NOAA One-Pager for CRRC

Today I formatted a one-pager for CRRC that Kim worked on with Bill Lehr.  I did it in InDesign, natch, because I’m trying to transition completely away from WordPerfect.  It seems to work out well since the pdfs are perfect to send out and they print well.  Although, this one had to print at Standard quality since High quality was very dark.  I haven’t figured out yet why sometime Standard is better and other times it leaves all the graphics looking speckeled and fuzzy. 

Anyway, I kept the design pretty simple but changed up the look a bit from the regular one-pager so it won’t be so confusing.  I think it’s a little top-heavy but Kim is happy with it. For now, it’s in a directory I made under CRRC Promotions called “center one-pager lehr” for lack of any better name.

Nepal

Poor Maya contacted Maddy from Kathmandu (no joke!) asking her to clean up his map of Nepal which shows his sampling areas.  She thought it was beyond her so she asked me to work on it.  Ugh!  A fuzzy, poorly reporduced line map embedded in a word document!  I started by enlarging it in Word then taking a screenshot and pasting it into Photoshop.  In retrospect, I should probably have printed it out and scanned it but I didn’t think of it at the time.  I played around with the contrast to darken the lines as much as possible.  I actually drew in a river and its tributaries, completely guessing!  Then I cleaned up all the schmutz in the background, made new, larger symbols for the lakes, mountains, cities  and sampling sites and we sent it off to Maya.

Unfortunately, I was working with an older map that wasn’t up to date.  After Maddy sent it to Maya, he wrote back to say it was missing some of the data.  So, today I finally found time to revisit it.  In the end I had to add text layers for all of the sampling site labels so, while I was at it, I also rewrote the country and city names that I could make out.  I wish I could have found another map for him.  I even looked on line and would have been willing to shell out a little $$.  However, the only usable thing I found was $500.  That exceeds my generosity!  So, hopefully, this will be enough for Maya to include in his journal submission. I think it’s amazing that I worked on an image for someone in Nepal!  Ah…our shrinking global village. 

Uploading Images to WordPress

Interesting.  WordPress will display an image in CMYK as a thumbnail but not full size.  Linking a CMYK image from Flickr works too.  But, I had to make my images RBG to make them load properly in WordPress.  Interesting.

Simmons Flyer

Matthew Simmons (the world’s leading expert on peak oil) will be speaking on the peak oil dilemma at UNH on April 4. NEK asked me to make a flyer. I wanted to keep it very simple since it’s only page-sized and I wanted it to be eye-catching.

 

I found a great image of an oil derrick on a snowfield at istockphoto (last time I use my personal account to buy images for CRRC). NEK liked it but said it should have a drilling platform. So I found a good but uncredited image of a platform on-line. NEK like it but wanted there to be ice. I gave up at that point but Kathy found an image for me. A teeny tiny web image (read: 72 dpi). I stretched it as much as I could and spent a lot of time cleaning it up. Not great but passable for what it is.

In each case, I placed the image at the bottom of the canvas. On the first 2, I was able to make a gradient on a seperate layer using colors sucked up from the image. Using some judicious blurring and erasing and a seperate layer of paint at low opacity, I blended the images and the gradient layers pretty well. Don’t judge by these images…I sharpened them after I shrunk them.  They printed very nicely.

On the final flyer, the sky was a mess so I ended up erasing all of it and made a circle gradient which I stretched and placed behind the platform layer. I had to get in pretty close to the platform to clean it up but I think it’s not too bad. Also, there is an additional gradient layer (linear) in the very back to give color and depth to the sky. The circle gradient is light grey to transparent, the linear gradient is blue to transparent and the background is blue.

CRRC Annual Report

The annual report was delivered on Monday…as promised!  Paul Roberts at UNH Printing farmed it out to Ram Printing because we gave them so little time.  I have to say, they did a fantastic job.  Maybe because they’re so big or because they print all 4 colors at once (Paul told me the UNH press only prints 2 colors).  The blue is a dead match for my Pantone swatch (539) and is consistent all the way through.  I’m happy to go back to UNH printing our stuff but this turned out so much better than I expected. We did go with the Chorus Art paper with varnishing.  Hopefully it will not scuff.

WERC Logos

I created a folder in my Colleen directory [currently M:] called WERC and put the latest logo designs there.

Printing to the Plotter

Before I forget…I had to print posters for the CRRC Arctic Summit last Friday.  As always, printing to the plotter was fraught with difficulties.  First, since the plotter is no longer wireless, a laptop is required.  I got a laptop from CRRC (#7).  I downloaded the drivers from the ERG Printer webpage but the rest of the directions are WRONG.  They are for loading the plotter as a wireless printer which can no longer be done. I connected the laptop to the plotter with the USB cable and the laptop detected “new hardware” and installed it (with the previously downloaded drivers).  Easy enough but it would have saved so much confusion and frustration if the directions on the ERG web page were RIGHT.

Since I was printing a poster of the workshop goal which I’d already created as a handout in InDesign. I just created a new size (18 x 24) under Custom Size and checked “fit to printable area.”  Worked beautifully.

CRRC Notecards

I’ve had such problems printing these notecards.  To eliminate the problem of light stripes, I changed to the design that’s mostly white with a small logo on the front.  They won’t print on my printer at all anymore so I send them to Maddy’s printer (Xerox 8400).  The design colors were modified accordingly.  Today I printed 35 by printing the outside design (photoshop file) first, then manually flipping them and feeding them back through the by-pass feed to print the inside.  It wasn’t perfect (there were several jams ) but, all and all, it was doable.  However, the printer is definitely showing signs of wear.

PowerPoint and Transparent Gifs

For some reason, I’ve always thought that transparent gifs don’t work in PowerPoint.  At least the ones that I make.  However, I was sending different versions of the WERC logo to Zach today and wanted to make it transparent for their presentations and posters.  I found instructions on making parts of gifs transparent in PowerPoint and started to follow them.  I imported the gif I’d created in Photoshop and, lo, it was transparent.  Maybe it’s just the ones that I suck up a color to be transparent (that shows grey in Powerpoint).  More investigation will have to be done.

Collating a PDF

I had to print 55 sets of Arctic Incidents for CRRC last week.  For some reason, sending the 5-page pdf to my printer (Xerox 8200) 55 times did not result in collated sets.  “Collate” was checked by default so I unchecked it and tried again.  No dice.  Still not collating.  I finally figured out that I when I send the document (in this case an InDesign file) to the Adobe writer, I have to say 55 copies and collate.  It creates a huge document that then prints perfectly.  Only drawback really (besides remembering to do it) is that it takes a little longer to create the pdf.