Thanks to all that came out to check out my work! I appreciate all the compliments and sales! Here are a few photos of what transpired. )

There are extra prints available…please stay tuned for what’s still available!

It is located on 4th street and my booth is between 20th and 21st Avenue. Time is Sunday, May 31, 9am – 6pm.

These are just a few photos that will be on display and some will be available for purchase! Please come by and say hi!

When I start a document, I always start with a few things before I can put my ideas down, planning and forward thinking are incredibly valuable when time is of the essence. Here are some quick tips I see many designers skip.

1. Plan what you want first. Do not design in any programs. This means use sketches, doodles, or any idea before you get into the tools. The Creative Suite is merely a design tool for which to carry out the wishes of the designer.

This includes making sure you aim for the right number of pages (this is especially important with pagination in booklets and magazines), bleed and page size.

2. Set your styles. This will determine what your document will look and feel like before you put the content in. This would include your body copy style (font family, size, leading, kerning, etc), all your headers and sub heads (I usually start with about 4 sub heads for large documents), image styles (borders, shadows, etc), and page numbering. I am a huge stickler when it comes to consistency, I think it should be exactly the same on each page and shouldn’t change any time.

This will save you hours later on when you see something isn’t consistent. I’ve forgotten to count before hand and screwed up a large magazine before, trust me on this one.

3. Set your margins. Do not let anything cross this line! A good starting point is a minimum of 0.125″ usually. A quick method I have used in the past is take the tallest capital letter in your main article title and double it. This is the width to start with. Larger banners will need a bigger margin, obviously.

4. Never “Eye Ball It”. You are a precision designer charged with a precision job, now’s the time to show it and not “guess” the distance. There are a couple different ways to make sure you can stick to this staple:

• Use guides. “Eye balling it” is what separates us as designers from the amateurs.  Little differences effect design projects in the largest of ways.
• Make little boxes that do not have any fill or stroke to a specific size and measure the distances to make sure everything is consistent. e.g. the space between a header text box and a three column body copy text box.
• Crack out your ruler to measure a sample if you need to. A calculator and thickness gauge are also important manual tools.

Dan's photo gear setup

This is my regular quick setup. I also have two tripods I use on occasion and a Canon A510 pocket shooter as a secondary.

Nikon D40x

18-70mm
55-200mm
50mm f1.8

ML-L3 remote

SB-600

2 sets of rechargeable batteries + charger for flash

2 Nikon batteries
1 Aputure battery grip

Hand Strap

Crumpler 7 Million Dollar Home

2 GB Sandisk Extreme 3 SD Card
2 GB Sandisk SD Card

Business Cards

Rocket Blower

USB cable

Camera manual
Screen protectors
Microfiber cleaning cloths