10 Essential Illustrator Productivity Tips

Level-up your illustrator skills by learning how to enhance objects and type in ways that add complexity, flexibility and fun. In this session, we’ll share some of our favorite tricks for letting Illustrator do the heavy-lifting while getting beautiful results. We’ll explore:
  • Appearance Panel and Graphic Styles skills
  • Symbols and Brushes
  • Creative problem-solving tips

Improving Cruddy Vector and Image Graphics

Your client or boss just sent you a bunch of images for your marketing campaign… and they’re terrible! Learn how to use the secret powers of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Acrobat to improve your graphics.

Topics include:

  • How to improve grainy low light mobile phone images
  • What to do with low resolution and pixelated images
  • Tips for improving poor quality stock photos
  • How to fix stock vector graphics with blend modes that won’t render in InDesign
  • How to match color tones across all assets
  • Choosing the right ICC profiles for image assets

Next Steps in InDesign Accessibility 2021

This is part 2 of our full-day accessibility tutorial. (See this link for Part 1.) In this session, we’ll explore:

  • Managing tables, images, and forms
  • Exporting PDF documents (including best practices for settings and presets)

InDesign Styles and Masters Deep Dive, Part 2

In Part 1 of this two-part tutorial, we learned about master pages and creating solid and flexible documents. Now, in Part 2, you’ll learn all about styles and masters.

Everyone knows that using styles in InDesign is key for efficient formatting of text and objects in a document. Not only do they save time and allow us to format content quickly and efficiently, but they also facilitate easily making changes in a document as well. Let’s not forget that they’re also a requirement if you want to take advantage of some powerful features in InDesign that help you to automate tasks. With styles however, there’s a lot more beneath the surface that can help you take your text formatting to the next level by automating specific formatting within a paragraph.

Part 2 includes:

  • Setting up your paragraph, character, and object styles
  • Leveraging Nested Styles to apply text formatting
  • Isolating and formatting text using GREP Styles
  • Understand ingthe order of operation when using automated and manually applied styles
  • Thinking creatively with styles

Gradients and Blends in Illustrator

If you have ever tried to make a great blend (or gradient, or vignette, or whatever you want to call it) in Illustrator, you know you need this session! We’ll go beyond the basics here to explore the many different ways to blend objects and add gradients, and you’ll learn how to use blends to create incredible (and unexpected) shapes and designs.

Making Killer Infographics

If you’ve ever tried to build an infographic, you know that telling a story through visual design is not as straightforward or intuitive as it might seem! This focused session will explore:

  • How to break down your project atomically, step by step
  • Let’s get clear: what is an infographic (and what isn’t!)
  • What works and what definitely doesn’t when it comes to at-a-glance design
  • Examples of amazing and inspirational infographics we can all learn from

10 Essential Photoshop Productivity Tips

Join us in this information-packed session where we’ll share our best Photoshop tips and power shortcuts for designers!

In this session, you will learn timesaving techniques, little-know features, and better ways to work with the tools that you already use. This session will leave you saying, “I wish I knew that years ago!”

In this session, you’ll learn:

  • Time-saving techniques
  • Little-know (hidden) Photoshop features
  • How to make blending modes work for you

Accessibility Fundamentals for InDesign 2021

“Access to information is a fundamental human right”
—George Kerscher, DAISY Consortium

Ensuring that the PDF files you produce are accessible to all is not only a good idea, it’s the right thing to do! In this session, learn about what accessibility and “Section 508” means and how you can ensure that the PDF documents that you create from Adobe InDesign are accessible to everyone!

This tutorial is split into five individual sessions. In this session, we will journey through setting up an InDesign file for accessibility and giving your document the best chance for “out of the box” accessibility.

Topics include:

  • How to build an InDesign document the right way
  • Controlling content order
  • Using features that already exist in InDesign

InDesign Styles and Masters Deep Dive, Part 1

Anyone can build a house, but it takes skill to build a strong one that won’t fall down! In the same way, it takes skill to construct an InDesign document that is solid enough to withstand the test of time.

Even better, you want a file flexible enough to change when you need it to… like an hour before deadline (when your client or boss tells you to make a change).

In this two-part tutorial, we’ll learn the fundamentals every InDesign user needs to understand to make strong and resilient docs.

Part 1 includes:

  • Creating hierarchical master pages
  • Understanding why and when to use primary text frames and Smart Text Flow

Retouching Images

Overwhelmed by Photoshop? Have too many images that need work, and too little time? Learn some quick techniques for retouching, image balancing, and color matching. You’ll be amazed how quickly you can get your files cleaned up and print ready.

Learn how the pros do it in this session with a veteran retoucher and get a fully annotated PDF to keep you on track after the class.

What we’ll cover:

  • Fast clean up methods
  • The key to extending backgrounds quickly
  • Take out objects in a snap
  • Using Frequency Separation (don’t be scared, we’ll make it easy)
  • Color Matching made easy
  • Color Balancing, fast
  • Color Grading in a few short moves