Check it out!
Yours truly was interviewed by Mary Gay Marchese – the Public Relations Director at Markzware, the software company. Over the years, we have purchased a few of their products, most notably Flightcheck. For us, this application is indispensable as we run all our outgoing layout files through it to make sure there are no surprises when it’s time to print a project.
Recently, I received an email from Mary asking if we’d be interested in discussing how Intrigue utilizes Flightcheck in it’s workflow on a daily basis. Sounded very intriguing to me, so I said “Sure!” It was a lot of fun working with Mary and hammering out the interview. In return, we received 15 minutes of fame with some links on the Markzware website, along with free T-shirts for everyone in our office. Not bad…
By now, most creative professionals in the digital world have heard about Adobe’s latest iteration of the Creative Suite Franchise. CS5 was unveiled last week and is scheduled to ship within the next four weeks.
As with previous releases of the software, purchasing new copies or upgrading old ones comes at a relatively stiff price. Many design studios are currently evaluating the new version to see if and when it is most prudent to make the jump.
Of course, everyone wants to stay at the cutting edge of the latest in technology and software tools. But in today’s difficult economic times, many companies cannot afford to do that. It may not make financial sense for studios and especially individuals to purchase every major upgrade that Adobe releases.
It can be argued that the last version of Adobe CS, version 4, was not a significant enhancement over the one before, version 3. Yes, there some new and interesting features. But was it worth shelling out several hundred or thousand dollars to bring workstations up to CS4 when CS3 was more than adequate?
In our case, at Intrigue, we did something a little different. We upgraded our designers to CS4 and left the production workstations at CS3. For the most part, this has worked out well for us. Occasionally, there have been glitches – ie: not being able to open a file in CS3 when it was created in CS4. OK, not insurmountable.
Today’s topic is targeted at website creators and promoters. Although I’ve worked with the design team here at Intrigue at helping build our corporate site, we haven’t fully explored the various options at promoting it. So I decided to do some research and learn some of the techniques needed at telling the world about Intrigue and intriguegraphics.com.
I created this blog as an adjunct to our main site. It’s partially an experiment and partially an indirect way to draw traffic in to our main site. Along the way, I’ve picked up many bits of tid that I get to implement over time. It’s about learning what works and there’s a bit of trial and error – and a whole lot of research to see how other people do this.
After spending a bit of time perusing some web marketing forums, I’ve picked up a few techniques that people can use to help promote their sites and or blogs and to help drive traffic to them. Read More…
When you talk about scripting and/or programming, the average person looks at you with the “deer in the headlights” look. Unless you are a programmer yourself, there is something about this topic that makes most computer users cringe and recoil in horror.
These are people who are very happy to use their Mac or Windows PC as-is to get things done. Even though I’m not a programmer myself, I’ve had enough experience to realize that there are MANY tasks that people do that can be either enhanced, done quicker or done more efficiently through the use of automated scripts.
Years ago, I took a couple of classes in BASIC programming. As long as the programs were short and sweet, I was able to follow along and understand the logic. But once more bells and whistles were added, I found myself falling further and further behind. After a certain point of complexity, I was not enjoying it at all. I did find it interesting in that someone who knows what they are doing can get a computer to do some amazing things. But it just wasn’t for me.
About a year ago, I posted about an Apple repair where it was not covered by Applecare. We had a relatively new Intel iMac begin to malfunction severely outside of the one year warranty. It was a helpless feeling to know that fixing it would require spending some money and time at an Apple store to remedy the situation.
Well, it was a gamble and in that case it didn’t work out. Recently, I had the opposite experience. My own personal iMac at home began to malfunction in a similar fashion. It was fine one day, and unusable the next. The hard drive decided it was retiring from active service.
The first thing I did – after taking a deep breath – was to check if my iMac was covered by Applecare. I couldn’t remember for sure. I had to scramble to find my paperwork (computer stuff is filed together at home). What a pleasant surprise it was to discover that not only did I get Applecare with the iMac, but I was still covered for it! Read More…
While doing my proofreading duties, I often see patterns regarding mistakes people make in the layout. Like most things, when something is done in error once, there is a good chance it may get repeated another time. People are people and mistakes are to be expected. I see this all the time in copy we receive from our clients and customers.
None of that bothers me. What I do find irksome is when I check a job and see that people repeat the same bad habits they learned in English class years before and have no idea that there is a problem. That might be simple spelling errors or an incorrect usage of a word, or lousy grammar. While I’m certainly no expert on the English language, and make a bunch of errors myself, I can say that I worked hard in my English classes. My efforts help Intrigue quite a bit today as there are errors aplenty in copy and texts. Read More…
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