July 7th, 2008

by Jeff Gamet

Press Release 6/11/08

Never before has the world of graphic arts been so dynamic, so ripe with change and new opportunities afforded by emerging creative technologies. And no longer are the creations made in popular desktop programs - like QuarkXPress, Adobe InDesign or Microsoft Word - bound to the traditional constraints of print. These days, businesses create content for any number of purposes.

Adobe Announces Acrobat Pro 9, Creative Suite 3.3

by Jeff Gamet, 12:05 AM EDT, June 2nd, 2008

Adobe announced Acrobat Pro 9, the next version of its PDF viewing and editing application, along with Creative Suite 3.3 on Monday. Adobe Acrobat Pro 9 will include native Flash support, enhanced collaboration tools like PDF Portfolios, improved print production tools, and support for Adobe PDF Print Engine 2.

PDF Portfolios lets Acrobat users bundle documents, images and videos together as packages with summaries, create PDF forms and collect and analyze form data without requiring IT department involvement. Portfolios are compatible with the new (in beta) Acrobat.com hosted services that support document collaboration.

What Does Preflighting The Design Mean?

As a graphic designer, has this ever happened to you?

The scenario: You’ve sent your marketing masterpiece that you have meticulously designed to your printer. The deadline is tight, but you made it. Then the phone rings. Its your printer calling to let you know they are having problems printing your piece. You are about ready to scream because the client is waiting to get this piece out to his customers.

I am saddened by todays news of David Watsons death.

David was a visionary and a gentleman. He always made it a point to visit me at all the GraphExpo and other tradeshows to share a word or two with me.

I have known David personally since 1996. He was a typesetter from the old days. We both shared an affinity with each other as I was a typesetter and we could relate to each other.

Not too long ago, shortly before drupa he gave me another one of those [out of the blue] phone calls. It was to invite Markzware to demonstrate our wares at the Hewlett-Packard booth. 

by Claudia McCue
April 2008

If like many designers you are in the process of making the big switch from QuarkXPress to InDesign, you know it is not a trivial undertaking. You have to retrain your brain to a new way of working and remind your fingers which keys to hit for those newfangled shortcuts. You are in a hurry to get up to speed, and you have just been asked to create a client’s next newsletter in InDesign. The template for the newsletter is currently in QuarkXPress. You’ve finally come to that fork in the road: Do you build a new newsletter template from scratch, or do you take the easy way out and just open the file with InDesign? If there’s a lot of work in the template, go for File > Open. While it’s surprising this works at all, you should know what converts and what does not.

Reviewed by Macintosh Users East.

I recently saw a video on the internet which featured a designer who had created an Adobe InDesign document that had somehow become corrupted. Eventually the file refused to open in InDesign.

Ordinarily an event like this would be disasterous to a layout artist, especially if the document were a huge commercial layout for a magazine or a book.

Since the file would not open he could not even revert to a saved copy. Instead of starting all over again the designer launched QuarkXPress (more)

We are helping our friends in the UK, CFour who are about to release an exciting new desktop publishing application entitled iStudio Publisher and are asking for your assistance.

Yes, we understand that there are several desktop publishing applications on the market today.
However, this one should prove to be unique.

Please take a moment to fill out our very quick survey and add comments on what you think would make a popular desktop publishing application.