Design Essentials (3rd Edition) (Professional Studio Techniques) [Paperback]

Luanne Seymour Cohen (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1568304722 | ISBN-13: 978-1568304724 | Publication Date: May 14, 1999 | Edition: 3

Design Essentials provides exciting and innovative techniques for creating graphics with Photoshop and Illustrator. In the groundbreaking Essentials format, it presents professional-quality results in step-by-step format and helps the you develop the skills to achieve these results. Design Essentials explains vital procedures such as painterly images, dashed lines, 3-dimensional charts, and seamless patterns. Design Essentials opens up a world of design options for you to draw from.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Written for business professionals and graphic-design beginners, Design Essentials focuses on developing intermediate skills using Photoshop and Illustrator to achieve more-than-basic results in various image-editing and image-creation tasks. The third edition of this book, while updated for Photoshop 5 and Illustrator 8, retains the handsome four-color layout with screen shots placed alongside clear, simple step-by-step instructions for each task in the book.

Design Essentials will show you how to set up your system's memory specs, manage fonts, optimize your software, and avoid unnecessary memory constraints. Divided into six sections, the book concentrates on related areas of software use and visual design to help you make the most of your time spent using these Adobe products.

A typical section breakdown can be understood by looking at Section I, which shows you how to draw lines and work with perspective; you create line effects, shapes with outlines, shaded spheres, and perspective grids. Other sections in the book focus on painting style techniques, patterning and texturing, text manipulation, filters, and Web-related tasks. --Kathleen Caster

From Library Journal

Here are the latest editions of two very good manuals.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Pearson Education; 3 edition (May 14, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568304722
• ISBN-13: 978-1568304724
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 12 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,963,296 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Pleasantly Surprised, August 17, 2002

By 

A. W. Crawford (WI, US) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Design Essentials for Adobe(R) Photoshop(R) 7 and Illustrator(R) 10 (4th Edition) (Professional Studio Techniques) (Paperback)

As someone who's come to Photoshop and Illustrator from a tech background (I started out using them to design graphics for websites I was coding, and I'm now moving into using them purely for their own sake) I bought this expecting something high-brow and fairly abstract. Still, the reviews of past editions were good, so it must be worth a read...

However, on actually reading the book I was very pleasantly surprised to find...a recipe book. Lots of nice, step-by-step, two or three page descriptions of interesting graphical techniques you can apply, either to spruce up something you've already done, or as inspiration for something new altogether. Many of them are applicable to both Photoshop and Illustrator, and where appropriate instructions are given for both applications.

The techniques illustrated cover a wide range of subjects, from applying filters to photos to get a more painterly appearance to the creation of seamless textures, image compositing and the creation of semi-transparent object shadows in Illustrator. You'll almost certainly have seen some of them before (or arrived at your own ways to achieve similar effects) but there's enough in this book that you're sure to find something you'll want to add to your own list of techniques.

In a way this is "Photoshop 7 Down And Dirty Tricks" polite sister. The basic idea's the same (like I said, a recipe book) but the aim's slightly higher (i.e. improving your art, rather than impressing your boss). There's even some overlap in the techniques presented, although generally this book favours aesthetic results over flashy impact.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Beginner Book to Get Started with Advanced Techniques, August 15, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Design Essentials (3rd Edition) (Professional Studio Techniques) (Paperback)

The book goes through different techniques suchs as Cast Shadows, Texture patterns, and 3-D packages. There is not too much reading involved; you could just look and the pictures and read the one line step of what to do next. This book is a perfect supplement to other Photoshop/Illustrator books.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars vague in places, August 30, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Design Essentials (3rd Edition) (Professional Studio Techniques) (Paperback)

I had been looking for a book like this and was very disappionted and frustrated after trying to do the first chapter. I got to the point where you create the corner piece and ran into a brick wall. There was nothing telling you how to proceed. The adobe class room in a book are so much better at giving step by step instructions.