Introduce yourself

buteverde · 29-03-05

Introduce yourself, says Mr M. Wood.

Er . . . well . . . John Boyd, typographer and graphic designer from the (very) old school. Craftsman, worked over a drawing board all my life. Something like 12 years ago I still thought "They'll always need a board man." Ha! Now I'm the one always asked, "How do you do that in Photoshop . . . Illustrator . . . Quark?"

I shoulda opened a Fruit and Vegetable stand.

I've had to learn the little I know about web creation to set up and maintain seven sites for my lady, Marjorie. It's been savvy gurus with the willingness to help like folks at this forum who have made it possible for me to get by.

The first five sites were sold and transferred to us by WebSeed, a Content Management System Publisher. Anyone here an ex-webseeder?

Mogga · 29-03-05

What's webseed?

First entry in google shows a non-uk character set for me.

buteverde · 29-03-05

WebSeed was, gone now, one of the online publishers that Marjorie used to work through. ThemeStream was another. Suite101 is still in business, I believe.

Most of these have a business plan where they're going to publish material for a lot of folks and then make a bit off each of them and get rich. 'Course it don't work.

WebSeed was also a bulk domain name reseller, so their procedure was not to provide authors with a part of the main site, but create a domain name and assign it to the author's use. It belonged to them, but we maintained it.

A whole "Content Management" program gave us a control panel and fields to enter the texts and artwork, that were then transformed into pages on our/their site. When they went belly-up, they offerred to sell the domains to their authors for $20 apiece. We just had to take them up on it. Five domains with a readership and search engine standing. We just had to get our own registration and hosting going.

And, yours truly had to learn a program and convert five extensive sites before a two month deadline. Yikes, what a marathon it was. And it still shows in the earlier sites!

stevey · 29-03-05

Hi John,

Greetings and welcome.

So did you learn Photoshop and all the new technologies or do you still do most of your work the old school way?

Cheers,

stevey

buteverde · 29-03-05

Thanks, Stevey!

Ah, there is no more "old way" my friend. All those retouchers, strippers, goldenrod, color keys, darkroom work, film negs, all gone.

Very rarely some of the old craft is needed to put together a viable "dummy" of a project. Assembling printouts to give a paper product with the look and feel of the final.

But I can restore an old or screwed up image with layers, layer masks, multiply and a gradient application of "levels" in Photoshop in a way that the retoucher could never, ever do.

stevey · 30-03-05

Is that your business then?

An old friend of mine runs Photoshop Cafe.

http://www.photoshopcafe.com/

I stick to an old version of Paint Shop Pro myself LOL!

Don't normally need anything too heavy to be done, etc.

Cheers,

stevey

buteverde · 30-03-05

Thanks, Stevey . . .
That is truly a wonderful tutorial site. Bookmarked and I'll be back often.

Photoshop's only a piece of the puzzle for me. I have to put the whole project together and get it to the printer in a way that works smoothly. All adds up to a lot of attention to detail, as I'm sure you know.