Salisbury — Sep 25th 2018

Euan visited us from Dorchester to present ‘Greeting Card Design’, showing us samples of the many cards he has produced for friends and explanation how they were produced — using Affinity Designer and how many similar techniques are available in Pages and (even) Keynote.

With his Keynote presentation and Pages (both present on all Macs) he showed us simple uses of Shapes and Instant Alpha for transparency, and elaborated this with Affinity Designer (about £50.00 for Mac and £19 for iPad). As a more sophisticated programme, Affinity Designer offers more complex possibilities for a professional looking card.

Euan suggested ways to minimise the cost of your printer’s ink, how to overcome “Designer’s Block’, and to use transparency, gradients, and edited vector type forms. He starts with a template to place crop marks on the page and, to avoid printer registration issues, makes separate outer and inner pages from the same sheet of paper. After printing and trimming, he uses a very small strip of double sided sticky tape to join the outside and inside of his card at the fold.
There were many very interesting questions as his presentation went along.

After the break, Brian showed a short keynote presentation to emphasise select and measure your envelope size first then design your card, also showed that a card can be free standing and different shapes. David showed us the card he had produced, Mick showed us how to get around a problem when showing a presentation with the mouse pointer, Tricia showed part of leaflet she has designed for an Orchid growing club and asked how to make highlights on the photos to create a glossy finish.

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