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*** DesignGeek ***
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Tips and techniques for the digital designer
In this issue:
-- More "Telling" Interview Questions from Readers
-- OS X: Add a Shortcut to Solve Window Madness
-- Mastering Illustrator's Gradient Mesh
-- My InCopy Seminar is Now Online
Issue 57, 9/27/06
Written by Anne-Marie "HerGeekness" Concepcion
... for her clients, colleagues, random contacts and interested subscribers
(c) 2006 Seneca Design & Training, Inc.
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More "Telling" Interview Questions from Readers
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In the last issue of DesignGeek (#56), I wrote about a design studio owner friend of mine who used "telling" questions during interviews as a spot check for quality designers.
http://senecadesign.com/designgeek/dgarchives/designgeek56.php
For example, in the middle of the interview, my friend Joe would sometimes point at one of the chartreuse walls in the studio and ask the applicant, "What would be the CMYK mix for that color, do you think?"
The five percent of new-grad interviewees who had some inkling of what CMYK meant garnered points just for taking a stab at it.
I invited you all to send in your own "telling questions" you use in interviews, and you didn't disappoint! Here are some of the more interesting replies ... my apologies if I didn't have room to fit yours.
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Your Telling Questions
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Dave was one of many DG readers who couldn't help himself from mentioning what he would have replied to Joe's question about the chartreuse walls:
"I would be among those who say: "CMYK? Ummm ... I'm not sure what you mean." Of course I would follow up with a suggestion that he would need to go to a 5th color or hexachrome or something (and even then it might be a pretty hard match). I'd probably tell him about the piece I did with a kiss plate of florescent green under the process colors."
Whoa! ;-)
Dave went on to say that when he suspects an interviewee is taking credit for a portfolio piece they didn't design, "I ask them who the photographer or illustrator was. When they say "I can't remember" I press on to see if they can at least remember something about the photographer or illustrator -- if not I suspect the worst and can usually confirm it with a few more questions later in the interview."
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Diane recalled an interview question that stumped her back when she was 20: "They asked me what a blueline was. My printer has switched to spin jet proofs, and either term it's something you need to know."
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Timm suggests the following questions (but cautions, "It would be cruel to ask more than a couple of these"): "Point to the counter in this letter ... If you saddle-stitch something what is it now? ... What's imposition? ... Point to the crops, bleeds, registration marks, and calibration bars on this press sheet ... If the RGB equivalent is out of gamut what do you do to prep the process equivalent?"
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Frank recalled a phone interview he blew because he couldn't answer the boss's telling question: "What is the keyboard command for "Lock" and "Unlock" in Illustrator?"
I thought that was a little unfair for an interview question and asked him what the position was that he had applied for. "They wanted someone for production work in Illustrator." Um ... nevermind.
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Another Dave, the "Production Leader at a design-slash-marketing-communications firm, I interview the design and production candidates," shared a few of the interview questions he actually uses: "How would you rename a folder of 150 JPEGs to add the date in the filename? ... Can you cut out that circle with an X-acto knife? [What is this X-acto knife you speak of -- AM] ... Why did you pick that kind of paper for this job, and what kind is it?... Who printed this? (bonus points awarded if they tell me the pressman's name)."
I e-mailed Dave back and said if I were being interviewed, I'd say the pressman's name was Mike, because all pressmen are named Mike. I was joking of course, but Dave immediately replied, "You are a genius. My go-to printer's head pressman is named Mike."
9-ball, corner pocket. Thwack. ;-)
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Let's finish this up with Ricardo, a DesignGeek reader from Brazil. He said out of all the telling questions he uses, these three are his favorites: "Can you send me your portfolio in PDF format? (believe me, A LOT of self-named designers don´t know what is PDF) ... Which image resolution did you used in this case?" ... Do you think this kerning is ok? (if someone doesn´t know what is kerning, it is time to learn!)"
Sometimes, as Joe would attest, it's the simple questions that are the most telling.
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OS X: Add a Shortcut to Solve Window Madness
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One thing that drives me buggy about my otherwise-beloved OS X is how it loses document windows.
Designers typically have a lot of programs and documents open at once, so I'm sure you've seen this. Sometimes the document windows start to stack weirdly, especially if you're the type who clicks on visible portions of document windows to bring them (and their application) to the front instead of choosing the application icon from the Dock or Command-Tabbing to it.
You're reading a web page in Safari, for example, and right behind that window is an InDesign document, behind that are two Apple Mail windows, behind those are two more Safari windows, and way in the back is another InDesign (document) window or two. It's hard to tell which window belongs to which application because you can see only a portion of the ones in the back.
So, say you know that you have a couple image files open in Illustrator, and you're working on one. You click on the bit of the window that's right behind the one you're working on, and suddenly you're in Excel (or InDesign, or FileMaker...). Argh!
To assist users with "window madness," every OS X program, even the Finder, has a Window menu that not only lists all the open documents in that program, but also a Bring All to Front command (except Firefox and a few others). Choosing Bring All to Front finds all open document windows for that application and ... well, brings them to the front of the stack of open windows.
I use Bring to Front all the time -- especially with my e-mail program, Eudora, which often has ten or fifteen mailbox windows open and mixed up in the stack -- but got tired of mousing up to the Window menu fifty times a day to choose it. Bring All to Front lacks a keyboard shortcut and Eudora doesn't let you create your own.
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Roll Your Own Shortcuts in OS X
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If you open System Preferences (from the Apple menu is the easiest) and click the Keyboard and Mouse icon in the Hardware area, you can create your own keyboard shortcuts for any individual OS X program menu item that's "System Prefs-aware," as well as a single shortcut that works across all the OS X programs that share the same menu item.
Since almost every OS X program has a Bring All to Front command, I used System Prefs to make a single keyboard shortcut for it with one quick trip to the dialog box. Here's how:
1. In the Keyboard and Mouse system preference, click the third button, Keyboard Shortcuts, and scroll down to the bottom of the list.
2. Select the "All Applications" list entry and click the plus symbol on the lower left of the dialog box.
3. Another window opens up, initially set to All Applications. (Leave it there for this example, but if you want to create a keyboard shortcut for a specific program, choose it from this dropdown menu. Only System Prefs-aware applications will be listed.)
4. In this window, enter the menu item's text in the Menu Title field, exactly as it appears in the program menu. In this example you'd enter "Bring All to Front" (no quotes). If you can't remember the exact text, you can switch over to that program for a quick check without closing out of this window.
5. You've entered the menu item, right, so now click inside the Keyboard Shortcut field and press the shortcut you want to use. I've found that combinations of Shift-Function key work well here, so I pressed Shift-F1 for Bring All to Front.
6. Click the Add button to close this window, then close System Preferences if you're done.
7. Restart the program (if it's running) and you'll see that the menu item now carries the symbols for the keyboard shortcut you added, and best of all, it works! Well, at least in Tiger (10.4.7) it does; though I'm pretty sure this feature was introduced a while back.
Expose, Schmexpose. My tools of choice for OS X window management do everything I need: Command-Tab for cycling through running applications, Command-` (the tilde key) for cycling through open windows of the current program, and now, Shift-F1 to herd 'em all to the front.
Oh, and Command-Option-H ... that hides all windows except for those belonging to the current program. Try it, it clears your head like a deep inhalation of Vicks Vapo-Rub.
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Mastering Illustrator's Gradient Mesh
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When was the Gradient Mesh tool added to Adobe Illustrator, would you guess? Are you thinking with CS (version 11)? Nope. Version 10? Still way off! The Gradient Mesh tool was introduced with Illustrator EIGHT (when was that, back in 1964?) along with the new-fangled Bounding Box and the "enhanced pencil tool"!
Yet for all its longevity, I've yet to meet a person face-to-face who knows how to use the feature. Illustrator is one of those programs that everyone's been using for years, but basically stopped learning after they got through the essentials (Pen tool, Type tool, Fill and Stroke) regardless how many new gewgaws Adobe added over the years. Oh you might have a couple office geeks around who know how to do a Warp or release a compound path, but a gradient mesh that actually looks good? Those people are in a rarified strata.
I'm like most of you, I've tried the Gradient Mesh but the grid and points and stretchiness of it all scared me off. I know it just enough to teach it "in theory" during Illustrator training, but as my students can attest, "You, sir, are no Kevin Hulsey."
http://www.khulsey.com/
Whenever I see some of the photo-realistic drawings that can be accomplished by talented people who've mastered the Mesh, such as Mr. Hulsey, I'm chartreuse with envy.
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Oh Let's Just Learn the Thing
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Are you ready to join me in mastering the Gradient Mesh tool? Here are some wonderful, free on-line tutorials I've found.
Creative Bush
http://www.creativebush.com/gmeshtutorial/
I love this one, the writer speaks just like any other hard-working designer whose boss isn't in the room. The tutorial is all on one page and covers how to use the Gradient Mesh tool starting with a scanned head shot as the base.
Magical Butterfly
http://www.magicalbutterfly.com/tutorials/meshtutorial/meshtutmain.htm
Okay, the author won't win any awards for web site design, but the tutorial is well-done. I like it because it starts out with a simple illustration you draw with the Pen tool, and after you go at it with the Gradient Mesh tool, you end up with three-dimensional curtains. Cool.
Kevin Hulsey
http://www.khulsey.com/adobe_illustrator_gradient_mesh.html
Yes, the master himself has a number of great Illustrator tutorials on his site, and here's the one he wrote on the Gradient Mesh tool. Kevin's not a bad Photoshop user either, have you seen his cruise ship? Be sure you're sitting down before you go to http://www.khulsey.com/empress_main.html.
Brooke Nunez
http://www.lifeinvector.com/downloads.html
Brooke is a Chicago-based freelance designer who has written up an excellent 12-page PDF tutorial on the Gradient Mesh tool. I only learned about it because so many other Mesh-wannabes gush about it and link to it on many of the designer forums and listservs. Go to that URL and click the picture of the red bell pepper to download the tutorial. Not only do you get the PDF in the .zip file, but Brooke thoughtfully included the photograph of the pepper and the final meshed illustration of it as an .ai file.
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My InCopy Seminar is Now Online
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Are you and your editorial colleagues curious if InCopy could help streamline things at your workplace, but not sure how it actually works?
If so, I think you'll like the latest on-line presentation I did for Adobe, "Introduction to an InCopy/InDesign Workflow." They recorded the live, 60-minute webcast I did in August, and you can see and hear the recording in the privacy of your web browser, anytime you want:
http://seminars.adobe.acrobat.com/p86453887/
This was actually the second time I did an InCopy webcast for them, and it's better than the first (which I did back in March I think) because I was able to pace myself better and cover more ground. I took time to explicitly show the difference between a layout-based workflow and an Assignments-based one, the source of much confusion with new users; the sample documents are nice and simple, and the content is equally useful to editors as well as designers.
If you and a few colleagues (from both design and editorial) would like to participate in a live InCopy seminar, come to the upcoming InDesign Conference: Master Class, where I'll be doing an almost full-day workshop on InCopy and InDesign. (Or of course, contact me for training and consulting support for your particular organization.)
I'm excited about the conference, it'll be at the Adobe campus in Seattle, home of the Creative Suite! David and I will be doing a live InDesignSecrets podcast during one of the sessions, too.
InDesign Conference: Master Class
Seattle, Washington; Nov. 6-8, 2006
http://www.barrycon.com/conference.php?sid=1&cid=16
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DesignGeek is a free bimonthly publication written by Anne-Marie "HerGeekness" Concepcion, a cross-media designer and authorized Adobe and Quark training provider. She owns Seneca Design & Training, Inc. in Chicago, Illinois (http://www.senecadesign.com/).
To subscribe to DesignGeek or read archived issues, go to its home on Seneca's site:
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Copyright 2006 by Seneca Design & Training, Inc.
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