Great, friendly environment and very informational.
Attendee
McMurry Town Center
Event DetailsTo mix things up a bit, the main topic for our March meeting was Dreamweaver. Matt Jorgensen from McMurry, a print designer turned web designer, gave our main presentation of the evening. Director of Content, Rick Burress, engaged everyone in the networking session with some InDesign trivia. Those who participated received an extra raffle ticket for more opportunities to win some prizes. The networking session is also a great way to meet new people and learn new tips.
President Tami Rodgers welcomed everyone to the meeting with some club business and recognized the group's leadership team. She mentioned some ways to earn extra raffle tickets through participation, such as answering questions from Facebook and Twitter, RSVPing to chapter meetings, becoming a presenter, or by just participating in meetings.
Rick Burress led our member minute, presenting on "converting InDesign files to Flash." This feature is available only in InDesign CS4. He showed us how to apply a simple effect to an InDesign file that looks far from simple. First, start with an existing project; he recommended a book or a file with multiple pages. Click the Window panel menu and choose Interactive > Page Transitions. The Page Transitions dialog box opens. Drag the cursor over the various page transitions thumbnails to view an animated preview of each. He chose the "Page Turn" option then exported the file as a SWF (shockwave flash). To conclude his member minute presentation, Rick raffled off a 1-hour training with his company, Artistec, and Kim Matelski was our winner.
Our main topic of the evening, "Best practices for a print designer in a web world" was presented by Matt Jorgensen. He started his career as a photographer, then transitioned to a designer with email and direct mail marketing. When he came to McMurry, he started in the Agency division. About a year ago he transferred to the Interactive division and now works on web design.
Matt explained that designers think of Dreamweaver as a page layout program for the web. He said that Dreamweaver is much more than that, but it's not as intimidating to think of it in that way. He related InDesign to Dreamweaver by saying HTML templates in Dreamweaver are like master pages in InDesign, and CSS in Dreamweaver is like a paragraph or character style in InDesign. HTML is the backbone to web design and CSS is the aesthetics.
Matt also recommended that when using tables in web design, only use them when organizing tabular data and never for design. When it comes to fonts and web design, Georgia (serif) and Verdana (sans-serif) were developed for the screen. Dreamweaver also measures fonts through pixels as well as points and picas. He recommended the website http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_font.asp for info on web safe fonts, pointing out that san-serif fonts are easier to read on screen. Also, in regards to type on screen, he recommends setting type as a very dark gray as opposed to all black. Dark gray type is easier to read and less fatiguing on the eyes than all black type.
When designing with images on the web, stay away from TIFF files because of their large loading size and stick with the three main file types for the web: JPEG, GIF, and PNG. GIFs use only 256 colors, plus they read transparency. PNGs offer scalability, transparency, millions of colors, and they are 24-bit and are most recommended for use. Keep images small so they can be downloaded quickly.
Always test a designed webpage in different browsers. Sometimes pages can display differently in different browsers. Firefox offers a web developers toolbar as a plug-in to assist with viewing webpages in different browsers. As a last tip, Matt recommends to design webpages semantically so they will show up higher in search engines. This means naming and organizing your files correctly.
We were very fortunate to have Newtek Technology Services as our presenting sponsor for the meeting.
Newtek Technology Services is a local web hosting company that has been in the business since 1997 with over 100,000 domains in over 120 countries. Newtek representative, Will Rose provided us with food and prizes at the meeting. As a thank you to members, he raffled off four 3-month hosting packages with Newtek. For questions or more information, go to http://www.newtekwebhosting.com.
A special thanks to our other sponsors: Adobe, Shutterstock, Artistec, InDesign magazine, PeachPit, and McMurry.
Our raffle winners for this meeting include:
McMurry in Central Phoenix is looking for an Art Director in their Center for Professional Excellence division. For further information, go to McMurry's website for a description and to apply online.
"Great meeting! Going out of the box to show Dreamweaver was a good idea."
"Great experience. I liked the incorporation of other software into the meetings."
"Great, friendly environment and very informational"
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United States of America