Adobe Illustrator Appearance Panel

It’s quite odd that of all the forty one panels that live inside Illustrator that one of the most useful is often ignored. The Adobe Illustrator Appearance Panel is impressive to say the list and quite possibly in the top three of all forty one of them.

We cover it on the Illustrator Training Courses and show a number of different ways it can be used to create outstanding artwork.

What can you do with the Appearance Panel?

Like all panels the Appearance panel can be found under the Window menu. It lets you view and change different appearances to a group, object or a layer. Similiar to layers you can also shuffle the order of the objects attributes. Multiple effects such as fills, strokes and FX effects can be applied and are listed in the order they were applied.

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Pinterest – Greta Powell Training

We recently revived the Greta Powell Training Pinterest page.

The thought process behind that being that the examples we show sometimes on the site would actually be much better represented visually on Pinterest than here. So there we have it – a revival in progress.

Hopefully once everything is completely back to normal we will be back out there delivering loads of Onsite InDesign Training Courses and posting madly to Pinterest to show what we’ve been up to.

Todays Pinterest

Some time ago, for the life of me cannot remember exactly when but definitely pre Covid we ran an Introduction to InDesign Training Course. It was onsite in Derbyshire and was probably the last one we ran before lockdown. The majority of our training courses are customised and this was for a company who wanted to design their three monthly brochure as a template on the InDesign Course.

The idea being that once the delegate (it was a one to one session) had learnt the software and designed the brochure on the course then she would be able to update it with images and text once quickly on a three monthly basis.

The Design Project

Having gathered all the assets prior to the course and making use of stock images from the Internet for the course itself we set up the brochure from scratch. Our client opted for an A4 landscape design with a minimal look which actually worked so well with their fonts which were all Sans Serif. As with the fonts the colours were also taken from the companies own design guidelines and everything was then worked into the layout over the course.

The image you see to the left (or on Pinterest for that matter) is the end result. Consisting of eight pages in total (front and back cover left out from this screen shot) this template will be so easy to work with in the future. All the client will need to do is drop new graphics into the graphics box and the same with text. 

Text Styles

When the text is dropped in or rather placed in the text frames it will immediately adapt the type style in that particular frame. We set up paragraph and character styles and then mapped them to the text boxes so really apart from dropping in the text very little needs to be done in the future.

Our InDesign Courses

Any of our training courses can be tailored for you and being a small company we have the flexibility to adapt totally to your brief. Why not give us a call or drop us an email to find out how we can help with your training and projects.

Online InDesign Training

All our courses are currently available online as well as onsite – you can find out more about them:

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Photoshop Adjustment Layers

So what are Photoshop Adjustment Layers and why are they different to any other layer? Is it better to use Adjustment Layers or apply an adjustment directly from the Image menu. If so, why so?

Adjustment layers are a part of the Adobe Photoshop none destructive workflow and so the answer is yes in most instances. They give you far more flexibility and control over image editing than working directly on a normal layer. You can apply a number of edits to them such as colour and tone changes without affecting pixel values. An adjustment layer sits ‘on top’ of the image layer as shown in the example below and the panel is turned on and off from the Window menu. Once an adjustment layer has been selected it will appear directly above the working layer.

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Virtual Photoshop Course – Eventbrite

This Virtual Photoshop Course – Eventbrite follows a similar theme to our onsite Photoshop course. The only real difference is that is being hosted as a public session via Eventbrite. There are a number of different dates available but the last one for 2020 will be on the 16th December. 

What will you learn?

Following the Introduction to Photoshop Course outline this training will introduce to the basics of Photoshop and show you how to create content for both print and web. You will learn to select, edit and print high quality images plus produce and publish GIF’s & short video for digital output and social media.

How much is the Virtual Photoshop Course?

£95.00 all inclusive per person – this price is only for those booking via Eventbrite

How long is the Photoshop Course?

One day starting at 10.00 AM and finishing at 4.30 PM

Book online here at Eventbrite

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Online Photoshop Training Eventbrite

There are still tickets available for the Online Photoshop Training Eventbrite session on the 16th of December 2020, other dates are available. This is being run as a public online Photoshop course at the special price of £95.00 per person and can be booked online.

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Photoshop Retro Training

So during these last few weeks the focus has been on getting the courses delivered online and finally there seems to be headway. People seem to be taking advantage of the small bite sized chunks – they can just ring in or email with a problem and depending on the situation either hook up immediately or make a time later in the day.

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New and Not so New Tools in Photoshop

With new tools coming to Photoshop we thought it would be a good idea to give a heads up as to what they might. We also thought it might be an idea to include some of the not so new as well. Not the newest but certainly one of the most popular features on the Photoshop Courses is the Content Aware Fill tool which has been greatly updated in the latest versions. 

Then there is the New Object Selection Tool coming to Photoshop in the very near future. But this is going to be quite a fluid post so as and when new tools appear we’ll add them to this post but in the meantime take a quick look at these Youtube videos to get an idea of what goes on in the software.

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InDesign Interactive Documents

These Adobe InDesign Training Courses are designed to give you the skills needed to do exactly what you need to do effectively and quickly. Because these are delivered in-house as onsite Adobe Courses the choice is huge and totally down to you and what you need to do.  Most people are aware that you can create and design spreads and layouts in InDesign but what else can you do with the software.

Once the spread has been created for print or elsewhere you can then add elements from the InDesign Interactive Panel to create eBooks, presentations, slideshows and other online media. You can also use InDesign’s Interactive Panel to design and publish online forms to collect data and other information from perspective clients.

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Photoshop Poster Design Course

Every week or so we do a small write up about one of the tailored Adobe Courses we run. Early this week saw Greta return to Newark to deliver a Photoshop Poster Design course. This was a two day Photoshop Course with a specific aim in mind – creating, designing and publishing posters. The client was Rufford Park Golf & Country Club who had been outsourcing their poster design work for some time. They felt with some training they would be able to bring the posters in-house and save the club some money.

Everyone was fairly new to Photoshop so the first day was spent mostly on covering the essential tools and features they need to know to use Photoshop. Obviously layers played a big part in the day as did the transform tool. The guys were very keen to replicate the swoosh shape at the top of their poster design so we worked a lot with Photoshop’s Transform Tool.

Photoshop Swoosh Tutorial – how we did it

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InDesign Training Course in Bristol

So this week saw a trip down to the South West to deliver an InDesign Training Course in Bristol. Most people dislike the M5 but personally I like it, it always reminds me of driving down to the South West for holidays with my son. (Enough of the personal stuff). This particular course was bespoke InDesign Training for an engineering company, a regular client of Greta Powell Training who were looking for specific InDesign skills for their bid writers.

InDesign Training Brief

Briggs & Forrester Group are a well known engineering company whose bid writers wanted to stream line and build on their current InDesign workflow. They were working from existing templates and had a good grasp of the software but felt there was more they could do using InDesign’s automated features. 

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