As many of you know, the job of designing a brochure somehow dropped on my unartistic shoulders. I created something using the Creative Cloud for our Board Meeting on Saturday, and received immediate feedback about what to change. This was my first time ever to use Adobe Illustrator, and it represented about 8 or more hours of intensive effort. I just LOOKS so easy a first grader could do it! I would not call Illustrator an intuitive, user-friendly program.
Today I spent the entire day creating a new brochure with an artsy look rather than a blocky photography look. My husband helped me on this one by brainstorming with me, then finding me a nice artsy print to get my creative dry mouth (there were not juices) started. He also agreed with Cotton that the California Bear Flag was the primary symbol to use to anchor this brochure.
I couldn’t find the same picture he did, and I thought I would be so clever and Photoshop of our own meetings. It didn’t transfer well into Illustrator, so he emailed me the picture he found. I made major changes on it before I used it.
The hardest part after he found the anchor artwork for the meeting was to create a seamless look between the artwork and the background. I’m not sure I could do any of it again at this point. I found that it was easier to merge the pictures and the background in Photoshop than in Illustrator. I couldn’t even get the paintbrush tool to activate on the layer I wanted in Illustrator, and I couldn’t flatten the layers. So back to what I knew. I got a little paint on the photos, but I’m hoping it gives that artsy-dreamy look. I need to brush up my coloring skills.
I tried using the select tools, but forgot how to use them correctly, and so I just colored around the map – that took forever!!! I also had to do it more than once. The first time I thought I coud just place it into Illustrator. Place is how you get your photographs to stick on the background in both Illustrator and Photoshop. That is in the file drop down menu.
I found out that Photoshop CS6 is different enough from Elements 10 that I had a bit of a learning curve, but I was able to McIver my way through the project.
After I was as pleased as I could be in the amount of time that I wanted to devote to my 4th makeover, I saved the project as a jpeg and then placed it over the first page white blank sheet in Adobe Illustrator. Then I just added the words. V helped me with the words, too. He used to be in advertising, and he focused me on what was really the reason for the brochure – to GET PEOPLE TO JOIN THE ORGANIZATION! So that went in the top right hand corner. DUH!
I got it all done, and sent out to our Exec. Board, and realized I had misspelled California. Believe it or not I had to start back in Photoshop and get my three pictures together again on the background.
I finally got the words back on using Illustrator because the words are sharper if you use Illustrator rather than Photoshop.
I had a few changes to do to the inside, but those were simple. So this is the journey I’ve been on for the last few days since our start long ago with the simple cover you all voted on.
Thanks so much for all your input. I appreciate when YOU offer suggestions. Thanks also to V for all the help you gave me this morning, and the patience to see me through my tears without trying to SOLVE all my problems. I knew I could do this if I just put my mind to it. I was not going to be overcome by a computer program!!!! 🙂
Marsha Ingrao - Always Write 
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