Designing a handout

[Hardcoreruss]

As you all may or may not know I am starting my own business.

I want to design a professional looking hand out to be put in with my mail shot.

I could do a pretty good one in Word or Publisher but ones I have seen done with adobe products look much more professional.

Can anyone recommend a program?, maybe one that has pre determined templates also?

It is going to be going to a printer so it needs to be able to save it in a high quality format also.

[pacmania_2001]

Have you considered outsourcing it to a design company? Most places that print handouts, business cards etc also have a designer who can do it for you.

It's not as expensive as most people think as well and it provides a much more professional image than a home done job unless you're really good with a product like Photoshop.

[VCDHunter]

Have you considered outsourcing it to a design company? Most places that print handouts, business cards etc also have a designer who can do it for you.

Agreed. I outsource any Photoshop work to a mate in Brazil.

[Hardcoreruss]

I have already spent a lot of money on design and it does not need to be THAT fancy.

Therefore I would like to give it a bash myself. Does photoshop have templates for handouts?

[VCDHunter]

I have already spent a lot of money on design and it does not need to be THAT fancy.

Therefore I would like to give it a bash myself. Does photoshop have templates for handouts?

Probably, Paint Shop Pro has templates for different things all over the net. Google ?

[thecoalman]

Any image editing app. Photoshop, Paintshop, photoimpact....even the free one Gimp.

I use photoimpact myself. It comes with a lot of templates and objects for projects like that. Here's one from the business card templates. Everthing you see is easily editable... You can add whatever you want, anything really.



Here's one I made myself from scratch for business cards...



BTW photoimpact and Paintshop are about 1/5 the cost of photshop. There just as capable for creating something like that. Photoshop generally is used by professional designers because of the propietary extensions for one thing. they may even be more capable since it's aimed at consumers mostly and will have templates that a consumer would want....not sure about photoshop.

[Hardcoreruss]

Very good Mr Man, I will have to check that out.

How much is the software?

[rallynavvie]

First of all don't use Photoshop for layout, it absolutely mauls text. Photoshop is for editing the raster art in your layout. You should be using InDesign for layout of such a document. I don't recall if it has built-in templates but you can find some on the web if you need them. When I'm doing document creation orders at work I use a combination of InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator. The latter two program support InDesign to edit or create the finer elements of the document such as photo touch-up, logo creation/editing, and so on. InDesign is pretty easy to work with, far more so than Quark or PageMaker

If you're looking for something simple with a lot of templates then you're best just sticking to Publisher. It has heaps of templates. Unfortunately after being in the print/copy biz for so long I can spot a Publisher template pretty easy.

[thecoalman]

Very good Mr Man, I will have to check that out.

How much is the software?

Mr. Man... About $100 bucks for the latest release. You can find older ones for less and for something as simple as that would work just as well.

[Hardcoreruss]

Who make InDesign?, expensive?

[thecoalman]

Who make InDesign?, expensive?

It's only $700 standalone . Nothing against the Adobe products but they can cost a small fortune. Unless your doing it professionally it's not worth.

There's a free trial for Photoimpact... Can't hurt to give it a try. Don't know about the templates but the trial should give you enough functionality to accomplish what you want. I could even e-mail you template or two if you want.

[Hardcoreruss]

$700!!! crikey, and I am trying to keep costs down.

I will give that prog a go Mr Man and let you know when I get home if I need those templates.

Thanks

[thecoalman]

http://www.ulead.com/pi/runme.htm <-------link

[Conquest10]

You can get the Adobe Creative Suite that comes with Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign for about $1,000 or much, much lower if you are a student.

I second what rallynavvie said. Although if you're not using too much text, Photoshop can be good enough for laying out stuff.


A little ot, but I just love the way the three programs (four if you count ImageReady) intigrate so well with each other. You can create a logo in Illustrator and just import the vectors into InDesign. Then create an image in Photoshop and place that into the same InDesign doc. Beautiful.

[SquirrelDip]

... or much, much lower if you are a student...

If you purchased it when you are a student are you still permitted to use it for professional purposes when no longer a student?

I'm guessing it depends on the software agreement... But are there any packages that would permit you to continue once graduated?

[rallynavvie]

I think the way the student licensing should be interpreted is to mean you won't use the software for profit. So if you were to use it for your business to make handouts I would consider that making profit. If you were using them to create invites to your wedding or a party then I don't think Adobe is going to care as long as you have that legitimate serial. However I also don't think they're going to check up on you to make sure you aren't turning a profit from it.

For those that are planning on dropping the $$$ for a design suite the Adobe Creative Suite is a pretty good deal. That and the Adobe video collection are the most used programs on my workstation

[offline]

I'm going to risk being shot down but MS Word can do a great job. (I'm serious)

I'm a pagemaker and corel fan from long past but I was shocked at how well word can handle a fairly complex manual, booklet or flyer.

Sure you don't have any colour separation or post processing needed to make a glossy magazine, but for self printed or colour photocopied/printed stuff, word can surprise you.

There are limits (like the lack of layers) but you can get around them if you are creative. Don't fall for the MS Publisher trap.

Imo Publisher cramps creativity by locking in too many short cuts and your flyer will look just like those crappy restaurant handouts you always bin. Same with the other cheap DTP solutions. It's Word or spend the big bucks (& time) on the industry heavyweights.

I'd suggest maybe buying some word templates to help you get started. Steal graphics from mags and books (scan it) & alter it for your own purposes

[ZAPPER]

Look for like PrintShop or a cheap CAD program in the bargin bin. Hell even some of the photo editing software out there will let you add and modify text. I would love to have a few of the big boy programs but can't see the need to spend a grand for something that I wont be using to make money. Think about what you want on your hand out and then just about any program will be able to do it, getting the program to do what you want is the hard part.

[Hardcoreruss]

I have Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Pro and I just realised that it comes with a program called adobe designer, it looks pretty complex but I am just settling down with the manual.
So I will let you guys know how I get on.

[rallynavvie]

I have Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Pro

Mmm, now there's a program worth its weight in gold 8)

What I don't like is how Adobe keeps updating the Acrobat versions but there aren't any changes to the PDF engine. I'm pretty sure Acrobat 7 is still using PDF version 1.4 or 1.5 that has been around since Acrobat 5. The only thing they change is how layers are handled and so forth, but it forces me to keep upgrading because too many people are stealing the newest version in order to PDF their crap

I should only accept customer art in PostScript from now on