Hassig

I work full time at a church run­ning web­sites and print graph­ics, and to be hon­est, a lot of it is the exact same as when I free­lanced. Granted I don’t really get to take ran­dom naps after a late night and peo­ple expect to see me every day… but I still find myself hav­ing to adapt to dif­fer­ent people’s per­son­al­i­ties and expec­ta­tions, get asked for a ran­dom assort­ment of last minute work, peo­ple want changes made to web or art­work, and so on.

In my ongo­ing effort to make clients, cowork­ers, and my own life eas­ier, I had an idea. While work­ing on art­work that would be used for a near monthly sem­i­nar event, I thought it would be best if they didn’t have to come to me to have the date changed out every month. So I turned to Acro­bat. So I designed the art­work in Pho­to­shop while leav­ing out a few text boxes that would con­tain chang­ing details. Saved it as a .pdf, opened in Acro­bat, and placed editable forms. You can cus­tomize the text style of these forms, mean­ing peo­ple can type what­ever they want in there and it will still be what­ever font, size, color, ect you orig­i­nally selected. And snap! Now the coworker/client/friend can change out dates, save, reprint with ease!

Some notes to high­light:
– In my par­tic­u­lar exam­ple, I was print­ing two sheets to a page, in Acro­bat if you have two forms with the same name they’ll use the same infor­ma­tion. Hence, I make changes on one and it auto­mat­i­cally changes the 2^nd. Score.
– In your design, be mind­ful of the upcom­ing text changes. For exam­ple, ‘May 1^st’ takes up a lot less room than ‘Decem­ber 25^th’
– If you want them to be able to save a copy with their changes be sure and enable it by click­ing Advanced > Extend Fea­tures in Acro­bat Reader

Enjoy!