05.17.07 - 05.18.07  Chicago

The IIT Institute of Design Strategy Conference is an international executive forum addressing how businesses can use design to explore emerging opportunities, solve complex problems, and achieve lasting strategic advantage.

Global businesses increasingly appreciate how design and design thinking can provide them with high-level, strategic value and competitive advantage. In an intensely competitive market, with ever more diverse and demanding customers, executives are often left unsure of exactly what products, communications and services to create for what segments of the market. Design, with its ability to understand users, redefine problems and create systemic, human-centered solutions, can help companies better understand their customer’s daily lives, and lead directly to valuable (and valued) offerings that are effectively tailored to their market.

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Joe Marin and Tracey Ryan wrote a brief, useful summary of the most common errors to avoid when creating a PDF for output on press: image resolution, compression and color space, fonts, bleeds, and communication with your printer.

Read it at www.creativepro.com/printerfriendly/story/25236.html.

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Quark hands-on road show (16 April - 7 June 2007)

Creative professionals are invited to attend interactions ‘07, a Quark road show with a difference, featuring FREE scheduled training classes on QuarkXPress 7 and Quark Interactive Designer at 35 different locations across Europe. The events are designed for anyone not currently using QuarkXPress 7.

Attendees will get to work with a wide range of new page layout design features in QuarkXPress 7 and then build on these skills using the award-winning Quark Interactive Designer to add motion, sound, and interactivity in their designs with output to SWF (Flash®) files.

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Two places to potentially sell your Mac are:

www.MacSwap.org

www.SecondHandMac.com

You can get an estimate of its worth at www.EZTradeIn.com.

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Welcome to the 10th Anniversary of the Penn State Web Conference!

Web 2007 is open to University employees who support an official Penn State Web site as a server administrator, writer, designer, programmer or manager. This year’s conference will offer twenty-eight sessions and a full day of tutorials with a special Tuesday anniversary luncheon.

Web 2007 will be held on Monday, June 11, 2007 at the Penn Stater Conference Center.

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Photoshop pro Jack Davis and onOne Software have released a set of free custom presets for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. PhotoPresets includes 20 presets that apply adjustment settings to imported images and to images in the Library and Develop modules. This is an easy way to apply Jack’s years of image editing experience to your own photos.

onOne Software www.ononesoftware.com

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Win a $50 (approx £25) Amazon Voucher by writing a blog post on, either your biggest graphic design bloopers (mistake/s) or the biggest/funniest design mistakes you have seen.

To enter just email competition@graphicdesignblog.co.uk with your blog post from 50 - 500 words long, if you have got an image of the design blooper to go with it that’s great too. It can be your own design mistake, a colleagues or something you have seen in a book or on the web.

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Apple added a delay in Mac OS X 10.4.9 for the Media Eject key on your keyboard, hoping to help prevent users from accidentally ejecting optical discs from their computers. If you quickly press and release the Eject key, the CD or DVD won’t eject, making it appear stuck. Instead, just press and hold the Eject key for two or three seconds to eject the disc.

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The InDesign Conference Melbourne, Australia
August 30-31, 2007

The InDesign Conference is returning to Melbourne August 2007 and this year the event will be held at RMIT.

 This years conference will be 2 days, 2 tracks and will feature InDesign experts from Australia and abroad. The InDesign Conference is the most in-depth, dedicated Adobe InDesign event anywhere. You can download the event PDF and check out the sessions, speakers and events that were held in Chicago The InDesign Conference May 15-18, 2006.

 Speakers and session details will be posted soon.  Please check back for the latest details or sign up for our event updates and be the first to find out what is new as well as special offers for Adobe InDesign Users.

This year we have also partnered with Desktop Magazine to present to you The Create Awards.  All InDesign Conference attendees will get a pass to the awards on Friday, 31 August as part of their registration.  Normally these tickets are $95. Save this date! In addition to acknowledging great talent, The Create Awards are a great opportunity to meet with other designers from around the country.

More event details and a few surprises will be announced soon. Register to lock in your discounted rate and save your seat.  Seating is limited and the last few conferences have sold out!

For more information visit www.barrycon.com

One terrific, easy way to discover which websites are linking to yours is www.wholinkstome.com. It shows your Google Page Rank, how many links found by Yahoo and MSN Search, blogs that link to you, and more. Its Alexa link shows traffic statistics for the past three months at your site.

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The InDesign Conference New York
June 4-8, 2007

The InDesign Conference will be held in New York June 4-8, 2007 at the Conference Center at FIT. The InDesign Conference will include 18 leading InDesign experts and will cover over 40 sessions. In addition, 2 QuickStart classes on June 4 (InDesign Quickstart and InCopy/InDesign Workflow), full day Mastering the Adobe Creative Suite on June 8th, and 4 additional half day paid tutorials during the conference.

The InDesign Conference is the most in depth, dedicated Adobe InDesign event anywhere. You can download the event PDF and check out the sessions, speakers and events that are currently scheduled for The InDesign Conference New York.

More announcements and a few surprises will be announced soon. Please sign up for our event updates and be the first to find out what is new and special offers for Adobe InDesign Users.

For more information visit www.barrycon.com

If you’re fortunate enough to have discovered Macility’s PopChar ($30), you can now share your fortune with Windows users — version 3 for Windows is nearly identical to the Mac version. It’s an elegant way to find and insert any glyph from a font into your current document.

Macility www.macility.com

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GRAPH EXPO - the most comprehensive prepress, printing, package printing, converting, mailing and fulfillment and digital equipment trade show and conference in the Americas
 
September 9 - 12, 2007
McCormick Place, Chicago, IL

You’ll see the latest in technologies in digital printing, variable data printing, RIPs, workflow software and more, on display on the huge exhibit floor. Here you will learn how to develop new services, find new customers, keep customers loyal and gain profit from each. Plus, GRAPH EXPO’s series of educational seminars taught by industry experts, offers an unmatched learning experience with over 60 sessions to choose from!

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QuarkXPress 7: Upgrading from Version 6, by Erika Kendra, is a step-by-step, hands-on training manual for learning the new features of QuarkXPress 7. It includes a CD containing all the example files in the book. If you learn best from books, this is the best one we’ve found. 196 pages, $39.99 from Against The Clock.

If you learn better from video-based training, try QuarkXPress 7: New Features, by Jay Nelson. Its 5.5 hours of self-paced training covers every new feature in a relaxed, supportive style. $99 from Lynda.com.

Against The Clock www.againsttheclock.com

Lynda.com www.lynda.com

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Theme of the FGD Expo 2007 has been announced as “where Technology meets Creativity” to reflect the present trend of convergence in graphic arts technology which is mainly driven by creative businesses. As such, FGD Expo 2007 is driven towards setting a higher benchmark in promotion, publishing and packaging businesses that will match or surpass any standards in Indonesia as well as South East Asia.

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Zevrix’s LinkOptimizer 1.0 ($75) is a plug-in for Illustrator that reduces the size of linked images that were resized and/or cropped in Illustrator. If the effective resolution of any image is higher than a target resolution you define, LinkOptimizer backs up the image, opens the copy in Photoshop, changes its dimensions and re-imports it into the Illustrator document at 100% size. It can optionally also convert the image’s color mode to CMYK, RGB or Grayscale, apply sharpening filters and flatten the image.

Zevrix Solutions www.zevrix.com

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Chicago Conference: May 4th - 4th, 2007
New York Conference: June 8th - 8th, 2007

presented by Sandee Cohen
Here is the description for the class:

How the Creative Suite applications work together.
 
Now that you know each individual application in the Adobe Creative Suite, this class, led by author and trainer Sandee Cohen, will show you the insider tips and tricks of how to make the applications work even harder together.

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If you are planning to purchase more than one of Alien Skin’s image effects plug-ins for Photoshop, make note of their new five-pack deal: Eye Candy Effects Collection. The collection includes Eye Candy 5: Impact, Eye Candy 5: Nature, Eye Candy 5: Textures, Xenofex 2, and Snap Art, for $399. Bought individually, the plug-ins cost $575.

Alien Skin www.alienskin.com

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iStockphoto Invites Voters to Judge 125 Global Entries in “Future Now” Video Contest

Calgary, Alberta – May 3, 2007 – iStockphoto®, the world’s most visited stock photo and video site, announced that voting is now open for Future Now!,” the first iStockvideo contest. The contest, which began in February and closed on April 30, garnered 125 entries from countries around the globe, including the U.S., Pakistan, Portugal, Holland, Australia and the UK. Voting for the top 12 videos in both the “Funny” and “Not Funny” categories is now open to the community through May 8 at www.istockphoto.com/futurenowcontest.

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If you work in a cross-platform studio, Mediafour’s MacDrive 7 ($50) is a great tool for Windows users because it allows Windows to mount and use Mac-formatted storage devices. The new version adds support for Windows Vista, lets Windows users format and partition Mac disks, burn CDs and DVDs, and is Boot Camp compatible — very handy if you boot your Intel Mac from Windows but still want to see your Mac OS X partition.

MediaFour www.mediafour.com

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