Bernskiold Learning » Misc

NAPP Interviews: Ask the NAPP Staff (including Scott himself)!

Erik Bernskiold — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 18:55:04 +0000

My dear friend, Firgs is doing an interview series on her website (Design by Firgs) with the staff over at NAPP (and Photoshop World instructors and key roles). Each week leading up to Photoshop World, there will be an interview with a staff member on NAPP, both the public faces and the people behind the scenes, making the magazine happen, making the podcasts come out. There are some seriously talented folks there, so take your chance and ask them your questions.

The lineup includes public faces such as RC Concepcion, Matt Kloskowski, Terry White and none other than Scott Kelby himself. I know that you have always, wanted to ask Scott about his most embarrassing photo shoot. Fine, secretly I know you have wanted to know what pattern he likes best on his socks, striped, plain or dotted. Now is your chance!

What you absolutely want to do, is take the chance to ask some questions to the more hidden faces, doing all the great things you enjoy from NAPP, aside from the tutorials. You can’t see an issue of Photoshop User Magazine go by without seeing Taffy Clifford’s work! She is one of their awesome graphic designers working on the featured article pages in some of the issues. Or, Leslie Montenegro, who is marketing graphic designer, in charge of the marketing graphics.

Basically, what I am trying to tell you all, is that this is a golden opportunity to ask what you have on your heart. Especially to the behind-the-scenes crew. How often to you get to ask about the real-life creation process for the magazine? I thought not…

Get yourself over to Design by Firgs and submit those questions!

Happy New Year!

Erik Bernskiold — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 14:00:40 +0000

Please let me take a minute today, on the final day of 2009, to wish you all a very happy new year! May the new year be filled with joy.

For Bernskiold Media Group, we have several new things and sites planned. For this website, we are working on some very big things, that will come in the coming year. I can’t say much more now but I can promise more info coming soon!

Merry Christmas!

Erik Bernskiold — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 23:00:06 +0000

Today, I want to extend my warmest wishes to you and your family and wish all of you a Merry Christmas! Without you, this website wouldn’t exist.

As part of Christmas, we are taking a couple of days off posting and will be back again on Monday with new tutorials, articles and reviews. We are also working on some big announcements that we are readying for the new year.

Five Practical InDesign Tips

Erik Bernskiold — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 19:16:24 +0000

The Finished Program

In the early parts of last week, I had a rush job to design and get printed approx. 600 copies of a program for a performance—a Revue. For any print project like this, InDesign is my choice and every time I open up the application to do anything with multiple pages (this was 20 pages long), I am happy to have a few features in InDesign.

I wanted to share with you, five very practical tips in InDesign that does help when doing a project.

InDesign: Paragraph Styles

1. Use Paragraph Styles!

I wouldn’t dream of doing a project that isn’t just a simple flyer without paragraph styles. These give you the ability to set up a style (like CSS if you are a web guy like me) that can be applied to any number of paragraphs. This style can contain the font size, font family, color and everything about the display. The beauty is that you can go back and change this at any time, should you want, and all paragraphs with the style will update with it.

2. Place Files and Manage the Links

This may be an absolute no-brainer to you, but if it isn’t, beware! Make sure to always save images and resources you use in your InDesign document in a separate folder on your hard drive (preferable in connection with the InDesign document). From here, you can place your files into InDesign which will create a link to the file. If you modify the file, it will be updated to reflect that within InDesign too.

InDesign: Links

Do not forget to write your text in another app as well. If you have your InDesign file go corrupt or get deleted, or if you need to extract the text to something else, you will not have to rely on InDesign for this but you will have your other text document.

3. Don’t forget the layers!

Most features in the Creative Suite is there because they are useful (with some notable exceptions). In InDesign, the layers feature is none of these exceptions. Use them to your advantage and don’t forget about them. I usually have my layers set up for images and text to go on separate ones, so I can easily preview one or the other (or turn off one or the other). At the same time, I keep some structural elements on their own layers (header, footer, backgrounds) that usually are positioned on the same level to the images and text.

4. Know the limitations

If you have got the Creative Suite, know the limitations of the individual apps. You don’t have to recreate a structural element in InDesign that is easier off creating inside of Photoshop or Illustrator. In fact, you can benefit from doing it there (especially if it is very graphical) and then placing it and linking it to the InDesign file.

5. Always Preflight

Before a document goes out to print, use the built-in preflighting tools to make sure the document is not missing some links or fonts that don’t exist. This is most crucial, especially if it has been some time since the creation of the document. Preflighting will catch most nasty errors with your file and gives you a chance to fix them before it is too late!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Erik Bernskiold — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 17:10:23 +0000

I just want to take a moment and wish all of you Americans, celebrating Thanksgiving today, a very Happy Thanksgiving! Thank you to all of you, our visitors who keep this site up and running by visiting and spreading the word.

Thank you!

Erik’s Holiday Gift Guide 2009 Now for Download

Erik Bernskiold — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:00:16 +0000

As every year, this being no exception, I’m releasing my Holiday Gift Guide that can be downloaded here on Bernskiold Media. The idea of this gift guide is to provide you with ideas on what to get photographers/techies or gadget lovers for christmas, or what to wish for if you belong to the group. The guide is arranged in sections for different types of people, like photographers, videographers, designers, gadget lovers and more.

I should note that this guide is in no way endorsed by any manufacturer and I am not being paid anything from anyone for making this available. These are things that I use and recommend to you, that have made my life a whole lot easier.

Please stop over at the official gift guide section here to either view it in your browser, or to get your downloadable PDF today, and spread the word around. You don’t know what you might be getting!

Backup Importance! It Doesn’t Have To Be Your Hard Drive That Crashes!

Erik Bernskiold — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 12:00:29 +0000

By now, anyone who follows my personal blog or my twitter account, will know that I have had computer issues and that my computer is still (after three weeks) in for repair. The rant of why it is still there, can be found on Twitter. Nevertheless, I have learnt these week to be very grateful of one of my backup plans. Let me tell you why!

What Is My Strategy?

I do three backups. I have one 1TB hard drive that I have partitioned into two. One partition is for Time Machine (built into OS X) and one, I use an application called Super Duper! to make a full, bootable clone from my main hard drive. I also do backups to Mozy, an online backup service. I am also in the process of getting another drive, which I can do a bootable clone to, say once a month, that I can have placed elsewhere than home.

How Has This Saved Me Now?

I haven’t really needed the Time Machine backup yet. I do it to have the ability to go back in time for files, that I may have accidentally changed without later wanting to. For that, it is amazing.

SuperDuper! on the other hand is what has saved me this time. Since my computer is not with me, I don’t have any of my data on my hard drive that is with the computer. This is where I store most of my things (client projects, school files and so on). While these are backed up in many places online as well (I am most paranoid about these) I don’t have the time to re-download trials of my software to my backup MacBook. This is where that bootable clone has been handy!

All I did when my computer failed me, was to take this backup hard drive, connect it to my older MacBook, and while booting (this is a Mac only tip) holding down the Option/Alt key. This gives me a choice to boot onto whichever hard drive is attached, that Mac OS X can boot from. How about booting from my bootable clone copy of my hard drive? Sounds good? Yes!

By being able to boot right into my regular hard drive (albeit on another computer), I could just pick up where I left. I have all applications, all files, everything! I do have to say that it is quite a bit slower (I am forced on either USB or FireFire 400 as this MacBook doesn’t have an FW800 connection) but it works. Even Photoshop will run at an OK speed (although I do my best to avoid it). I don’t recommend watching videos though! That is a major pain, at least if you are doing something else at the same time

My advice today, make sure to have a bootable clone copy! It might just save you, even if your hard drive hasn’t crashed!

No-Blog Week

Erik Bernskiold — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:02:56 +0000

As I had to turn my MacBook Pro (main computer) in for repairs this Friday because of my graphics card going bad (read more here), I am forced to declare this a no-blog week. This is mainly because with the workload that I had for this weekend, there was no chance that I could pull off articles and podcasts for this week on a crippled system (I do have a fully bootable backup and will talk about that soon).

It’ll also give me some extra time to focus on the Göteborg International Organ Academy of which I am apart here in Gothenburg and some time to generally relax and have fun!

So to all of you, have a really nice week and I’ll see you back on Monday with some new articles, and a refresh for the fall quarter, starting soon. Oh! I might get something together, so keep watching.

Audioboo: Neat Way to Share Audioclips

Erik Bernskiold — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 06:50:11 +0000

I’ve known about Audioboo for quite a while but I haven’t really gotten around to test it, so when I was reminded of it as I was watching TWiT Live, I decided to give it a spin for real.

Audioboo is a free service that lets you record and publish "boo’s" from the iPhone! It comes as a free download from the App Store and once over on the phone, it is simply to just record your own clips. On the phone, you can also view the latest boos and listen to them.

The website gives you more browsing capabilities where you can follow users to get notified when they post news boos. What’s brilliant with it is that it generates an RSS feed for you so that people interested can subscribe to your boos. With some usage of other services (like Feedburner), you can tweak the feed up for iTunes! In essence you could make a podcast from using Audioboo, from the iPhone.

From what I hear, they are working on a Videoboo that would work the same only with video, from the iPhone 3GS.

Friday Tutorial Day: Check out the back ones!

Erik Bernskiold — Fri, 15 May 2009 16:16:33 +0000

Today, I actually want to make the Friday Tutorial Day into a back looking day! Check out the previous tutorials on the site. Here are some links to some good ones:

Hot Text Effect (Photoshop)
Creating a 3D Can (Photoshop)
Text Design Made Simple (Photoshop)
Paragraph Syles (InDesign)
Cropping and Straightening in Lightroom 2 (Lightroom)
Swirly Blend Wallpaper (Illustrator)