Bespoke Adobe Training Course

15 August 2014

Bespoke Adobe Training Courses...

Continuing on the theme of our design training courses a recent course shows how flexible our bespoke training is.  This week one of these courses was designed for a client who, after inheriting a design structure from her predecessor needed to learn how all the pieces of the software worked together.  She needed to get up to speed on this really quickly to complete the overall objective of designing the monthly newsletter for both online / print delivery / HTML email.  The Adobe Training was delivered across four days dedicating one day per piece of software including Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Dreamweaver.  It started with Illustrator and Photoshop then after preparing and working with the images in these went on to InDesign and Dreamweaver.  Briefly these are some of the features and techniques covered in this totally bespoke course.

Illustrator Training...

As Illustrator was needed for both print and the web and the delegate had never worked with the software before we focussed on specific tools such as selections, type, transformations and rotation.  We worked in depth with the type tool as she needed to produce different type designs such as headlines and type for marketing flyers etc.  Illustrator's type tool has a number of options both vertical and horizontal and include point type, type on a path and area type.  She found that turning point text into outlines worked for her letting her design two colour headlines for the print newsletter.  As she said not at all suitable for the construction industry but this graphic shows the power of working in Illustrator to produce individual and unique designs and shows what a new user to Illustrator can achieve in under one day.

  

Illustrator Training Courses

Outline Text - Edwardian Script ITC - this was created during the training using 'type outlines', 'the knife tool', 'rotation' and colour sampling

 

Because some of the Illustrator artwork was intended to be used in the HTML newsletter the 'save for the web', 'save for the web options', 'file formats', 'colour table' and 'eye dropper', 'the slice tool' and working with sliced images.

Photoshop Training...

Never having used Photoshop before our delegate learnt how to work with the software by using the various tools and panels.  The company was in construction so she needed to know how to improve images by retouching colour, removing unwanted items from photographs such as buildings and was keen to learn how to correctly select parts of an image to retain colour while turning the background to black and white.  As some of these were intended for the front cover of marketing materials we worked with masking to isolate areas then used 'black and white' from the 'adjustments menu' to have control over the colour channels in the images.  The course showed her how to add clipping paths to images to take across into InDesign to apply different wraps to and the end of the day focused on making sure the colour was accurate the images would be perfectly and professionally print ready. 

InDesign Training..

Once the image creation software had been learnt then she moved into creating layouts using InDesign for her marketing brochures and newsletters.  Again it was specifics needed to complete her work so she learn how to put together a Master Page to create a uniform and consistent look across multiple pages.  The next step was to learn to create and work with character / paragraph styles.  We included the company style guide on the InDesign Course and worked to exact requirements which meant one less job when she returned to the office.  Obviously graphic placement and text wrap were extremely important so the content focussed heavily on bringing in external images that she'd prepared in Photoshop and then bought into InDesign to give the layout extra flair and panache.

 

InDesign Training Course Layout Example

Features and techniques used in InDesign included working type using Baseline Grid, accurate positioning of both images and text frames, gradients and colours, master pages for consistent page layout.

Curve &Learn training courses are designed to get you up to speed with the software quickly and easily without fuss at times and dates to suit you.  We can supply full kit including laptops and projectors for classroom based onsite training or if preferred organise training at our venue in Leicestershire.