Preface: Why This Book Is Different


Congratulations! Welcome to a new type of computer training book. At least we hope it is new.

Most of the computer books we've read (and written) are application-specific books. Some books show loads of pictures of the tools and dialog boxes. Others inspire you with amazing artwork that professionals have created. Still others take you step by step through projects.

For all their differences, all those books have one important thing in common: they all deal with just that single application. Yes, every once in a while, a chapter might touch on a feature in another program, but for the most part Photoshop books stay on the topic of Photoshop. InDesign books stay on the topic of InDesign. And never the twain shall meet.

Our book is different. Instead of a single application, we're covering Adobe Creative Suite 2 as a whole. In order to understand what this book does, you should know how the book came into being.

A New Way of Teaching

Until 2003, Sandee was teaching a two-day seminar for the Macworld Conference & Expo called "The Secrets of Desktop Publishing." In that class, Sandee took the three main types of desktop publishing applications layout, illustration, and photo retouching and covered all of them in a single seminar. Instead of concentrating only on mastering QuarkXPress or InDesign, she taught how both of those programs could be integrated with Adobe Illustrator. (In all fairness. she had a definite preference for InDesign.) She covered how artwork from Macromedia FreeHand could be used together with Adobe Photoshop. It was a successful class, but there was something missing.

What was missing was better integration between the applications. Most of the techniques Sandee taught were workarounds to get the applications to work better together. However, when Adobe released Creative Suite, suddenly there was a real level of integration between the applications.

Steve and Sandee were already friends through teaching classes together and being active participants in the Adobe User to User Forums. Shortly after Adobe Creative Suite was first introduced, Steve came to Sandee with a proposal. Steve's idea was that we could teach a seminar called "Mastering the Adobe Creative Suite." We'd cover the types of projects that you can create with the software for example, a section on raster images, another on vectors, another on web graphics, and so on. Most importantly, we would focus on how the Suite applications worked together.

It seemed like an idea whose time was right. We first taught the class at MacWorld in Boston July 2004. The seminar was an instant success. We knew we had struck a chord with the design community. We continued to teach the seminar for San Francisco and Boston in 2005, and again for San Francisco 2006. Each time the number of attendees increased.

Complementary Backgrounds

The more we worked and taught together, the more we realized how much our backgrounds complement each other. Sandee comes from a background in advertising and has always focused primarily on teaching designers and art directors how to use the software creatively as well as efficiently. Known as Vectorbabe, she has taught hundreds of classes in Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, and Acrobat. She has also written many articles and contributed techniques to books that show how to achieve special effects in those programs.

Steve comes from a background working at prepress and printing companies. One of his primary concerns is to make sure that designers create files that can be easily handled by print service providers for printing. For over ten years he developed and taught classes to designers, production artists, and others about how to best create files from Adobe applications. Later, working independently as a consultant and trainer, he has taught online seminars for Adobe to print service providers on how to output files from Adobe Creative Suite.

Our Mission in This Book

It wasn't long before we realized that our seminar was the basis for a book. Both of us understood immediately what we wanted this book to be. There are three areas we want to cover none of which you would find in the usual computer book.

How the Applications Work Together

The primary goal of the book is to look at how the applications in Creative Suite work together. For instance, how do you get artwork from Illustrator into Photoshop without losing the layers in the Illustrator file? That's covered in Chapter 12, "The Flexibility of Layers." How do you take a PDF file from Photoshop and add it to a PDF file created in Illustrator? Good question; look in Chapter 14, "Creating and Using PDF Files." Are there any special techniques to ensure that colors stay the same across applications? Go to Chapter 10, "Colors and Color Management"!

Similarities and Differences in the Applications

Let's say you're familiar with Photoshop, but have only recently started using InDesign. How much can your knowledge of Photoshop help you work with InDesign?

It turns out, quite a bit! The same techniques that let you duplicate objects in Photoshop apply for duplicating objects in InDesign. While Photoshop may not have page-layout per se as InDesign does, you'd be surprised how many palettes are similar in the two programs. Most likely your favorite keyboard shortcut for zooming or moving around a document is the same in all the Creative Suite applications.

Of course, the flip side of looking for similarities is knowing the differences. For example, it will do you no good to spend hours looking for the duotone curves in InDesign or Illustrator; they're not there. It's just as helpful to know when the applications don't work similarly as when they do.

We'll also show you which application is the best to use for a particular purpose. For example, you can create business cards in either InDesign or Illustrator. In Chapter 2, "Which Application Does What?", we cover what the advantages and disadvantages of each approach to help you choose which one to use for your project.

Benefits of the Suite

Years ago designers complained that there were too many programs they had to buy. They wanted a single "uber-application" that would do everything. It would retouch images, lay out pages, do 3D-drawing, handle word processing, and let you design logos, create web pages, and perhaps even make coffee in the morning.

Outside of the fact that it would have taken thirty or forty minutes for this mammoth and miraculous application to open on the machines that existed then, the swiss-army-knife approach to software was never feasible. Instead of making one program do everything, it would have become a dumbed-down version of the individual programs.

However, with the advent of Creative Suite, Adobe has created the modern-day equivalent of this mega-application (except for making the coffee). When the two of us work, we launch almost all the programs in Creative Suite. Then, as we work on an InDesign layout, we're constantly jumping around from application to application. We run over to Photoshop to modify the images in our layout. We use the effects in Illustrator to create paths that turn into the graphic frames in InDesign. We use Adobe Bridge as the hub of the Suite: It allows us to preview and manage all our Adobe files, synchronizes the colors in our applications, provides some innovative ways of placing our files, and even adds some powerful ways of integrating the applications through scripting.

Who This Book Is For (and Not)

We'll be upfront about this. This book is not suitable if you're just starting out and need to learn one (or all) of the Creative Suite applications. We're not going to teach you how to draw frames in InDesign or set the brushes in Photoshop. There are much better books for that. The Visual QuickStart guides from Peachpit Press are a great way to learn. The Adobe Classroom in a Book series is another.

So, who is this book for? Well, most obviously, it's for someone who is using Adobe Creative Suite 2 either Standard or Premium. (If you have the first Adobe Creative Suite, some of the methods and techniques we show will work, and some will not.) But you want to learn more than one application: With the Suite, you can start with whichever of the applications you know, and use that knowledge to leverage learning the others and how they work together.

Regarding Platform Issues

Please, no flames! We honestly don't want to get into any platform wars. Yes, it's true that our main production machines are Macintoshes, but both of us also own and use our Windows machines whenever the need arises.

There are a few conventions we have used. When we include keyboard shortcuts for commands, we list the Macintosh key first and then the Windows key. So, for example, we will tell you to hold the Option/Alt key as you drag something to make a copy, meaning the Option key on the Macintosh and the Alt key on Windows. We call the Command (or Apple, or Splat) key the Command key. We call the Windows Ctrl (Control) key the Ctrl key. Shift is, thankfully, the same for both platforms. The Macintosh has an extra key labeled "control." We use that label when we talk about a control-click, which we mention in conjunction with the term right-click. You control-click or right-click (if you have a right mouse button) to access a contextual menu or special feature.

Occasionally we will separate instructions into platform-specific sentences. In that case we list the Macintosh instruction first, and then Windows. This is not to slight the Windows users at all. It's simply that consistency makes it easier to tell what's going on.

We'd Like to Thank

There are quite a few people who have helped us with this book, our seminar, and other projects whom we need to thank.

We are exceedingly lucky to have friends at Adobe who unselfishly gave of their time to review chapters in this book or answer our questions about the various applications. This list includes, in no particular order: Bob Schaffel, Lonn Lorenz, Thomas Phinney, John Nack, Lynn Grillo (who was our GoLive guru at the very first Macworld seminar), Ted Alspach, Terry White, Noha Edell, Will Eisley, Olav Martin Kvern, Whitney McCleary, Ginna Baldassarre, and Luanne Seymour. A special mention goes to the beta-team coordinators who helped us get up to speed on the new features of the software.

We'd also like to thank some of the industry experts who gave us feedback and advice: Mordy Golding, David Blatner, Peter Truskier, Anne-Marie Conception, Jon Bessant, Jim Birkenseer, Claudia McCue, Bruce Fraser, Chris Murphy, and Fred Bunting.

We owe a big thanks to Paul Kent of Macworld Conference & Expo for allowing us to present the original seminar desktop publishing and Creative Suite seminars. Back in those early days, it wasn't obvious that multi-application seminars would be popular. Also, another acknowledgement goes to Barry Anderson of The Creative Suite Conference (barrycon.com), who has let us recycle some of this material into the short sessions of his conferences around the United States and other countries.

Then there is our editorial and production team: Cary Norsworthy, editor; Judy Walthers von Alten, development editor; Wendy Katz, copy editor; David Van Ness, production editor; and Owen Wolfson, compositor. We'd also like to thank the following people at Adobe Press and Peachpit Press: Nancy Ruenzel, Nancy Davis, Karen Reichstein, Kelly Ryer, and Christine Yarrow.

On a personal note, Sandee would like to thank Terry DuPrât, Sharon Steuer, and Pam Pfiffner for their patience and emotional support. Steve would like to thank Harry McCart, Ray Dyer, Mark Atchley, and Chae Flores for their love and support that made working on this book possible.

Finally, we'd like to dedicate this book to all the students who take our classes and seminars. Your questions, problems, puzzles, and comments make us better teachers and authors.

Sandee Cohen and Steve Werner, March, 2006.



Real World(c) Adobe Creative Suite 2
Real World Adobe Creative Suite 2
ISBN: 0321334124
EAN: 2147483647
Year: N/A
Pages: 192

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