As I convert more and more things to InDesign, this issue may become moot, but meanwhile, I’ll record that math and science WordPerfect characters will prevent conversion to pdf so they must be replaced.  I’ve used the Athenian font (since it’s Greek) with great success.

I just added Vector Magic to my links under Resources.  I can’t say enough about this site.  Maybe I don’t know how to use Illustrator’s LiveTrace correctly but I never get the results I get with Vector Magic.  Unfortunately for me (but good for them!), it’s no longer in the beta stage and there is now a charge to use their service.  Still, it’s reasonable and I will continue to use them.  They offer a desktop version of the program but it’s a little pricey.  I just converted this drawing for Kristin’s Reach the Beach team.  It was a high-res scanned tif file to begin with.  I cleaned it up a bit in Photoshop, then uploaded it to Vector Magic.  It did its thing and I downloaded the resulting eps file.  I did have to do a little work in Illustrator, mostly smoothing lines and pulling points but I think it turned out great!

I love our Shrinking Global Village! Earlier this week, I was asked to create a mock-up of a website for the “Nexus for Oil and Chemical Spill Research.”  The only way that it made sense to lay out the (sparse and sketchy) content was to use drop-down menus.  Since I neither like nor use drop-downs, I haven’t created them in years.  I found a short tutorial on YouTube by ZeforceTutorials in Australia that shows quickly and succintly how to create drop-downs with Spry in CS3.  The “instructor” sounds like he’s about 14. I imagine him as a well-meaning, earnest LOTR fanboy.  Anyway, it was exactly what I needed.  Thanks Zeforce!

To make the skinny skinny lines in Dreamweaver (which are table cells), put a tiny spacer gif in, fiddle with the alignment and make sure that it’s all one merged cell!

So, this is the new design for the Stormwater Center’s one-pager.  It’s an InDesign file.  Funny thing is that the background blue looked just like this on my monitor but printed out a deep, vibrant teal.  Weird! But center section is actually a transparent white layer and it was fine. So, I made a whole-sheet white layer and made it about 5% transparency. Seemed to do the trick. Makes it a little more challenging to move things around, i.e., the water rings, but at least it prints correctly. Still, I wonder why. WHY?!

While I object to the term “webinar,” this was a fun project, mostly because Jeff challenged me to do better than FHWA’s big black oval design.  Not hard! So, a few things…

I used a layer mask on the road image.  After sizing and cropping it, I made a copy and fiddled with duotones until I got something I liked.  Then I changed the mode back to RGB and pasted a colored road pic on top of the duotone road.  I went to Layer, Add Layer Mask and chose Hide All.  Then I simply used the brush tool to remove the mask to show the double line in the original yellow.

After making it into a pdf, I used the Link tool (Tools, Advanced Editing, Link Tool) to hyperlink the registration url. Since the flyer is being distributed electronically and the url is a bear, this will make things much easier for potential attendees.

I laid this out in InDesign (yay!) because it’s easier to make pdfs there than in my ancient Photoshop version.  When I created the pdf, I the translucent bars had white edges and were raised a pixel or 2 over the image.  So in the pdf setup, I went to Advanced and set the Transparency Flattener to High Resolution. 

I relinked all of the WTTAC webpages on Tuesday so it’s all live and the old website is gone for good.  Vaso wanted it posted before the end of March so she could report it finished in the first quarter but with my accident and being sick on Monday, I didn’t get to it until the 1st.  Still, the work was done and it was just a matter of uploading.   It’s gotten some positive feedback, including a shout-out from Ashlee in Holland.  Hollah!

www.unh.edu/erg/wttac

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.

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. 

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.