A Beginner's Guide to Desktop Publishing

5 Things Desktop Publishers Should Know

1. Stick with one or two fonts per project. I love fonts, and it's easy to get carried away when you have thousands to choose from. Fight the urge! The more fonts you crowd into a project, the worse things look.
2. Fall in love with white space. White space is the area on a page that contains no text or graphics. Some beginning desktop publishers mistakenly think every inch of a page should be covered with text or graphics. No, no. White space is your friend. White space creates a clean page, and provides rest for your reader's eyes.
3. Avoid information overload. Too much information will ruin any project. You dont have to tell your readers every little thing about the business or product. Eliminate any information that doesn't serve a specific purpose.
4. Keep design elements to a minimum. You can go design crazy with Photoshop and Illustrator, but just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. It's not necessary to include drop shadows, bold text, underlines, colored text, and colored text boxes all in one project. Be tasteful. Choose one or two defining design elements per project, and stick with them.
5. Define a style. All pages of a project, either web or print, should fit together. Each project should have a personality that flows from one page to the next. Decide on a font for headlines, text, and subheads. Decide which colors will be used within the project. Decide on text alignment. You get the idea. Basically, you want each project to look like a cohesive unit.

Business Card Design Tips

• Business cards have four corners, but it's fine to leave them empty. Your card will look way too busy if all the corners are crammed with text. In fact, it's a great idea to have empty space. You don't have to fill the entire card!
• Try to avoid centered layouts. A lot of desktop publishers love centered layouts. I don't know why, especially when there are so many other options. Be creative with your business card layouts. It's ok to try right alignment or left alignment.
• Experiment with format. Your business card can be horizontal or vertical. Pick the format which works best with your information. If you have the budget, you can even get oddly-shaped business cards.
• Stick to one or two fonts. This is very important. A business card with more than two different fonts always looks bad. Also, the important information on the card should be in a larger font. The business name and name of the person is usually larger than the address, phone number, or email.

My Favorite Desktop Publishing Programs

1. Adobe Illustrator. This started it all for me. The learning curve is steep, but it's worth every minute. This is great for working with graphics for print projects. If I could work with this program all day, I would.
2. Adobe InDesign. This program is great because it works well with Adobe Illustrator. If you've used Quark, then you'll also enjoy InDesign. It's a page layout program.
3. Adobe Photoshop. This is the best image editing software I've used. You can also design web graphics with it, but I've never used it for that. Desktop publishers work with photos all the time, so learning this program is a good idea.
4. I've tried the following programs as well. I don't use them anymore, but you might want to check them out: Paint Shop Pro, Corel Draw, Quark, Microsoft Publisher, and PageMaker.There are plenty of desktop publishing programs available (for various prices), so shop around until you find what works for you.

Let's Talk About Type

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• There are basically four types of font: serif, sans serif, decorative, and script. It's true, there are fonts that don't neatly fit into any one category. But for the most part, fonts can be catagorized. Study the fonts below and take note of the differences.
  
  

Steps to Access Picture Fonts in MSWord

1. Choose "Insert" from the MSWord menu.
2. Go to "Symbol".
3. Find the font selection dropdown menu and pick your font.
4. Click "Insert Symbol" to paste the symbol into a MSWord document. Once it's there, you can copy and paste it into an image editing program like Adobe Illustrator for editing.

Common Graphic Mistakes Made by Desktop Publishers

1. Too many graphic elements on one page. A business design project isn't the same as your family photo album. Don't overcrowd your pages with clipart, illustrations, or photos.
2. Graphics that block text or other important information. I once received a promotional piece that violated this rule. It was during the 2006 mid-term elections. The candidate's name was partially hidden behind a piece of clipart, and more text was covered by even more clipart. I have no idea what the candidate was trying to tell me. Please, proofread your work carefully and make sure everything is where it belongs.
3. Assigning equal weight to all images. Generally, important images should be larger than insignificant ones. For example, let's say you have a newsletter with two articles on the front page. Article one is about the company's new vice-president, and article two is about the winter coat drive. The photo of the vice-president should appear much larger than the clipart image of a pile of coats.