Creative Mentor

Archive for September, 2009

If you’re interested in starting your own blog check out my new Wordpress Unleashed training title…

I’m excited to announce the launch of my new title at infiniteskills.com. If you’re looking for a thorough training resource on Wordpress, this is it.

The WordPress Unleashed video course from Infinite Skills offers an innovative and easy guide for beginning bloggers.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 23, 2009 - A new training series designed to help WordPress newcomers launch and maintain their own blogs is available from Infinite Skills, a quality provider of e-learning and interactive media. With over four hours of hands-on guidance, the course covers a wide spectrum of common questions and useful techniques, with longtime instructor Neil Oliver providing helpful narration every step of the way. The innovative teaching format makes use of video screenshots of the WordPress dashboard and configuration screens so that learners are guided through the entire creative process.

Now in version 2.8.4, WordPress has been a popular blogging platform and content management system in use for over six years. With each new update to the software, stability improvements and user-friendly enhancements have made their way into the code, and many people are finding that there has never been a better time to start their own blog. While the default WordPress configuration is developed so that users can create basic posts with minimal effort, more complex and interactive sites often require a finer understanding of the way the system works.

The Infinite Skills WordPress training was created to break down the complicated and tedious work of setting up a customized blog into a series of easy steps. After addressing hosting options, the course dives right into the WordPress dashboard to familiarize beginners with the full suite of controls at their disposal and to point out often overlooked or misunderstood settings. Significant time is devoted to posting new content and managing previously published material, and hands-on guidance is provided in uploading multimedia content, managing categories and comments, adding multiple users to a single blog, using widgets and plugins and more.

The Infinite Skills video format is designed to take the best of classroom instruction–thoroughness, clarity and expert quality instruction–and combine it with the affordability and ease of use that digital media can offer. Users are also free to control the speed of the course and the order in which they view lessons in the series. These simple but effective innovations allow a course that is both comprehensive but suited for individualized needs.

The tutorial can be purchased as a hardcopy disc version compatible with both Mac and Windows computers or viewed in its entirety by special subscribers online. More information about the WordPress Unleashed Tutorial Video and Training DVD is available on the product’s web site, including free online samples of several lessons and a point by point list of subjects covered: http://www.infiniteskills.com/training/wordpress-unleashed.html

About Infinite Skills Inc
Harnessing a full library of titles developed by in-house experts and sourced from the best teachers in the world, Infinite Skills strives to become the definitive e-learning destination on the web through superior customer service and educational innovation.

Posted by Neil Oliver in News | No Comments

Learn from the best and fight cancer at the same time. Please join us in fighting the fight…

This is your last chance to see CS4 live and in the flesh in 2009. Tips, Tricks and Techniques to help you get more from your software and help the fight against cancer all at the same time. Learn from Industry Experts how to become more proficient and get more from you suite. All of the time, marketing and facilities have been donated for this event.

When: Sept 30th, from 9.00am to 4.00pm

Where: Zenith Centre, Railway St, Chatswood NSW 2067

Agenda
Registration - 8.45am
9.00am – 10.00am - The Fast & The Furious with After Effects, Illustrator and Photoshop -
10.00am – 1.00pm - The Workflow Shoot out - InDesign, Photoshop, Flash & Illustrator 12 workflow techniques to get the best from your CS4
Part 1 10.00am – 11.00am Coffee break Part 2 11.20am - 1.00pm
Lunch break 1.00 - 1.30pm
1.30 - 2.15pm Wired for Sound - Become an audio aficionado with Soundbooth
2.15 - 4.00pm Flash Forward - Leverage the social power of Flash to stretch your brand

Tickets are $100 and are fully tax deductible as donation to the Cancer Council.

For more info click here

Posted by Neil Oliver in News | No Comments

Did you know, you can decide what you see in the control panel?

Most people overlook this, but there is a little symbol on the far right side of the control panel that looks the same as you would see in any panel InDesign. Commonly known as the drop down/flyout/pull down (breath) menu. It’s the one with the down facing triangle with three horizontal lines next to it. If you select it, a menu will appear with loads of different options. Take a good look: you may find something useful there. To customize the control panel choose “Customize…”

From here you can control what appears under each of the five categories (Object, Character, Paragraph, Tables, Other). It can save you a lot of time if the control panel is set up to give you what you need quickly. Try it out!

For more information on this topic via Adobe help click here.

[Click play to watch video tutorial, will commence once downloaded in full]

Posted by Neil Oliver in Interface | No Comments

If your considering taking an Adobe Certified Expert Exam then you MUST check this out…

I recently came across a great resource for helping anyone prepare for an ACE exam. Checkout http://www.examaids.com/ these guys provide a simulated learning and testing application for each of the leading creative suite apps. This is as close as it get to taking the actual exam and I highly recommend it for anyone considering taking an exam.

Here are the links to the InDesign examaids: MAC: http://www.examaids.com/products/InDesign-CS4-ACE-Exam-Aid-for-Mac-OS.html and PC: http://www.examaids.com/products/InDesign-CS4-ACE-Exam-Aid-for-Windows.html

Posted by Neil Oliver in ACE Exams, News | No Comments

Eliminate the annoyance of text turning into grey bars when zooming out…

Ask me what my number one annoyance is in InDesign and I’ll probably give you a different answer every time. But this one is up there. Have you noticed when you zoom out a few times that all the text within your document turns into grey bars? How are you supposed to get a good feel for your design when this happens?

I find this problem really distracting, and if you do too you can turn it off via your preferences. Choose, InDesign > Preferences (Mac) or Edit > Preferences (PC) and select the Display Performance tab, under Adjust View Settings you will see by default Typical. Below are all the settings relevant to that Typical display setting. If you change Greek Type Below from 7pt to 1pt you won’t have to worry about the problem of text turning to grey bars again when zooming out.

I would also recommend changing the Greek Type Below option for the Fast and High Quality settings. This can be done by changing the Adjust View Settings drop down menu to Fast or High Quality and entering 1pt in the Greek Type Below field.

For more information on this topic via Adobe help click here.

[Click play to watch video tutorial, will commence once downloaded in full]

Posted by Neil Oliver in Preferences, Text | No Comments

Are you in the habit of pulling images from here, there and everywhere?

Do you place images from everywhere and anywhere when working in InDesign, ie a server, hard drive, usb, desktop etc? You aren’t the only one. I’m as guilty as the next guy. For some reason it just seems easier to work like this. Personally, I can be far more creative when not having to worry about file management.

Really though, we should be looking after our images and making sure they’re located in the same folder as our InDesign file. It makes good sense and can be easier to manage our links in the end working this way. If you do place images from all over the place, there’s no need to hunt around for your files, copy them to a new location and then relink them, InDesign can do all that hard work for you.

To do this, select all your links via the link panel, go to the flyout menu within the links panel (top right) and select Utilities > Copy Link(s) To… Now all you need to do is choose the location you want to save them in and press OK. That’s it, all files will now be copied to a new location and relinked automatically within your InDesign file. Life saver!

For more information on this topic via Adobe help click here.

[Click play to watch video tutorial, will commence once downloaded in full]

Posted by Neil Oliver in Links | 1 Comment