So how’s the Pennsylvania Music Awards site coming along?
Funny you should ask…
I’ve been working on the layout in Photoshop for the past three days. I was up until 4:30 this morning hoping to finish the mock-up, as Johnny Kai has a meeting with a grant writer on Thursday.
I tell you, some of us old-skewl designers should CHECK out template sites like Template Monster or Boxed Art for inspiration and new techniques. It’s just like the music biz, baby… you have to keep up with the latest styles, or you can become yesterday’s news really fast!
Sometimes, when the sales department needs to woo one of our clients by producing a full-blown website in two days (yeah, I’m serious!), it just makes more sense to spring for a $40 template and concentrate on the backend. We used one for Pocono Job Search, and the revenue we’re generating has returned a jillionfold (give or take a zillion).
There’s just a lot of “outside-of-the-box” thinking in these templates, going in directions I’d have never normally conceived. Currently, I’m employing the newly-discovered technique of using slices, and then constructing a template by regenerating it through ImageReady…
It’s only fair, as my job just paid a small fortune training me in Photoshop 7 and Quark.
Which brings me to an interesting point, maybe Maria or Dawn can answer this:
My friend Madeline brought up an interesting point the other day. In the print world we use Adobe for everything…
…except we use Quark for the actual publication, instead of PageMaker or Indesign….
… Why is that?
Speaking for Harcourt Publishing only, and only for the school division mind you….. We use Quark to make the eps files for the pages, then we use Acrobat to PDF them for the final proof. Acrobat locks the final PDF file.
Indesign is something we are just now tinkering with. We have been using it, but not as a standard practice yet.
PageMaker, Photoshop, and Illustrator are used for master graphic pages, and intense graphic layouts. (Usually in the first printing, or manuscript stage)
Quark, Acrobat, and Photoshop are used in the Reprint process. (For fixing graphic and text errors.) Acrobat is always used to make the final digital proof though. 🙂
Quark seems to be the industry “standard” like Photoshop is supposed to be…
(Sorry—off topic warning!)
Awww….that’s a very pretty baby girl. And I just fell in love with Tigger. Do you all live close to each other?
Quark had all the bells and whistles when most newspapers went to full pagination — therefore, they have 90% marketshare. While some of us would like to use InDesign and InCopy, its cost prohibitive to make the switch.
Kate: There’s no such thing as “off-topic” here. :0) She’s about an hour and a half away FROM me. She and her friend Bobthecorgi were two of many people who’ve seen me and my family through some rough times. And vice versa. It’s good to see happy news on that end too.
You guys all have a point. I just got a tip that we all may be using Macs again too. I was advised not to buy any Macs until September (whatever that means).