If you’re “in learning” like I am then you probably have to take these nerve shattering things they call “tests”. And if there’s anything I know about them, it’s that they suck. But there are a few ways you can prepare for these kinds of tests.
Videos
There are numerous types of videos for you to use for testing. Watch the tutorials on sites like, Linkedin learning, or the sites youtubers keep promoting like skillshare, or you can even look up youtube videos that teach you how to do things if whatever the schools provide aren’t working.
Practicing
Practice doing the the stuff you see them do. Don’t just watch the videos in the hopes that you’ll understand it, because they aren’t that simple. They’re really not. Just watch and do the stuff after or while you watch it. The term practice makes perfect exists for a reason.
There really isn’t much no know about how to study for this kind of test because you really need to just practice the stuff that they’re going to test you on. I do this alot and I passed the certification test easily. Now I did do this before so photoshop wasn’t hard for me to certify in, but this is the best way for you to study for this.
When it comes to fonts there are many different types than just Ariel, Times New Roman, and…
From mytimes.com
We ain’t using this anymore. Don’t use this. EVER. There is nothing less professional than comic sans. So we’re going to talk about fonts and how to do them right.
Open Type Fonts
from adobe.com
Open type fonts are cross platform font file formats that were developed by adobe and microsoft. The main benefits of open type fonts are it’s cross-platform compatibility (so they can work on both mac and windows pcs), and its ability to support widely expanded character sets and layout features, which provide richer linguistic support and advanced typographic control. Feature-rich adobe open-type fonts can be distinguished by the word “pro”, which is a part of the font name. Open type fonts can be installed and used alongside Postscript Type 1 and TrueType fonts.
Open type fonts significantly simplifies font management and the publishing workflow by ensuring that all of the required glyphs for a document are contained in one cross-platform font file throughout the workflow. Open-type fonts may contain more than 65,000 glyphs, which allow a single font file to contain many non-standard glyphs, such as old-style figures, true small capitals, fractions, swatches, superiors, inferiors, titling letters, contextual, and stylistic alternates, and full range of ligatures.
Postscript Fonts
from: fonts.com
Postscript fonts are generally two main components to Postscript Typefaces. The first file contains the actual Post script typeface itself and is often called the “binary” or “printer file” file. The second file contains the typeface’s complete name, the spacing characteristics and information to help the computer display the typeface on the screen and for printing the font. Both files need to be submitted.
Truetype Fonts
from: computer.howstuffworks.com
Truetype fonts only require one file to be submitted for each instance of the font. For example, a different file is needed for normal, bold, italic, etc. Truetype typefaces are generally intended for business office use and can be less reliable for publishing applications. Only use Truetype typefaces when the typeface is unavailable in Postscript format.
And now you know a little more about fonts, and how they work. Now go type a good story and remember, DONT USE COMIC SANS.
When it comes to making gifs (not pronounced JIFFs), it’s a bit more complicated than taking a picture, or just drawing a picture. Because in animation it’s really about multiple pictures with objects in multiple positions.
I used photoshop for this.
There are multiple ways of making animated gifs, you can use software such as Photoshop (which is what I used) or other adobe software such as animate, or premier. As you can see there is a timeline for this displaying the start to finish for the length of the video.
The dots in the transform timeline are pivot points which indicate where the action is supposed to start and finish. The pivots in the transform timeline means that I was using the transform action to move the lock object. This method is called in-betweening (or tweening as the animators on youtube would say), where you would get an object and transform (move) it giving it the Illusion of motion.
To export as an actual animation you first need to save for web. First go to file -> export -> save for web legacy, then where it says PSD change it to gif.
There are other ways to animate like frame by frame, and photoshop can do that but I’m not an expert on the frames portion of it, when it comes to frame by frame I would use another software. Here’s a video that will explain it better. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2fy_iNFhFo. And the tutorial that I used is this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbwQwDg8x0Y.
It’s not the ball animation tutorial that you will mostly see in animation tutorials, but it’s close enough right? Yes, good. So if you followed the tutorial you should have something that looks like my animation above. Now go create some nice business slides, cartoons, or memes or whatever you’re feeling.
As we’ve went over before when printing anything, the color mode for print is CMYK and not RGB. Some programs can do this for you when you go straight to printing and you can set it to CMYK from there. But here’s how you do it before hand.
First you pull up an image on photoshop.
Then you go into edit -> convert to profile color then it will give you the option to change it to CMYK automatically depending on the printer you use.
Then as you can see the color mode changed from RGB to CMYK.
(This picture was made after converting the last image which is why the blue circle looks duller, product of converting) To print go to the file tab-> print, and you’ll see all these options. Where it says document profile it should say web coated (which is basically CMYK). Once you are done setting up hit print.
It works similarly in other programs such as illustrator as well but the placements are somewhat different.
In illustrator you need to go to file for this one.
In file find “document color mode” and choose CMYK instead.
And now it should say CMYK instead of RGB.
There are different programs that does this differently but the ways that they do this isn’t hard. Just go to file (mostly) and find the settings that convert to CMYK, you can even do it right before you print. Also if you see some type of warning telling you that the color isn’t supported for CMYK then click on the warning and it should set it to a similar but more well supported color pallet.
That’s basically it, it’s that simple. Now get out there and print something nice.
When it comes to designing, something to keep in mind are colors. Not which color you should use for your clothing design website, I mean which colors are safe for the web.
When it comes to the web, colors are made in RGB (reds, greens, and blues), and print (on paper) is made of CMYK colors (cyans, magentas, yellows, and blacks… yeah its black).
Web colors are specified as RGB triplet or hexadecimal format. Hexadecimal color codes are specified with notation using a leading # sign (not a hashtag).
In the mid-90s, many displays were only capable of displaying 216 colors due to the limited hardware.
Looks like windows 95 right? It basically is.
Nowadays our computers are capable of at least 256. Approximately 10% of the newest computers can only use 256 colors (8-bit). Others are equipped with 64 thousand colors (16-bit) and the highest quality deliver 16.7 million (24-bit).
When it comes to web safe colors, one thing to keep in mind is dithering. If your computer doesn’t have all the colors available for the website then it will try to simulate the colors by mixing two or more available colors from the pallet to give it the illusion of the color making it look like it has spots.
ditheringnon-dithering
Windows 95 stuff that is.
Spot colors are CMYK colors (printing colors), and are generated by ink. CMYK does a similar proccess of mixing colors (solid) together to generate another; like cyan and magenta to make a blue or purple, or cyan and yellow to make greens. Today they are used for print, and are used by various printing companies, such as pantone. There’s really nothing that complex about CMYK, only that it’s used just for printing and only CMYK is what prints. You can’t use RGB to print unless you have an LED based RGB printer. You can preview what your picture looks like when you edit it in photoshop by looking in the previews before you print.
And now you know a little more about colors and the history behind them.
When it comes to businesses and idea pitching what comes to the rescue would be mood boards. These are simply collages of certain images, text samples, and objects in a composition. They can be random, but this is business, so it must be topical or you’ll just be spewing nonsense. The best way to make a mood board is to first know what it is you’re doing; that’s a given, and since you know what you’re doing you need to know this thing called: grouping. Grouping is putting items that go together,… together. Even if your mood board has a purpose without organization by grouping subjects together it will still look like nonsense. So group relevant topics together and it will look presentable.
Programs/Tools
So how do you make a mood board? Well you and literally build a mood board on the wall or on the floor; it will look terrible, but you could still make one like that if you choose. Some good tools to make some would be:
Powerpoint
Keynote (Apple’s powerpoint)
Google slides (googles free powerpoint)
InDesign (oldschool methods)
Pintrest (oldschool methods)
Personally I mostly use powerpoint, because it can organize my points using slides (also I use windows so I don’t use keynote). Google slides is just like powerpoint but it’s free and you don’t have to worry about saving documents because it’s saved in a cloud. And I don’t use pintrest or InDesign.
So remember this. In order to make a mood board, you need to get ideas together on a “board” but the best mood board is one that’s well organized. And remember you can use the programs I’ve mentioned but you don’t have to use them, you can literally do it on a wall (but I would advise not really doing it that way).
No I don’t mean the mud bricks, I mean the Adobe CC software. Adobe CC (which means Creative Cloud) is a service that can offer applications and services for editing photos, creating videos and animations, and even design websites.
One of the tools and applications used to edit photos in adobe cc is Photoshop. There are other applications for photo editing, such as photoshops desktop equivalent Lightroom classic, and a few cloud services like bridge and lightroom (modern). For now we’re looking at photoshop as an editor, although you can use bridge or lightroom to view your photos before working on them in photoshop but neither of them are necessary for it, but it’s still helpful to drag and drop your images in one of the programs to view them before editing them. In photoshop you can use various tools to basically touch up photos, or create something grander. One tool for example is “the spot healing brush tool (the band-aid looking tool)”, it works like a paintbrush to cover up anything like spots using the pixels that surround it. Basically, think of it as filling a hole with the surrounding mound of dirt (but not really).
Some other little shortcuts and do-dads to remember:
Undo: command (mac PC) + Z, ctrl (windows PC) + Z
Redo: Command+shift+Z, ctrl+shift+Z
Copy: command/ctrl+C
Paste: command/crtl+v
A few issues to note and how to fix them:
MacOS 10.15 catalina compatibility need photoshop 21.0 and 20.0.7, and sometimes when you save them as a copy it doesn’t append “copy”. To work around this just manually rename the image and add copy.
When working with cloud documents, you might have issues saving as a cloud document. To fix any issue just check to see if creative cloud needs an update.
When working on videos you can use photoshop, but there are other programs that specialize in video editing. Premier, after affects, and animate to name a few. Premier pro is a timeline based video editing app to edit movies, which was used in creating movies such as Deadpool, Gone girl, and Captain Abu Raed. After effects is used for creating visual effects for the movies, and animate is used to create vector based graphics for websites and T.V shows. If there are issues with the program
Such as:
Drop in (choppy) frames
audio drop out
No video during playback
Playback getting stuck when you hit the spacebar
If these issues occur
Ensure the file that you’re using
Update the video card driver: flawed video display card drivers can incorrectly display motion video and textures.
Temporarily switch to single display configuration.
For web designing the adobe software to use is dreamweaver and XD.
Dreamweaver uses both live view and a code editor with standard features such as syntax highlighting, code completion/collapsing, and more advanced features like real-time syntax checking, and code introspection for code hints.
Adobe XD is a vector based program used to make mobile and web apps and supports wireframing, you can even use it for your mobile device.
XD contains features like:
Repeat grid: for photos and lists
prototype and animation: create animated prototypes through linking art boards.
Voice design
Issues with the programs and how to fix them:
If the extension isn’t displayed on dreamweaver, close it out and install the extension.
If you have dreamweaver and cant install new updates for dreamweaver 12 and up, you need to install the latest extension manager for further extensions.
Also for extensions use .zxp files, and mxp files for manager CS.
So these are the Adobe programs used to for web designing, movie making, and photo editing.
When it comes to mac vs pc people think that either the mac can do everything pc can do or it can do it better. But here’s the thing; if you can’t tell, the mac runs a completely different operating system than the pc. As a matter of fact, the mac has its own operating system that only it can use. Such as iCloud; which is universal for all mac OS devices, and many other apps ranging from creativity, productivity, and communication. The mac OS is designed to be used as simple as it can possibly be.
So what about a PC? Well let’s ask ourselves what the acronym “PC” even is. PC actually stands for: Personal Computer, which is something a mac technically is also. So what else is there besides mac? There’s windows (and I guess linux, but shhh, we wont talk about that).
Let’s talk similarities
First off lets address the elephant in the room. What are the similarities between them? Well first off they’re both PC’s; Yeah I know that I stated that already but it’s important to remember this because there’s a common misconception that PC is just the computer that isn’t a mac; but it isn’t, it is really the windows that’s “the other one”.
As a matter of fact according to lifewire.com they both:
Use the same basic hardware components.
They both have a similar interface that allows you to save, click, and run apps on your desktop.
They both allow you to use cloud storage services like Dropbox, Googledrive, and Box.net, (never used that one though).
And they actually both have assistants. Mac OS products have Siri, while windows have Cortana. Although I personally don’t really use her myself.
Lastly, you can actually use microsoft products on both OS’s.
Also You can even install windows OS on your mac.
Good and bad. Art by: me.
Difference between them
Even though Macs and windows are both PCs, both types are very different, in design, and functionality. In fact according to howstuffworks.com, mac designs its PCs with more expensive components, hence why they usually sell for less than $1000, and come pre-installed with vastly different software packages. Some software are compatible with both though you’ll have to manually install some software.
More ways that mac and windows are different include, but not limited to:
Availability: Certain retailers don’t sell Apple products such as, walmart, and are usually ordered online. However some outlets do have Apple specific stores. You can find both mac and windows PCs in stores that mainly specialize in technology like Best Buy, or Brandsmart.
Operating systems: In modern times we use windows 10. Back in the old days, in 1983, we used to use windows vista. It need a lot of updates and extra packages to run certain operations like 3-D graphics, and was prone to lots of crashes. For mac the first OS was developed by Co-founder Steve Jobs in 1984, but due to leadership problems Jobs resigned and began working on a project called the NeXT computer, which ran on an operating system called NEXTSTEP. This became the staple for mac OS’s in 1999. Now the mac OS runs on Kernels: which controls and monitors hardware resources like memory, CPU processors, and disk drives. Machs: which basically an old Kernel code to manage memory, multitasking, and reduce processing speed to prevent overheating. And of course Device drivers: used for external devices.
So now you’re wondering “which one can I use to tea-bag noobs in counter-strike”. Well it’s the Windows of course. You can play games on the mac, such as World of warcraft, Starcraft, Duke Nukem, Civilization and hundreds more games, but it’s very limited and Apple even had to collaborate with microsoft to optimize it’s products. So it’s best to just stick with the one OS that has been able to function for gaming since the day it was made, the windows.
Old picture made by me
Security
Now admittedly the windows is more prone to cyber attacks than mac but mainly because most of the worlds PCs run a windows OS. However that doesn’t mean that mac OS’s aren’t prone to attacks either. As a matter of fact there are trojans that disguise themselves as mac OS software, like Mac defender just to steal credit information.
So what should you get?
Well it’s not a matter of what you SHOULD get, but a matter of what you want to do. If you want a strong fast PC that can stream games and do work then I would recommend getting windows. But if you don’t play that many games and just want to browse the internet then go ahead with a mac. Personally I use a windows PC, but mainly for working and sometimes playing games.
Henry Iglesia 