Desktop Publishing Job Description
Desktop publishing programs have opened up the tools of graphic design to everyone. A job in desktop publishing, however, requires a person to be responsible for producing brochures, publications, ads and other graphic documents on deadline and with a flair for design.
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Design
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To work in desktop publishing, you need to know what looks good on screen and what looks good in print---and realize they may not be the same. You need a sense of color and graphic impact to create good designs.
Typography
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Design programs come with many fonts, but designers carefully select a limited set of complementary fonts to give a publication a specific style and maintain its readability. It's important to understand the importance of aspects of typography, such as leading, the amount of space between lines, and kerning, the amount of space between letters.
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Elements
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A desktop publisher manipulates all the graphic and text elements on a page, without the need to send photos back to the photographer or illustrations back to the artist. Knowledge about how to create those elements in programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash is essential.
Collaboration
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Desktop publishers may routinely work with editors, writers, photographers and artists, and for publications, printers, often under tight deadline pressures. Even when a page or publication design is done, it must go back for review by copy editors and proofreaders, necessitating quick changes.
Printing
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For print publications, it's not how good it looks on your screen, but how good it looks off the press. Desktop publishers work to accurately match colors on their screen to the capabilities of a press to reproduce them on paper.
Work environment
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For freelance desktop publishers, work may be done in a home office, but with frequent phone calls with clients, emails to exchange proofs and conferences in coffee shops. For designers employed by print or online publications, you'd be surrounded by an exciting and daunting milieu of creative people working as a team under pressure to produce high quality design and content.
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References
Resources
- Photo Credit Image by Flickr.com, courtesy of Jennie Faber
