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Welcome to the Online Digital World of Vahid Lancaster - Graphic Artist, Web Designer and Internet Entrepreneur. This website is all about my passion for computer graphics and web design. Anything that I am doing regarding these particular fields, it would be on this website. I have been a Web Design, Computer Graphics and Microsoft Instructor since 1998. These are fields that I love and I know that I would not be leaving these fields anytime soon. I first began using computers in 1991 and I was hooked from the very beginning. It was also around that time that I began developing a passion for teaching - although I did not know it at the time. From then till now, I have had the privilege of educating many people and as I learn more about these fields, I take pleasure in passing on my knowledge - whether in the classroom or online. After all, teaching is actually a learning experience. Besides teaching in the classroom, I also like to create 3d artwork. Some of my art pieces would be found in the Artwork page. Feel free to check it out and let me know what you think. My tutorials, tips and other articles can also be found here. I also like to create 3d animations and experiments in motion graphics. You can have a look at some of my creations in the Animations page. I hope that you will enjoy your stay at VahidLancaster.com. Drop me a line if you are interested in getting in touch with me. Preflight to Your Printer Specs In InDesignI was on a press check at a local printer that I work with quite often and got into a conversation about the new Live Preflight feature with the head of the prepress department. He kidded, “Wouldn’t be great if I could set up a custom Preflight Profile that includes everything that we normally check in our prepress department and then supply it to all of our customers who are using CS4?” Viewing Color Separations In IllustratorI was training a group of advanced computer graphic artists, who were new to Illustrator. In a discussion about print production, one artist said, “In Photoshop, I can turn off or on various combinations the CMYK ‘plates’ in the Channels panel. I find it useful in seeing how much of a particular color is being used. I know there’s no Channels panel in Illustrator, but is there a way to turn plates on or off?” Getting Rid Of Stray Text Objects In IllustratorI got a phone call from one of my former students, who was using the knowledge he gained from my InDesign training classes to learn Illustrator on his own. He ran into a problem however, when using Illustrator’s Type tool (T). Why? In InDesign, clicking with the Type tool on a empty area of your document does nothing. In Illustrator however, clicking with the same Type tool creates a Point Type object, which is type that starts at a point and is not contained within a Frame. How To Properly Unlink Text Frames In InDesignI’m sure many of you have asked this question. Is there any way to unlink Text Frames, and have the existing text remain in each of the Frames? Well there is a way to indeed do this, but it requires a script. How To Change Your Artboad Size In IllustratorI got a call from an artist, who I trained a while ago in Illustrator CS2, with a question about something that has changed in CS4. He asked, “I’m working on my first really big project in CS4 and I’m stuck on something that used to be so simple in all of the previous versions of Illustrator that I’ve used. I go to File > Document Setup and everything has changed. How do I alter the size of my Artboard? The Width and Height are nowhere to be found”. Fixing Your Nested Styles In InDesignDuring one of my InDesign classes, one of my students questioned, “Why is my Nested Style not working correctly? I set up the Style to Nest a Bold Character Style through the first sentence. Sometimes it works perfectly, other times not at all.” How To Fix Printing Problems In IllustratorEver ran into a situation where part of your artwork is not printed – even though you know that your artwork is within the print area of your artboard? You are looking at your design on the artboard and you know that it is within the printed area – but for some reason, when it comes time to print, only a part of your design is printed out – that can be preety annoying to say the least. So how in the world do you fix a problem like that? How To Keep Your Rulers From DisappearingI got an email from a former student who was facing an interesting delima in his design office. He opened a new document and something did not seem quite right. There where no Rulers at the top and left side of his document window. “Where did they go?” He asked me. Well I certainly did not steal them from you, I joked to myself. How To Apply Masters To Various PagesMasters are extremely useful in InDesign when it comes to creating pages with consistent layouts. You can create masters very easily and you can apply them to your pages in multiple ways. Here’s one way that you can try out. To apply a different Master to one of your pages, select the page in the Pages panel and go under the Options menu and select ‘Apply Master to Pages.’ In the window that opens, choose the Master you would like to apply from the Apply Master popup, and press OK. But are there faster ways to apply masters to pages? Make Your Images Look BetterThere are very few Preferences that I actually change in InDesign, mainly because the Defaults are so in sync with the way that I do my work. One Preference however that I usually recommend changing is the Display Performance for Typical View (Command+K [Control+K on the PC]). Why do I change this Preference? Well its because my Photoshop images may look O.K using Typical, but the look of my Illustrator files however can simply look awful. |
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Unless otherwise stated, all content and artwork on this site was created by Vahid Lancaster (let no one deny my power - LOL) © 2000-2010: Vahid Lancaster Online |