This year C2 is hosting the new 2008 Creative Transitions Conference here in Milwaukee. This is a unique opportunity for all creatives, whether you are in print, web, video, animation, or multimedia. The three day conference runs August 13-15, 2008 at the Milwaukee Hilton City Center.
We are bringing the talent to you – no need to fly to the east coast or down to Chicago to learn from the best. Speakers for the 2008 conference include: Anne-Marie “Her Geekness” Concepción, co-host of the popular InDesignsecrets.com podcast and InDesign guru; Lesa Snider-King, author, istockphoto guru, and a nationally recognized Photoshop Expert; Adam Pratt, Adobe Senior Solutions Engineer and co-host of Adobe TV’s “The Lazy Designer”; Michael Kanfer, Adobe Business Development Manager and Academy Award Winner for Visual Effects (Titanic, 1998); Tom Petrillo, Adobe Senior Solutions Engineer; and many more!
Sessions can be attended at will – no confusing schedules or limiting track-only presentations. You choose who you want to see!
Day three will feature hands-on workshops hosted by many of our speakers and C2 certified instructors. Three hours of training direct from the experts!
Exhibitors from Adobe, C2, istockphoto, Shutterstock, Widen Enterprises, O’Reilly Media, Proven Direct, and more will be presenting their products and services throughout both days in our Exhibit Hall.
Another great incentive for our conference, being a veteran of the conference circuit, is food is provided (which also lends to the creative credo – if you feed them, they will come). Breakfast, lunch, cocktail/snack hour, and a great keynote address banquet is all included in the conference packages.
Your registration also includes a free Thursday night pass to Milwaukee Irish Fest, the largest Celtic celebration in the United States.
Click here to view the conference website, or contact us for special discount codes and rates!
Hope to see you all at the conference. Together we can make this a rousing success!
Kevin
Tracking is the process of changing the space between a selection of letters. In QuarkXPress people are used to tightening up the space by changing the amount to -1, -2, or -3 and most people are comfortable with these amounts. If you have been using Quark for awhile and then jump into InDesign, Illustrator or Photoshop and try to use tracking, you may run into some issues. Quark and Adobe measure tracking differently.
A commonly overlooked function of Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress is paste in place. If you copy something to the clipboard, and then go to another page and just paste, it will go in the center of the screen. But, if you choose paste in place from the edit menu it will be pasted in the same XY coordinates that you copied it from.
A useful feature of Adobe InDesign CS3 is the ability to save your find/change queries. After entering your find/change operation, click on the little floppy disk icon(if you can still remember what those are) and you can save your query. The next time you need to use this find/change you will be able to load it from the drop down menu.
Personally, I am really sick of Times New Roman. Every time I make a new text frame and start typing inside Adobe InDesign, the text will be Times New Roman. Luckily, I have changed by default font to something else. Here is how you do it.
I always thought that the disadvantage of using a Library inside Adobe InDesign was the fact that you had to place the items where you wanted manually. I thought this was the case until last week when a student in a class pointed out that if you select a library item and choose “place item(s)” from the panel menu it will be placed at it’s original X/Y position on the current spread. Previously, the only way to do this was with snippets, but now we have another.
Rounding corners is all the rage to day with the cool kids, but the problem is that if you try to use the corner effects/options menu in Adobe InDesign you will can only round all them. What if you want to be trendy and round just one, or two. Be crazy, what if you wanted to do three! Well, the answer my friend lies in the scripts panel.
One feature of QuarkXPress 7 that has always intrigued me was composition zones. This feature would let more than one person work on one file at a time. The problem was that it was convoluted to use and inherently broken since there was no way for you to bring all aspects of the file back into Quark once you let someone else work on it.
Have you ever accidentally clicked on a text frame in InDesign and turned your arrow into a loaded cursor? It is really annoying and easy to do. Here is any easy fix, if you ever get a loaded cursor and don’t want it anymore just hit the “esc” key. This will remove the loaded cursor and put it back to the regular arrow. This trick only works with InDesign CS3.
An often overlooked tool inside Adobe InDesign is the free transform tool. How many times have to had to rotate an item, and then you decide to scale it too? Well, in the past you probably went to the rotate tool, and then the scale tool. Now simply use the Free Transform tool (keyboard shortcut “E”) and save yourself a step. In fact I wish you could remove the scale and rotate tools from the toolbox since I really never use them.
You probably already know that when you find the file you are interested in, in Adobe Bridge, you can double click on that file and it opens in the program that made it. And that’s great. But what if you want to place a PSD file into InDesign or Flash (or After Effects or Illustrator)? The fast, convenient way is to do the following: select the item or items you want to place into another Adobe program, go to the File menu, go Down to “Place” and choose the program you want the files to goto. Voila!
A quick way to change the case of your headlines inside Adobe InDesign is to use the change case command. Select your headline and go to the type menu > change case > title case. This will automatically capitalize the first letter of each word in your headline and make the rest of the letters lowercase.
So not only is today the birthday of James Fritz, one of our Rockstar instructors, but it also marks the 25th anniversary of Adobe Systems, Inc. 25 years ago, John Warnock and Chuck Geschke left Xerox to pursue a new computer system that would incorporate graphics and text into printable pages called Interpress. Interpress and another program called JaM would evolve into the Adobe Postscript language we have all used in our graphics applications today. This was the launching point for the desktop revolution.
