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How a Technical Writer and Illustrator Work Together

How a Technical Writer and Illustrator Work Together. Christine Arthur Christine Arthur Design Group 4.20.09. Why Technical Illustration?. “A picture says a thousand words” Reinforce your writing Seeing is believing FOCUS – wade through information quickly; highlight what’s important

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How a Technical Writer and Illustrator Work Together

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  1. How a Technical Writer and Illustrator Work Together Christine Arthur Christine Arthur Design Group 4.20.09

  2. Why Technical Illustration? “A picture says a thousand words” • Reinforce your writing • Seeing is believing • FOCUS – wade through information quickly; highlight what’s important • PATIENCE! Quick Start Guides, Getting Started, NOW NOWNOW. The immediate gratification factor.

  3. Understanding the Process WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO COMMUNICATE? A process? A product? A feature? A difference?

  4. Understanding the Process WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO COMMUNICATE? • A process? • A product? • A feature? • A difference?

  5. Communicating with the Writer • Understanding what the writer will be writing about • Going through the motions – testing out the dialog • Focusing on what’s important

  6. The Process Communication Goals Reference Photography Understanding / exploration / demo your process PRIOR to illustration; DON’T HAVE THE ILLUSTRATOR JUST DO IT Doing a sketch

  7. Communicating Visually

  8. The Importance of Accuracy

  9. Communicating Visually

  10. Tools of the Trade Adobe Illustrator – 14th generation First developed for the Apple Macintosh in 1986 (shipping in January 1987) as a commercialization of Adobe's in-house font development software and PostScript file format • Industry-standard • Vector based • Output to virtually ANY format, ANY size

  11. Competitive Products, Past and Present • CorelDRAW's competitors include Adobe Illustrator and XaraXtreme. Although all of these are vector-based illustration programs, the user experience differs greatly between them. While these programs will read their native file types and vice versa, the translation is almost never perfect. CorelDRAW can open Adobe PDF files: Adobe PageMaker, Microsoft Publisher and Word, and other programs can print documents to PDF using the Adobe PDFWriter printer driver, which CorelDRAW can then open and edit every aspect of the original layout and design. CorelDRAW can also open PowerPoint Presentations and other Microsoft Office formats with little or no problem. • CorelDRAW was originally developed for Microsoft Windows and currently runs on Windows XP and Windows Vista.[1] The current version, X4, was released (ver. 14.0.0.567) on 22nd January, 2008. • Versions for Mac OS and Mac OS X were at one time available, but due to poor sales these were discontinued. The last port for Linux was version 9 (released in 2000, it didn't run natively, instead it used a modified version of Wine to run) and the last version for OS X was version 11 (released in 2001). Also, up until version 5, CorelDRAW was developed for Windows 3.1x and OS/2.

  12. Communicating Visually • Less is more • Key details • Avoid distractions • Reference points/objects

  13. Aspects of Technical Illustration • Why Technical Illustration? Why not a digital photo?? • Illustration vs Technical Illustration – how much detail to show? • How will these illustrations be used? Online, manuals, signage

  14. File Formats AI EPS JPEG PNG BMP TIFF

  15. File Formats -- continued Vector vs Raster http://www.cartype.com/page.cfm?id=2950

  16. Concepts and VaporWare

  17. What’s Important

  18. When to Use Color • How will these illustrations be reproduced? • Docutechvs Offset Printing • Will color add any information? • How will your color usage translate to black and white? • Do your chosen colors have any meaning? • -- Corporate colors/color meaning chart

  19. International Color International color chart here

  20. Tools of the Trade

  21. Fonts and Copy Will your documents be translated? -- Issues for translations Do you NEED to say anything? Image file separate program/process to edit than copy Are there corporate fonts to consider? Style Guides?? Cross platform friendly fonts for Mac/PC -- OpenTypevs. TrueType vs.PostScript Outlining fonts prior to production Less is more Font selection – Serif vsSansSerif Fonts Aa Aa

  22. Sizing and Formatting Figure out the ultimate size of your images PRIOR to creating them Proporations Clarity Cropping Ultimate readability for various production processes

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