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Huge news coming from Adobe in the last week. After 10 years of service, it will be dropping its Creative Suite product entirely, in favour of pushing the Creative Cloud service that was introduced last year.
Here at Silicon Beach, we’ve already updated to Creative Cloud and so all our Adobe Courses, including our Photoshop Courses, will be completely up to date.
This is a massive shift in focus from Adobe, whose business model had until the release of Creative Cloud, followed the ‘traditional’ software licencing model. So what exactly does all this mean for consumers and what’s new?
What is Creative Cloud?
Last year Adobe released Creative Cloud which at first appeared to just be an alternative payment option for existing Adobe products, rather than an entire product in itself. As it has transpired, Creative Cloud will be the sole focus of Adobe from now on.
The next release in June will see them scrap the ubiquitous CS (Creative Suite) moniker that has been attached to Adobe programs since 2003 and instead each product will be branded as CC (Creative Cloud).
There will be no ‘full’ update system in place as their is currently (CS4 to CS5 to CS6 etc) but rather more frequent, less substantial updates each remaining under the CC brand.
Read the rest of "Adobe Drops Creative Suite to Focus on Creative Cloud"
Posted by Aaron Charlie in eBooks, Illustrator, InDesign, News, Photoshop, Print Design on May 13th, 2013| 1 Comment »
Minimalist movie posters have almost become an art form in themselves as a way for fans of the films to show their appreciation creatively. The best designs summarise everything you know about the movie while remaining simple and stylish.
With that in mind, we thought we’d take a look at some of the best minimalist posters of some of the best movies of all time, as judged on IMDb. (Attribution has been given where possible.)
If you’d like to be able to create iconic re-imaginings of movie posters like the ones below, come on our InDesign Training Course which will teach you all the skills you need. If textual design is more your thing, try our Flaming Text Photoshop tutorial.
So let’s start with number 10 -
10/ Fight Club by Pedro Vidotto
Movie posters don’t get much more minimalist than this – a grey background, a bar of soap and exactly 6 words. This might be IMDb’s 10th best movie but the poster would be challenging for top spot in this list!
Read the rest of "Top 10 IMDb Movies: Minimalist Posters"
Posted by Aaron Charlie in Illustrator, InDesign, News, Photoshop on February 18th, 2013| No Comments »
We are pleased to announce that all of our Adobe courses have been updated and will now be running with the latest CS6 software.
With plenty of new features and an up-to-date format, now is the right time to learn with CS6!
Don’t worry though, if you’d rather learn Photoshop, InDesign or any of our Adobe courses in an older version, we can still tailor a course around your needs.
We can also run bespoke CS6 upgrade sessions, for those who have used Adobe software before but would like to get to grips with the latest version.
Contact us by phone on 01273 622272 or email info@siliconbeachtraining.co.uk
Why the Change?
We always strive to keep up-to-date with the latest products and versions of software available here at Silicon Beach Training but beyond that, upgrading to CS6 means benefiting from all of the new features which include:
Photoshop
- New interface
- Video editing
- Improved Blur function
- Dashed and dotted vector lines
- Auto Save
- Crop tool change
- Auto Adjustment improvements
- Layer Search/Filter
- Text Enhancements and Stylesheets
- Vector tool change
InDesign
- New Interface
- Liquid Layouts
- Alternate Layouts
- PDF Forms
- Flexible Columns
- Conveyor Tool
- Form Tools
- Epub Creation options
Read the rest of "Adobe Courses: CS6 Update"
Posted by Jackson Rawlings in Illustrator, InDesign, News, Photoshop on January 30th, 2013| No Comments »
With a new year comes a new course, and one we hope you’re excited about! Today we launch eBook Training with InDesign, a course we have developed to meet the demand for guidance on creating eBooks from scratch and publishing them – ideal for writers and marketers alike who want to self-publish digital content that meets the industry guidelines.
Our InDesign eBook Training Course is a 1 day course and costs £295 + vat. To cover everything you need to create eBooks in 1 day we assume prior knowledge and experience with Adobe InDesign. If you’re an InDesign beginner but still want to come on the course then you can also book our 2-day InDesign course as a package for just £595 + vat (normally £740 + vat)!
InDesign eBook Training Course Dates
Our upcoming Brighton dates for the eBook course are:
- 25th March 2013
- 10th May 2013
- 19th June 2013
If you can’t make those dates or wish to arrange in-company training then don’t hesitate to ring 01273 622272 to arrange a quote for a private course.
Why InDesign & ePub?
On our eBook training course you will be using Adobe InDesign to create eBooks in the ePub format. While there are a number of free tools to use to quickly create eBooks, nothing gives you the freedom of control over your work that InDesign is capable of. As well as being the industry standard tool for document layout, the latest versions of InDesign (this course runs on CS6) are full of features for making sure your eBooks meet the best practice guidelines for digital publishing. Read the rest of "New InDesign eBook Training Course"
Posted by Craig Charley in eBooks, InDesign, Marketing, News, Print Design on January 10th, 2013| No Comments »
Do you want to make a basic poster design but don’t know where to start? Use this tutorial and you’ll be making simple posters like the one below in no time. This tutorial is for those who are new to InDesign and want to develop their skills, or for anyone who just wants to brush up on the basics.
If you want to learn more skills for creating posters and other similar projects, try one of our Adobe Courses which include InDesign and Illustrator or one of our popular Photoshop Training Courses.
Firstly, open the program and click on the “Create New – Document” button
The document setting screen will appear. Choose the page size – for this example we will use A3 – and the margin size. It’s good to have around 20 mm of margin for a project like this. Put the same value as the margins in the “Gutter” box.
Make sure you un-check the “Facing Pages” box, keep the default “portrait” setting and then press OK. Read the rest of "InDesign Poster Tutorial"
Posted by Aaron Charlie in InDesign, News, Print Design on November 30th, 2012| No Comments »
In previous blog posts we have extolled the benefits of setting up Paragraph Style Sheets to instantly format your text and once you have taken the time to set these up how they can then be loaded to, and applied to other InDesign documents.
However, there may be times when you have lots of text to format. All of which follows a standard and repetitive format, when even the simple task of selecting the paragraph and applying a style to it by the press of a button, can still feel quite laborious.
So in this post I want to demonstrate how you can speed this process up further by delving a little deeper into the Paragraph Style Panel dialogue box, which allows you to choose one style that is subsequently followed by another style, thereby allowing you to format many paragraphs of text simultaneously.
Remember, the best way to learn InDesign is in person from an expert, so if you really want to get to grips with the world’s favourite document tool then come on our 2-day InDesign training course!
Setting up your Paragraph Styles to be continued by another
Posted by Sharon in InDesign, News, Print Design on October 12th, 2012| No Comments »
Last month, our InDesign trainer Sharon showed you how to create your own InDesign Paragraph Style Sheets. If you missed that, follow the link to catch up! This week, Sharon’s going to show you how to load your Paragraph Style Sheets in a new document…
Once Formatted you can load Paragraph Style sheets to a new document in a flash.
InDesign will do all it can to make your life easier, especially when adhering to Corporate Guidelines or producing similar documents on a regular basis.
Once you have set up InDesign Paragraph Style Sheets you can easily load these styles to any new document you create as long as that document is available on your computer or server, so you do not have to go through and format everything from scratch. Read the rest of "Loading Paragraph Style Sheets"
Posted by Sharon in InDesign, News, Print Design on September 7th, 2012| No Comments »
Formatting text in InDesign is very straight forward but can be laborious and time consuming if you’re formatting large amounts of text or carrying out repetitive design tasks. Trawling through, selecting each bit of text and changing its character and paragraph attributes can be an unreliable way to work as inadvertent mistakes could happen such as entering the incorrect font size or leading formats.
This is when you want to utilise the beauty and power of InDesign Style Sheets and let InDesign do the hard work for you. All you have to is take a little time to set them up and when the Paragraph Style sheets are in place all you have to do is press a button to format your text; it’s as simple as that. You can also load these Style Sheets to new documents, so if you are working to strict corporate guidelines you will never have to format your text from scratch again!
Coming on our InDesign course will teach you lots of ways like this to save time and improve accuracy. Even if you’re a self-taught user of InDesign, coming and learning from a trainer in person means you can be much more efficient – and creative – later on. Many thanks to our trainer Sharon for her efforts putting this tutorial together.
Style sheets are a designer’s best friend and it couldn’t be easier to create them. All you have to do to set them up is select the formatted paragraph and InDesign will store all that information in the Paragraph Style Sheets including the texts’ character and paragraph attributes, such as tabs, indents and spacing, paragraph rules, colour and hyphenation attributes.
Once you’ve mastered Paragraph Styles, use our InDesign Templates Tutorial to save even more time! It’s vital to produce consistent documents in business, so creating document templates and paragraph style sheets will allow you to output consistent documents. Read the rest of "InDesign Paragraph Style Sheets Tutorial"
Posted by Sharon in InDesign, News, Print Design on August 17th, 2012| No Comments »
