Ask a Design Pro #2

I love receiving feedback from readers/viewers! I am a firm believer that one person’s design dilemma can help another. Therefore, I’m excited to launch a new section of this blog entitled Ask a Design Pro. I will post questions and comments from my wonderful readers/viewers and provide answers or feedback. In return, my hope is that we can all learn and grow our skills as design pros.

Have a design dilemma? Great! I hope I can help. I’m accepting submissions via email, Facebook, Youtube and Twitter. Please use #Ask a Design Pro for easier searching!

I am looking to start a magazine. I found magcloud, but I am not sure how to prepare my document from ps to a pdf ( I think that is what they want). Any chance you could pass on some expert advice for me? —Linda”

Magazine production is a massive undertaking but oh so rewarding and fun. If you want to get involved in this, then I would suggest you learn InDesign. It is the best program for publication layout and you can quickly export your magazine into a PDF for magcloud. Plus, you can create templates and reuse them for each new issue, saving you lots of time. Head over to the tutorials page here for some in-depth how-tos specific to magazines.

Firstly, I like to say that your videos are very useful and a big thank you for taking the time to make those videos and uploading them on YouTube. I have learn a lot from your videos. Secondly, I am a freelancer at the moment but I feel that I am not gaining enough experience in the graphic design industry, I would like work in a graphic design company to gain more experience. Do you have any advice on how should I approach this situation? —Yee Lau”

Thank you! My advice to you is to find projects you enjoy to gain more experience. If that means working for an agency, great. However, there are alternatives that can be equally rewarding. Even creating something for a fake project is going to help you gain experience and skills with the corresponding design program. Design experience comes from doing, so get out there and be the best you can be and learn…learn….learn every step of the way! Also, be sure to get out there in your community and talk up your biggest asset, you. You’ll get more jobs, meaning more experience and samples for your portfolio. It’s a process to work you way up in the industry, but keep at it and you’ll go far.

I’m trying to get into the graphical design industry and I really wanted to know how to create a downloadable PDF portfolio for potential employers to view. I would like to know which programs and settings to properly export a multipage PDF portfolio please. —Angelo”

You’ll want to check out my PDF presets tutorial for the settings I use for the majority of my PDFs. I use InDesign to lay out my portfolio and then export to a PDF using my preset from there. It’s up to you how you want to lay out your work and the size of the document, but InDesign is the first step.

Readers: Share your thoughts and experiences regarding these design dilemmas below in the comments!