Some advice......

Matt Wallace

New Member
Afternoon all,

I am looking at doing some graphic design as a bit of a hobby and have been looking around at different software. I have been trialling Adobe InDesign and Serif - does anyone have any further recommendations?

Also, looking at creating printing A5 flyers but this probably sound like a really daft question but how do you print? What I mean by this is can I print 2 A5 flyers onto 1 A4 piece of paper? What about the bleed?

Many thanks
Matt
 
Afternoon all,

I am looking at doing some graphic design as a bit of a hobby and have been looking around at different software. I have been trialling Adobe InDesign and Serif - does anyone have any further recommendations?

Also, looking at creating printing A5 flyers but this probably sound like a really daft question but how do you print? What I mean by this is can I print 2 A5 flyers onto 1 A4 piece of paper? What about the bleed?

Many thanks
Matt


Good morning :)

there is also Affinity Designer (Illustrator Photoshop fusion: https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/ (now also available for PC) I myself recently started to experiment with it :)

and of course the open source alternatives like:

GIMP (for Photoshop): https://www.gimp.org/
SCRIBUS (inDesign): https://www.scribus.net/
INKSCAPE (for Illustrator): https://inkscape.org/en/

hope this helps :)
 
What are your thoughts on Affinity @ash?
well ...
I only had a quick brows through and have not check how well, or if at all it will work with my wacom intuos. Illustrator is one of my absolute favourite programs, so I am looking at it quite critically. I will give it a bit longer, since it is a learning curve and I am so used to all the Adobe shortcuts. I will give a longer statement at the end of the month (It's looking good so far and seems good value for money) ;)
 
It's always hard to switch programmes.
I remember moving from Freehand to AI and the learning curve was more like a brick wall.

I have a love/hate thing going on with AI.
I've always thought it could be a LOT more intuitive and I'd have thought they'd have used some of Freehand's nicer tricks when they bought it out.
I do however like what can be done with it.

I've heard a lot of good things about Affinity although not from people that have been using it but it's price and lack of subscription are a major plus.

Looking forward to your road test. :D
 
Also, looking at creating printing A5 flyers but this probably sound like a really daft question but how do you print? What I mean by this is can I print 2 A5 flyers onto 1 A4 piece of paper? What about the bleed?

No, two A5 files will not fit on the A4 sheet because of the additional space required for the bleed and crop marks. You would just create the flyer as an A5 document with the bleed and crop marks and let the print company sort it out form there.

For now I'd go for Affinity, since it's only a £40 one-off payment. Illustrator and other packages is a rolling ~£15 a month subscription you'll be tied into, which isn't a lot if you can cover the costs, but is a lot to pay long-term for a hobby.
 
The two A5 sheets are printed on a SRA4 sheet, or four A5 sheets printed on a SRA3 sheet.

Printing companies look after this.
 
Scribus is a free open source program very similar to InDesign.

I have not used it, but heard it's ok.

Just to note, most print companies use Adobe software, and if you use software like Affinity, or Scribus, or even Quark, there can be additional charges for taking on your artwork, as they wouldn't necessarily have that software available to them, and any fixes required for printing would mean a lot of work on their end.
 
The two A5 sheets are printed on a SRA4 sheet, or four A5 sheets printed on a SRA3 sheet.

Printing companies look after this.

Good printers do.
These are worth their weight.

Others just complicate things et every step and need their arses wiping.
 
Just to note, most print companies use Adobe software, and if you use software like Affinity, or Scribus, or even Quark, there can be additional charges for taking on your artwork, as they wouldn't necessarily have that software available to them, and any fixes required for printing would mean a lot of work on their end.

Don't printers tend to request PDF's anyway? That's what they always ask me for.
 
Don't printers tend to request PDF's anyway? That's what they always ask me for.

Oh indeed, but we often get a large company who is say, multinational, who have online branding site that hosts all their material. So, we'd have to go into their 'vaults' and get the artwork to localise it for our country, or another country.

We would then download the source files. The last thing I need to start happening is someone has started using Affinity or Scribus, it's quite a shift to get those sort of things into another program.

Whereas we request PDFs for print ready artwork, sometimes we get the files sent to us in InDesign that we would then amend, and hold their files and artwork, storing them accordingly with their job numbers and dates of preparation.
 
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