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!

I keep skip­ping days, and then I keep writ­ing about skip­ping days…heh. I really need a new theme for Feb­ru­ary, if you have any ideas please let me know. Here’s day 20 (rel­a­tively speak­ing), it’s basi­cally just a 5–10 min play­ground of some brushes, brush tool options, and some pen tool tech­niques. It took me years to get a han­dle on the pen tool and then one day it clicked, who knew.

I’ve got­ten pretty bad about skip­ping days… regard­less, here’s day 18. Jan­u­ary is over so “thoughts” theme is fin­ished, Haven’t decided on February’s theme, I’m open for input. Was think­ing about “soli­tude” or “nighttime”.

Day 13… thanks for stop­ping by.

Very small changes to a stock photo, i think maybe day 13 will be an addi­tion to this…

Feels a bit of throw­back to my search for a good stock photo then call it a wrap days. Oh well, I sup­pose you could argue an eye for con­cepts… or just chalk it up to time or lazi­ness, what­ever. (edit. appar­ently I spelled soli­tude wrong, /shrug)

Yes, its a for­mula… an incom­plete view, like any­one knows the whole thing anyway…

I think this is the quick­est that some­thing has popped in my head since I started this thing.

GAAA! Why did I pick ‘thoughts’ as a daily theme. Any­way, here’s day 7. I’m kinda won­der­ing if maybe like one big project a week would be bet­ter than this 5-10min daily thing, well I mean, I know the longer project would prob­a­bly look bet­ter, but which one would help me grow more. Maybe I need to start read­ing again… Any­way, here it is.

My daily design #5… though I skipped a day or two, ugh who knows. Any­way here’s the lat­est, let’s just call it day 6, as if I started on time any­way. Some of these designs look thrown together… they some­what are since I nor­mally give myself 5-15min to do them, though there is some hon­est thoughts behind them. As long as I’m typ­ing, this has been more chal­leng­ing that I expected, par­tially in the dis­ci­pline of doing it daily but more in hav­ing to sit down and just come up with an idea, a design, based on a loose theme with almost no para­me­ters, all in a quick time­frame. Any­way, day 6 (sorta).