s in development.

Another option is to use a tool like Adobe Reflow that also allows you to add content to containers and then drag your workspace and see the elements scale. You can also determine your break points by resizing your workspace until the content breaks and simply adding a media query. Reflow is still in public Beta and can be downloaded from here.

8. Add some polish

Having scaled your designs down at increments of every 100px, you would of identified a few widths at which the content breaks and rectified it by adding a breakpoint. You can now go back into the software which you created the original designs in and change the layout of your design at the widths that you identified as break points. This means that you end up designing only 2, 3 or 4 different layouts (depending on the complexity of your grid and how many breakpoints you need) that will cover all the way from 300px to 1600px.

9. Deliverables

If you have followed this process, you should now have a set of layouts that match your break points, a document that shows how your grid is made up of percentages of the browser width and how it collapses for smaller screens as well as all of your typography styles already created and tested in the browser. This should be a very strong point for a developer to then start building your designs accurately and without having to deal with content breaking at certain widths later on.

This process may seem very long winded but without a specific tool built entirely for RWD, it is the best way that I have found to easily test my responsive layout using non-responsive software and clearly communicate my ideas to a developer. This is by no means the one and only way to approach a RWD project, but it’s the best I’ve found.

What has responsive design changed about your workflow? What tips would you share? Let us know in the comments.

Featured image/thumbnail, flow image via Shutterstock.

Type & Grids: Responsive HTML5 Template – only $27!

YORGOO Logo Design Ideas

With YORGOO becoming a limited company and soon celebrating a renaissance in a completely new shape – adapted to modern… meaning mobile times – a whole new branding has to be developed. As we work in collaboration – not competition – on this topic together as a team, here are a few of my own first YORGOO Logo Design Ideas with an emphasis on the name itself with an elegant touch and a lying 8, the sign of infinity.

A simple little favicon in 16 x 16 px could look like this, both developed directly from the logo:

YORGOO Logo Design Ideas

Strict rules in terms of the colour scheme – black, white, greys and red only – have been observed in these first YORGOO Logo Design Ideas, whereas the choice of fonts was entirely free. Obviously, this is very much a matter of personal taste, but we have to ensure that these fonts display perfectly both online and in printed matter.

In the above variant I chose a combination of black and very dark grey, perhaps not easily distinguishable here, or perhaps I’m going blind :). The same below, with a tick of red… but not necessary.

…and a totally different feel – I just had to do this and I could go wilder:

How to create a Logo

There are many ways to learn how to create a logo… and it shows if you’re ‘in the zone’ and having fun when doing so! It’s just the beginning that’s hard, when an idea wants to be born and projected into our physical plane!

So just get started with an idea and play and experiment around it!

That’s how I got to the cute little elephant above… right from the word “YORGOO”… in a different font and shape, also playing with RGB colours (as YORGOO stands for “Media Marketing Publishing”) :

…and also integrating our slogan “Together We Are Unbeatable” – which will appear as a fine red line, depending on the size of the logo:

You see: I got started and experimented… and this is how this totally ‘out-of-the-box’ logo developed. A really original and interesting idea… but we won’t stop there, but just continue to improve!

Although everything needs definition and detail work, this logo appears well as a little favicon:

Well, elephants always make their mark; I’ve grown up with them in Namibia, they truly blow you away :)

There are tons of informative articles on the web teaching you what to observe when creating a logo. It is essentially a process where you start with first sketches as I did here (although I do idea scribbles by hand first esp. if not working with a focus on fonts directly), and you add, change, adapt, and produce massively for your dustbin (or delete button) until you just know you’ve got it!

Show it around, ask others what they like or don’t like, and keep going until you are happy – or your client is! Logo development is a highly paid profession – just think of Apple, Coca Cola and IBM for example. And if you look where Apple started and into what the famous logo evolved this process can even take decades!

We won’t have that long, but at least this is a beginning! Hang in there for more to come…

YORGOO is a platform where a multitude of inputs unite to a whole new entity.

Inspired by this idea and in respect of the imposed color scheme I did the following sketch which can work out at very small  size for example as a favicon.

The graphic represents well the above idea, however I am not too happy with the proportions. Also there is another version on the drawing board where the red square becomes a red circle, giving the design a more dynamic look.

The difficulty with round, curved objects is obvious, namely when you want to squeeze them into a 16 px x 16 px canvas.

Here below the 16px x 16 px favicon:

A version with the rounded shape:

Of course there are other options, such as letter based ideas, which present some disadvantages when it comes to very small shapes.

It’s tempting to use the letters representing YORGOO Limited and of course, I had to try it out.

The idea is always the same: join the two letters, simplify the shape and try it out with colors. While the first examples are font based, the second set is based on geometrical shapes, square and triangle and square and rounded.

Playing with geometric elements is interesting and yet, the difficult part will be to find the right proportions to express the desired relations existing between these elements. Joining the elements differently and splitting the middle bar would be another option or moving that bar out of the center … back to the drawing board!

The word YORGOO offers some interesting challenges, namely due to the rounded shapes of the “o”s and the “g”. In the past, YORGOO was branded with condensed Eight Track fonts which worked quite well for the purpose of 2005.

YORGOO Limited’s image is different from the good old membership program. We need to express a modern angle with a touch of elegance and class, a touch of “good taste” and yet an interpretation thereof, pointing to a more speed oriented environment, a more abstract and yet harmonious design for a more dynamic generation.

For the purpose of this post, I have selected some sketches based on the Adobe Garamond Pro Font:

While Garamond is an old font, it remains one of the most elegant and harmonious serif-fonts, namely for the letters needed here. Garamond is timeless, even if it looks a bit oldish, too traditional for my taste. That’s why I applied the brush to clear some parts of the font to get rid of what I feel is an excess of serifs and to bring in some dynamic into the design.

Also, treating each letter individually allows to play with individual letter spacing which is needed for the word YORGOO; due to all the rounded fonts, the word would fall apart with standard metrics.

Note also, the treatment of the first “o” which is designed to form a unity with the “y” making it a nice logo shape.

Of course all the above requires real detail work to get the best effects. Please take these sketches as what they are: sketches for discussion, ideas for inspiration or simply drafts designed for the bin.

I am looking forward to your feedback at tonight’s call.

Wedding Photo Book

Creating one’s own Wedding Website is the smart solution for anyone with a large family spread all over the world and wanting to stay in control of their name, content and – in this case – wedding photography – which is not the case with Social Media websites as everyone knows by now. However, besides the virtual world of the Internet there is the very physical, material world we live in and a Wedding Photo Book is something that can be looked at and passed along from generation to generation as was and is the case in our family and most probably in your’s as well.

Wedding Photo Book

Many wedding photographers offer a “Wedding Photo Book” or “Wedding Album” as part of their major package – and it makes sense! They usually work with templates into which the photos taken at the wedding are placed chronologically.

While my focus over the past years has been strictly online, it now shifts back to include print media as well. Having created many catalogues, books and posters (especially for Art, Culture and Architecture, Culinary and Kids),?? well before digital times, this meant diving into new programs, especially ADOBE InDesign, and learning the basics. This lead to the first Wedding Photo Book version – under extreme time pressure that left no room for much experimenting – but that forced me to learn and act fast and that allowed me to fulfill a task in a very attractive way.

When comparing the online and offline methodology for publications there are fundamental differences. When we edit a picture for the online environment, i.e. for the web – we want it to be as light as possible while keeping as much quality as possible, so we save it at resolution 72; for print it has to be 300 dpi, no matter what! While online we work with a .jpg or a .png?? in RGB, for print it’s in CMYK … and the big lesson here is also that while your low-end digital camera is perfect for the screen, you need a quality photo camera to take quality pictures for print, fullstop!

The pictures here show screenshots of the spread in ADOBE InDesign (above) and the very good PDF proofs at the top and below (single pages) that show how the page in the printed book should look, although that then depends again on the choice of paper and the inks used.

Print at affordable prices

An interesting journey! With the incredible possibilities to print at affordable prices today – unthought of in the ‘old days’ – we all can write, edit and publish our own book today!

That’s a kind of freedom I like!

How to get your Windows 8 Pro and Save Money

Windows 8 Pro has been released and for a limited time, you can upgrade your PC running a previous version of Windows to Windows??8 Pro for a special price. Here’s how to get your Windows 8 and Save Money!

How to get your Windows 8 Pro and Save Money

YCADEMY Seminar November 2012

Windows 8 Pro installation

Here is how to complete your Windows 8 Pro installation after doing the steps we discussed in my article “How to get your Windows 8 Pro and Save Money“.

Windows 8 Pro installation

For my Windows 8 Pro installation I started my computer (still on Windows 7) and inserted the DVD we created with Windows 8 and let it run, following instructions like inserting the Product key.It ran through pretty smoothly, rebooting many times as it seems – and I went out to do some errands.

Once back, it seemed to be hanging on a black screen but the harddrive kept flashing – so something was happening. As this didn’t change for a while, I got nervous and consulted quite some forums on the “Win 8 black screen issue” – which is very real in some specific cases. But we also don’t know how long the installation should take. For someone it may be 3 hours, for someone else it may take much longer. Noone had done a Windows 8 Pro upgrade in my area down here yet, so noone knew the answer either.

I kept checking and trying – and suddenly all just seemed to be ready! I did my settings – skipping my email address for maximum privacy – and finally I ended up on the Start screen with all its colourful Windows apps – and from here the journey was pretty easy and enjoyable!

It is important to see to it that all drivers are updated and if there are errors – like here my graphics card cannot be found and it’s a pretty new one I bought not long ago – these things should be addressed as soon as possible.

The next big lot will be the media center… but at least here you have the next step, so take heart and do your setup now, especially if you attend this month’s Ycademy Seminar November 2012 as then this part has to be done so we can move into the more interesting ‘inside story’.

Enjoy!

And the sunset above was just yesterday, as seen from my terrace down here in Noordhoek, South Africa!

Windows 8 Pro Seminar with Ycademy

Following my articles earlier regarding the downloading and installation of the brand-new Windows 8 Pro version, we are looking forward to the Windows 8 Pro Seminar with Ycademy this weekend!

Windows 8 Pro Seminar with Ycademy

The question is whether or not a Windows 8 Pro Seminar with Ycademy is needed and if so, why?

At the end of the day it’s basically Windows 7… so what’s better and what’s the difference?

We all know that as website designers and website developers we need to remain at the top of developments and as the virtual world is mad about apps, you will have at least one big question answered the moment you open your new Windows 8 Start screen and say WOW! But there’s more and we will go into it.

ADOBE Illustrator

Additionally, we will get a first grip on ADOBE Illustrator and learn how to create vector graphics. These become the more important as we focus increasingly also on print media.

OnOne Tools

Last but not least and time-depending, we will look into OnOneTools – which I personally really like and have been working with extensively. But the latest version is quite something else and I’ve created both pictures on this page using some of its features.

It seems winter is back in Noordhoek: it’s stormy, cold and raining… the rains obviously are graciously and thankfully accepted, the rest is totally out of synch! Nevertheless, our two guineafowl families frolick in the garden, one couple has tiny chicks, the other one’s are already able to fly. A joy to see wild life passing by … and capturing such moments on the digital camera!

How to turn a word into a shape

When designing a logo for a customer, we often receive psd files as a basis, but what we need has to be developed in Adobe Illustrator so that – in this case the logo – can be produced in different sizes, say for business cards as well as posters – and this always in perfect quality, sharp and crisp. It was my case as described earlier HERE.
In this exercise the question is: How to turn a word into a shape?

For this exercise, I will simply use my name ‘Bianca’ … :)

How to turn a word into a shape

1. Open Photoshop > FILE NEW
2. Image size 800 x 600 px, 72 res, RGB colour, transparent, name it.
3. Type the text – Bianca -?? (250px big) , center it and fit to screen. Select SMOOTH Font at the top.
4. Add a layer underneath for a white background.
5. Now you have a white layer background plus a T-layer with the word Bianca.
6. To get these fonts the way we want them to look in Photoshop, we can select between sharp, crisp, smooth etc.?? Often we choose SMOOTH. In order to have a bigger contrast, we may rather choose CRISP.?? The problem is that if we have received this text as a logo, we need to TRACE it, to make a SHAPE out of it or to extrude it in 3D.

So how do we do that?

7. The first thing to do is to make this image bigger. How? Here’s the way:

Go > Image size > and at the top where we have the pixels I select %. Punch in 400 %. Resample and Constrain Proportions at the bottom should be ticked, and click OK.

8. Blow up the image with your ZOOM TOOL to make it really big so you will see the edges and some of the weaknesses of the font you are using ??? it may be scales, steps and even holes.

The question now is ??? esp. if I go for ACTUAL PIXELS : How can I make the font sharper? In fact, it???s pretty similar to photography.

9. First, I will merge these two layers..

10. Then I will use a BLUR FILTER in order to get smooth edges choosing > GAUSSIAN BLUR. It will ask you to RASTERIZE the type and you click OK.
Now move the radius so that things look equally smooth, meaning the lines are black and then a uniform gray zone around. Note that the harder we are the less uniformity we have.

11. Imagine that when you trace all this the tracer will follow all these corners and steps and that???s possibly not what you want, so you try to get something smooth and then bring it back and resharpen it with the levels.
Try a radius of?? between 3.0 and 3.5. It must really look smooth. Meaning smooth edges. When we blur we have full black colour and then we have zones with the blur where we are drifting down into grayscale. That means that we could work on this with the select tool. Make sure you merge all layers you have!

12. Here now is the secret that only works if you have a white background that enables you to see the levels at the bottom; also, you won???t see the histogram if you just work on transparent.
From the Adjustment Layers Button ADD A LEVELS LAYER and narrow in the white stop (say to about 170) and narrow in the black stop (say to about 100) and then finetune. See what happens when you move the mid tones. It changes the behaviour of the edges. Now go to ACTUAL PIXELS and narrow the white and black stops further. Make them look sharp??? do the finetuning from the center. Play with it and put your glasses on as your eyes might object at some point. The result will be a CRISP FONT. Similar to what we do in photography esp. if we have monochromatic pictures, which looks very nice.

13. You can exaggerate, blow it up a bit. The more space we have between the black stop and the white stop the more it is blurred. Push them closer until we have what we want, and the center tab we can move for hardness or softness. Try it out to get something smooth and sexy.

What is interesting here is the technique: we blur first to get a smooth edge. Then we try to sharpen this by burning black and white. We are moving the white stops and the black stops narrower together ??? this is like when we are doing a colour selection when you limit the tolerance. We just need to watch that we don???t limit too much and get corners back into our fonts.

14. MERGE the 2 layers and go FIT SCREEN.

15. Now we need to SELECT this ??? for which we use our MAGIC WAND TOOL. On top, in the Control Panel, untick ???contiguous??? (this means that everything that is hooked together will be selected).
Click somewhere on the black colour and this should select everything. Check if a letter is not linked to the rest; i.e. that if I select CONTIGUOUS on the MAGIC WAND and I select an unattached ???R??? for example, it selects only the ???R??? and I would have to use the SHIFT TOOL to select the other elements. In bigger texts it???s very easy to miss out on an element.

If you untick ???CONTIGUOUS??? then it will find, on the picture, whatever elements correspond to that selection. In our case black.

Note: We could refine the edges more using the REFINE EDGES tool in the Control Panel; esp. if we have some fuzzy design to trace, but in this exercise it???s not necessary now.

16. So with the blacks all selected we are going to make our PATH. On the layer stack on top we click on PATH and there is a dropdown menu where we select MAKE WORK PATH.

17. A popup comes up that lets us choose the TOLERANCE LEVEL. 2px comes up as default and we use it and give it a name, eg. Tolerance 2px. Click OK.

NOTE: On top on the Control panel we have a Tolerance level that we might want to play with (set to default now). If we get a logo from a customer then we might have to go into much more detail.

18. SAVE it.

19. We will repeat the process to do another tolerance level (MAGIC WAND > CLICK ON BLACK > PATH > MAKE WORK PATH > TOLERANCE LEVEL 1 PX > NAME Tolerance 1px > OK ). So we have two tolerance levels that we can test.

NOTE: The assumption of 1 or 2 px is usually not bad.

20. To see the layer stack we add a WHITE LAYER and compare the word Bianca in ACTUAL PIXEL SIZE to see where the critical issues are and which one is better. Just switch inbetween the two layers. Here tolerance 1 px looks better so I deleted the other version.

21. Now I FIT TO SCREEN and now I will select the PATH (keeping the Path Layer open).

22. In the toolbox underneath the TYPE-TOOL we select the PATH SELECTION TOOL to select the path. We could have stroke colors (on top in the control panel) but you now simply select the elements by clicking into the various fields that are of concern. If you have an O you need to click on the shape, but also in the ???hole??? where it???s supposed to be white. Make sure everything is selected – to the minidot!

23. So now we have a path designed that we can SAVE AS A CUSTOM SHAPE. So I go EDIT and click DEFINE CUSTOM SHAPE ??? give it a name, eg. ???Bianca??? and click OK.

24. So if I do a new design I just start from scratch again: FILE > NEW > 800×600 etc > make all FIT TO SCREEN ??? then I go to my CUSTOM SHAPES > dropdown??? and my last custom shape is my ‘Bianca’ that I just designed. I just pull it in. I can give it a gradient or another colour and I can do as many as I want I any shapes and sizes. I just placed a Noordhoek sunset behind it, duplicated the shape and played with it to get somethig interesting. And voila!

25. Now you can SAVE as a PSD or anything else. The PSD can be opened in ADOBE Illustrator to be worked on. Or even here in Photoshop if you need to do a 3D extrusion.

Important: once we have the path, we can manipulate the letters by intervening on those points and changing details on the fonts to adjust them. Even in this well designed font I used I found curves that could be improved – perhaps hardly noticeable without being blown up, but a good font is like architecture: you feel if something is out of synch!

Now it’s your turn – enjoy!

How to create an A5 folded Postcard

Following yesterday’s brief article on “How to create a Postcard“, let me add an excerpt from our next exercises: “How to create an A5 folded Postcard” using ADOBE InDesign – basically the next postcard version we looked into at our final Ycademy Seminar 2012!

How to create an A5 folded Postcard

Again, before trying to figure out how to create an A5 folded Postcard the idea of what you want to achieve – basically the picture inside your mind of what you want to see on this postcard, the Artwork – is what comes first. The rest is technique and can be learned.

In our example, we prepared a photo in portrait format and designated for A5.?? In my case a digital photo of a young emerald sunbird on a budding thorny acacia that I had taken just outside my studio in Noordhoek, South Africa, a few days ago. Yes – blue skies… what a lovely summer we a blessed with!?? The image size: 6 x 4.5 inches x 300 dpi.

Again, I opened ADOBE InDesign and created a new document, selecting an A5, portrait format and 4 pages. One click of the mouse and my layout opens, bleed en all.

A little bit of thought before we start doesn’t harm: we have 4 pages, meaning page 1 is the front and page 4 is the back – these two will be probably printed together to save cost. Note: as they are folded on the left side (seen from the front), we don’t want a bleed here – so when we draw our placing rectangle, bear this in mind (exclude that part). Then pull in your prepared photo or other Artwork and voila! Perhaps you want to add some text? So draw a textbox and write whatever you wish to put there. Choose fonts, size of fonts and perhaps some effects, like a shadow? Make sure the text can be read well and do leave some ‘space’ for the picture to breathe.

You may want to put a text legend on the inside, meaning page 2, bottom – leaving room for the message someone wants to write on pages 2 and 3 (meaning the two inside pages). Note: if you print anything on the inside of Page 2 it means an increase in cost – so you may prefer to place a legend on the back on page 4. However, if you have a nice picture taken in a museum for instance, it looks professional and elegant to see the legend on page 2 – some people just pull off pages 3 and 4 to keep the picture and not the rest – so the legend at the back makes a lot of sense. But if you have a limited budget, rather leave the inner pages 2 and 3 blanc and add your legend or other text on the back page 4.

Page 4 should have a discreet copyright and perhaps some additional text, some promotion or even another picture that corresponds to the photo on page 1 in one or another way. As I do a lot of bird photography, I had created an Apple Touch Icon long ago with the photo of one of the owls I had photographed in the area – so it’s in line with my ‘bird theme’. As I am in the beginning phase of preparing printed matter on the PC, I am still stunned how small objects appear in print as compared with online publishing! The above icon design is 506 x 506 px x 300 dpi – and this is as big as it gets when preparing for print! This will change with a high-quality camera – the more data are available, the higher the output. We are working on it, watch this space… :)

Above is an indication of how the pages in my test example look, excluding page 3 which is blanc. Try to have clean, sober lines that lead the eye, even with that perspective.

ADOBE InDesign

ADOBE InDesign is really THE professional program for preparing print work – and again: talk to your printer well in advance to see which colour settings he prefers on his specific printing machine.