Featured Five tutorials

Archive for the ‘Featured Five tutorials’ Category

Featured Five free videos: A first look at Microsoft Windows 8 and Office 13

Published by Colleen Wheeler, content curator | Friday, August 17th, 2012

A new version of both Windows and the Office suite are on the way later this year. Last week, we released two new courses designed to give you a glimpse into these latest offerings from Microsoft. Right now, you can download preview versions of Windows 8 and Office 2013 to try out. So for this installment of the Featured Five, I’ve chosen five free videos from our new Office 2013 First Look and Windows 8 Release Preview First Look courses. In each one, author David Rivers gives you a look at what’s to come.

A first look at Windows 8 and Office 13

1. Understanding the different versions of Windows 8

Windows 8 is planned to release in October and, as with previous versions, there are various editions to choose from. In this video from the Introduction chapter of Windows 8 Release Preview First Look, David goes over each edition of Windows 8 and its intended audience: Windows 8 (consumers and home users), Windows 8 Pro (tech enthusiasts), Windows RT (those who buy it preinstalled on ARM-processor), and Windows 8 Enterprise (bulk business customers).

2. Using gestures and touch in Windows 8

One of the real paradigm shifts in the way Windows 8 works is the ability to use touch, or what Microsoft calls gestures, whenever you’re using a touch screen, mobile device, or in some cases a mouse. Some of the gestures are intuitive if you’ve been using a touch-screen smartphone with any regularity. Other gestures may make sense only after David shows you how to use them. This video from chapter one of Windows 8 Release Preview First Look, introduces Windows 8 gestures, how they look in action, and how to use them to navigate the Windows 8 interface with ease.

3. Working with the Photos app in Windows 8

One of the features of Windows 8 is a home screen with app icons that look similar to those you’d see on a mobile device. One of those apps, Photos, helps you organize and view your digital photographs, regardless of whether your photos currently live on your camera, hard drive, Flickr account, SkyDrive, and so on. In this video from chapter two of Windows 8 Release Preview First Look, David shows you how the Photos app works.

4. Integrating Office 2013 with the cloud

When you’re working with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or other Office 2013 applications, the default location for saving your documents will be the cloud-based SkyDrive. Of course, you’ll still be able to save things to your local hard drive, as David demonstrates in this video from chapter one of Office 2013 First Look.

5. Tracking changes and conversations in Word

Although you may have used Track Changes in previous versions of Word, there’s a new option called Simple Markup that makes reviewing changes a much less cluttered experience. As David shows in this video from chapter two of Office 2013 First Look, when changes are made to a document using Simple Markup, a simple red vertical indicator appears to the left of a text area that has been revised. Then, to see the changes made, and who made them, the red indicator line can be clicked to reveal the details of an edit, one edit at a time. This new tool lets you see changes, and keep track of editing conversations, but it also lets you scan through a relatively clean document.

Members of lynda.com can watch the complete versions of both Windows 8 Release First Look and Office 2013 First Look in our library.

Which features do you think bring the biggest potential change to your work?

Tags: Office, office 2013, Windows, Windows 8
Posted in Business, Featured Five tutorials | No Comments »

This week’s featured five: Using InDesign master pages

Published by Colleen Wheeler, content curator | Saturday, June 23rd, 2012

Recently a lynda.com member wrote in asking for advice on using master pages in InDesign. Master pages allow you to place recurring items like page numbers, footers, or headers on multiple pages throughout your document automatically. Not only does this save time and energy, but it also gives you a one-stop location for updating a title or graphic globally later on.

An example of an InDesign master page in the Pages panel.

For this week’s featured five free videos, I’ve pulled together five tutorials from five different courses to give you a solid understanding of how to use master pages in different contexts. As a bonus, you’ll gather up some other useful InDesign tips along the way, as each author explains in his own way how to work with this useful feature.

1. Introduction to master pages
If you’ve never created a master page before and you’re new to InDesign, this first video from chapter four of Up and Running with InDesign will get you started without presuming too much prior InDesign knowledge. Author Deke McClelland starts from square one, showing you how to place a graphic header and folio with page number on a newly created master, and how to apply your new master to existing pages you’ve already created in your document.

2. Setting up a master page for a magazine layout
In this excerpt from chapter one of Designing a Magazine Layout Hands-on Workshop, author Nigel French shows you how to create the master page elements that you’d want for the interior of a magazine layout. You’ll see how to consistently place the headers and footers, format them appropriately with rules and mirroring, and set up automatically updating page numbers.

3. Creating master pages strategically for a book or other long document
The next tutorial is from chapter one of our Creating Long Documents with InDesign course. When you’re working on a long document like a several-chapter book, author Mike Rankin encourages you to set up your master pages strategically by first creating a base master, then placing additional master pages with tweaks that might be desirable for different kinds of spreads like body copy and chapter openers upon that base. This strategic layering will give you greater flexibility as the project grows, and keep you from having to set up completely new masters as the project expands.

4. Overriding master page items
Of course, once in a while, you’ll find that a particular document page doesn’t work quite right with all of your master page elements. Since the role of master pages is to hold those repeating objects in place, you can’t move, delete, or even select master page items on a regular page. In this excerpt from chapter four of InDesign CS6 Essential Training, author David Blatner explains how to override a master page with the handy Command+Shift+click shortcut (Ctrl+Shift+click in Windows), which frees an object from its master and assigns it directly to the document page. At that point, with the object assigned directly to the document, you can edit or delete it as you choose. If you change your mind and want it back, David shows you how to restore master page items as well.

5. Making sure master page items aren’t covered by document objects
Finally, in episode number 39 from the InDesign Secrets series (Moving master page items to the top layer for visibility), David Blatner demonstrates how placing your master page items on the top layer of your document ensures that they aren’t covered up by the occasional graphic or text frame on a running page. If you’ve ever experienced the mysterious missing master item, then this advice is for you.

For features like master pages in InDesign that don’t quite warrant an entire lynda.com course on their own, it’s nice to be able to round up this collection of useful tutorials with different information, approaches, and bonus tips. With the depth and breadth of the lynda.com library, we can probably create dozens of other “mini-courses” by compiling excerpts from different courses. Are there any software feature that you’d like us to provide this kind of round-up for? Let us know in the comments!

Interested in more?

• Start a free trial membership at lynda.com

Tags: InDesign
Posted in Design, Featured Five tutorials | 12 Comments »

This week’s featured five: Creating, tweaking, and listening to audio

Published by Colleen Wheeler, content curator | Wednesday, June 13th, 2012

Over the past several months our growing Audio segment has been adding key courses that aim to teach both the foundations of good audio practices as well as important audio software skills. This week’s featured five free movies were compiled with some help from our content manager for Audio, and lynda.com go-to Pro Tools author, David Franz, and focus on movies that are all centered around a very specific theme: improving the way you interact with your music, and the quality of the sound you create.

Audio soundwave

1. Recording audio in Pro Tools
In this excerpt from chapter four of Pro Tools 10 Essential Training, the aforementioned David Franz shows you how to create a new audio track in Pro Tools. While David takes you step-by-step through the process, you’ll also hear his real-world practical reasons for why one might choose one setting over another. Bonus: You get to hear David play the guitar.

2. Determining the correct listening position for your mixing session
In this video from chapter one of Audio Mixing Bootcamp, industry leader Bobby Owsinski explains how room acoustics can effect your perception of sound, and how to choose the best position for listening to playback. My favorite element of this movie is how Bobby’s explanations are made even more accessible by illustrative motion graphics.

3. Using lynda.com Get in the Mix interactive exercise files
As of March 2012, all of our Foundations of Audio courses in the lynda.com Audio segment now include Get in the Mix high-fidelity interactive exercise files that allow Pro Tools and Logic Pro users to experience hands-on instruction from the course author directly inside their personal Digital Audio Workstation, or DAW. All Get in the Mix exercise files are free to any lynda.com member (no premium membership required). In this movie, Alex Case explains how Get in the Mix files work and the advantages of learning from within your own DAW. If you’re interested in trying out a Get in the Mix learning session yourself, Alex’s Foundations of Audio: Delay and Modulation course includes eight member-exclusive Get in the Mix learning sessions, and two unlocked sessions that are free for all to try (Get in the Mix: Establishing groove with long delays and Get in the Mix: Modulation rate and depth).

4. Getting creative with EQ Curves and the telephone effect
In this tutorial from chapter three of Foundations of Audio: EQ and Filters, Brian Lee White discusses how EQ curves can be used to apply creative effect, or to place an element in a unique space within a mix. Discussing the telephone-effect (aptly named because the effect makes it sound like the signal is coming across on a telephone connection) Brian shows a real-life example of how a classic low-fi sound filter can be used to give you interesting, expressive possibilities.

5. Filtering loops in Pro Tools
In this video from chapter four of Pro Tools Mixing and Mastering, Brian Lee White explains how and why you might need to filter pre-recorded, synth, or sampled loops that you’re working with as part of a larger mix. While those loops are fundamentally designed to hold their own in isolation, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are always suitable as-is for your arrangement. I love how Brian uses a stock photography analogy, pointing out that when you choose a commercial or sample photo, you know you’re going to have to crop, scale, and tweak it to fit your design.

If you’re interested in sampling more of our new Audio segment content, keep in mind that all lynda.com courses have movies that are free to try, even if you’re not yet a member. Just click on any course of interest, and explore the blue links within any table of contents page in our library to watch unlocked videos.

lynda.com free movies explanation.

Tags: Get in the Mix, Logic Pro, Pro Tools
Posted in Audio, Featured Five tutorials | No Comments »

This week’s featured five: Going mobile! From using your device, to developing applicatons

Published by Colleen Wheeler, content curator | Wednesday, May 30th, 2012

It’s no secret that computer engagement is going mobile, with access via mobile devices predicted to surpass desktop computers in the next two years. So for this week’s collection of featured videos, I’ve chosen five free movies that focus on the theme of mobility, whether it be creating a WordPress site that behaves properly on mobile devices, learning to use your mobile phone or tablet more productively, or learning to develop your own mobile applications.

1. Customizing WordPress for smartphones and tablets
In this video from chapter nine of the WordPress Essential Training course, Morten Rand-Hendrickson shows you how to use built-in responsive themes and useful plug-ins to ensure that your content is presented in a usable form, regardless of screen size. The main takeaway? With a bit of appropriate planning, you can greatly improve your overall user experience by saving your viewers from the pain of having to zoom or scroll to view your carefully constructed content.

2. Accessing Evernote on a mobile device
Evernote is a great application for organizing and accessing your electronic notes, links, and other bits of critical information. (Admission: I use Evernote to collect interesting free movies from the lynda.com library that I want to use in my featured five blog posts.) In this movie from chapter one of Up and Running with Evernote for Mac, David Rivers shows you how to get Evernote set up so that you can add notes via your mobile device. If you’re primarily working in a Windows environment, there’s an analogous movie in chapter one of David’s Up and Running with Evernote for Windows course, as well.

3. Using the iPhone and iPod Touch Maps app
Admittedly, using the iPhone (or iPod Touch) Maps application is a fairly straightforward proposition, but in this excerpt from chapter nine of iPhone and iPod touch iOS 5 Essential Training, Garrick Chow shares some insights into using the compass feature that I always found confusing. Not only can the Maps app help you discover what is around you, and how to get there, it can also help you orient yourself by showing you which direction you are facing in your current location. After all, it’s always good to start out heading in the right direction!

4. Identifying the four pillars of iOS development
For the developer types who have already figured out how to use their mobile devices, going mobile is more about focusing on the creation of mobile applications. As with any metaphorical or physical journey, it’s always good to have a scope of where you will start, where you will end, and how you will get there. In this excerpt from chapter one of iOS SDK Essential Training (2012), Simon Allardice shows you how to approach your iPhone application development, and elaborates on why tools, language, design, and process are the four pillars—or, the four important areas of content—that you need to have all together in order to build the applications that you want to make.

5. Exploring the lynda.com mobile site
Finally, a lynda.com collection of mobile tutorials wouldn’t be complete without a look at how you can take the lynda.com library with you wherever you go via your own mobile device. In this movie from chapter one of the How to Use lynda.com course, Garrick Chow demonstrates the features and functionality of our new mobile site, so you can get to learning wherever you are:

We’d love to know more about how you are using your mobile devices, and how mobile technology is changing the way you work, and play. Which activities have gone mobile in your computing life? Are there some jobs that still feel best done at your desk? Tell us a little about your relationship with your mobile devices in the comments section below.

Tags: Evernote, iPhone, iPhone Apps, mobile device development, Responsive design, WordPress
Posted in Featured Five tutorials | No Comments »

This week’s Featured Five: Training beyond the tools

Published by Colleen Wheeler, content curator | Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012

The content team at lynda.com strives to create courses that continuously help you learn the key technological tools that you need to get your job done, and we certainly aim to make sure you have the best and most up-to-date information on how to use your tools of choice, from Aperture to ZBrush. Over the last several months, we’ve also been working to include more big-picture training that focuses on best practices, core concepts, and widely applicable skills that aim to help everyone, including those who may already be more well-versed in tools and techniques, take their work and skill-set to the next level.

For this week’s collection of featured free movies, I’ve picked a few tutorials that demonstrate this kind of conceptual, ‘beyond the tools’ approach. Although some of these video examples live within courses that are centered around a particular application, don’t be distracted, or deterred, by the application context—these videos all aim to give you foundational information that will prepare you to work thoughtfully before you ever touch the keyboard, and will stay with you long after you’ve stepped away from your computer.

What sorts of larger, more conceptual skills are you looking to develop? If you have suggestions or ideas about ‘beyond the tools’ training you’d like to see, please share them in the comments section below.

1. Finding and capturing a good photo
In this excerpt from our Foundations of Photography: Composition course, Ben Long shares his thoughts on where to find good photos. You’ll find that the answer, if your mind and eyes are open, might be ‘anywhere.’

2. Understanding color as a signifier
In this movie from chapter one of the Photoshop for Designers: Color course, Nigel French takes a birds-eye-view approach to discuss the significance, meaning, and changeability of different colors, including discussion of the connotation of colors, and how there is no such thing as an absolute color. Before you think about how to apply color to your design in Photoshop, you may take some time to consider why a particular color is right for your message.

3. Refining a concept
In this excerpt from Digital Creature Creation in ZBrush, Photoshop, and Maya, Ryan Kittleson shares his practical advice for sketching and experimenting with sketches to make even the most whimsical of creatures. In this video you’ll see how Ryan approaches his doodling process, why he recommends creating lots of types of creatures to give yourself a variety of options, and what character analysis questions he asks himself to get to just the right design for a project, long before he ever launches an application.

4. Focusing and working to make yourself irreplaceable
You might be the office wizz with Photoshop, Word, or Excel, but are you spending your time working on the activities that make you valuable? In this excerpt from Dave Crenshaw‘s Invaluable course, Invaluable: Making Yourself Irreplaceable, you’ll get an introduction to Dave’s system for identifying how best to employ your time and energy at work.

5. Web form structure, and considerations taken when designing
In this excerpt from Luke Wroblewski‘s Web Form Design Best Practices course, you’ll get some big-picture advice on how to think about your web form’s structure, and what considerations you should keep in mind when designing forms for the web. In this video, Luke discusses the fundamentals of sequential, non-linear, and in-context forms, and why you might choose one over the other:

In this blog we talk about color, recognizing photography opportunities, the conceptual sketching process, web form design, and how to make yourself an invaluable asset to your team. These core concepts are just the tip of the iceberg—what sorts of larger, more conceptual skills are you looking to develop? If you have suggestions or ideas about ‘beyond the tools’ training you’d like to see, we’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below.

Tags: color theory, Invaluable, Photography, Web form design
Posted in Featured Five tutorials | No Comments »

This week’s Featured Five: Choosing your lynda.com Photoshop course

Published by Colleen Wheeler, content curator | Monday, May 14th, 2012

For this week’s featured five new tutorials, I have a sampling of movies from five different Photoshop courses we offer in the lynda.com library, each with a slightly different approach, scope, or focus. With the announcement of CS6, we’ve updated three of our mainstay Photoshop training courses, and when you combine that with our existing content, it can be overwhelming if you don’t know where to start or which course is right for your needs. Here are some quick descriptions and free movie samples of five of our Photoshop offerings, from the encyclopedic to the specific, to help you figure out which one is right for you in your current state of expertise and interest.

Are you looking for more direction on where to start with Photoshop? Let us know what you’re looking to accomplish below in the comments section, and we’ll share our ideas about where to begin.

1. Photoshop CS6 Essential Training
In general, Essential Training courses at lynda.com are designed to give you comprehensive knowledge of a software application and a solid foundational overview of the product from a real-world perspective. In the case of Photoshop CS6 Essential Training, this means author Julieanne Kost stays focused on the most important tools for photo editing and compositing, with just the right pairing of ‘how does this tool work’ and ‘why you want to use it and when.’ Essential Training courses are great for watching start-to-finish for the big overview, or if you need focused instruction on a tool, or set of tools, you don’t quite understand. For example, in this excerpt, you’ll see how Photoshop’s Liquify tool can be used judiciously in a variety of different real-world portrait retouching scenarios:

Note, if you’re working with an earlier version of Photoshop, there are Photoshop CS5 and CS4 essential training courses available in the library as well.

2. Photoshop CS6 One-on-One: Fundamentals
The fundamentals course from the Photoshop One-on-One series also covers the core concepts of working in Photoshop, but veteran Photoshop instructor Deke McClelland approaches his training as though he were your private one-to-one tutor. Photoshop CS6 One-on-One: Fundamentals is great if you’re looking for more insight into how tools integrate with one another, or if you prefer to learn through “mini-project” examples that develop over the course of a movie or a chapter. In this excerpt from chapter four of the course, you’ll see a six-minute lesson on blending, and, specifically, how to work with three distinct features: Opacity, the History panel, and blend modes:

Deke has been creating a version of the One-on-One Fundamentals course in the lynda.com library for several years, so if you’re working with an earlier version you can find this specifically tailored instruction for Photoshop CS3, CS4, and CS5 as well.

3. Photoshop CS6 for Photographers
Using Photoshop can mean different things to different people and this course is notable for it’s focus on the needs of a particular set of Photoshop students—photographers. In this course, Chris Orwig, a noted photographer and photography teacher, details the features and techniques surrounding photo enhancement and retouching, preparation for print and online publishing, and much more. He also teaches some of the foundational science behind digital photography, including this discussion of pixels and bit depth:

Chris has been teaching this photography-centric Photoshop course for several versions of Photoshop, including Photoshop CS3 for Photographers, Photoshop CS4 for Photographers, and Photoshop CS5 for Photographers. He has also created several in-depth courses on photography-critical topics including portrait retouching and creative effects.

4. Photoshop for Designers
In the Photoshop for Designers series, talented designer Nigel French digs deep into Photoshop with a specific focus on the needs of graphic designers. The series is broken up into five full-length courses, each exploring a particular aspect of Photoshop including textures, colors, type essentials, Shape layers, and layer effects. Often, when you’re using Photoshop for graphic design, you’re starting with a blank canvas and creating artwork out of pure pixels, which is the case in this excerpt from chapter one of the Photoshop for Designers: Color course which covers how to create a color wheel using Photoshop’s blend modes and layer effects.

5. Photo Restoration with Photoshop
In this course, professional photo restorer Janine Smith describes how to use Photoshop specifically to restore, retouch, and enhance old or damaged photos. In addition to covering methods for fixing everything from exposure, to stains, colorcast, scratches, and tears, Janine also shares how to evaluate damaged photos before beginning the restoration process. A course that offers lessons through exploration of an example project, this course includes a hands-on photo restoration that takes an image from a damaged start to a restored finish. In this video from chapter nine of the course, you’ll see a before and after of the course project restoration, and a run-down of the improvements Janine will help you tackle, including, the restoration of a major crack through the subject’s face, color alteration, and the removal of several major damage spots:

The course was recorded in CS5 but it’s real strength is the best-practices approach that Janine takes to photo restoration, so you should find valuable information here even if you’re still working in CS4, or if you’ve just forayed into the brave new world of Photoshop CS6.

Photoshop is a complicated program that can be used in infinite ways for a variety of creative endeavors. The team at lynda.com is dedicated to making sure you can find a course (or maybe three) that really provides the depth of coverage, level of context, and variety of specific interest that you need. Are you looking for a place to start with Photoshop? Let us know here, and we’ll share our ideas about where to begin.

Tags: Photo Restoration, Photography, Photoshop
Posted in Design, Featured Five tutorials | 5 Comments »

This week’s Featured Five (plus one): New features in Adobe’s Creative Suite 6

Published by Colleen Wheeler, content curator | Monday, April 23rd, 2012

In honor of yesterday’s announcement of Adobe’s Creative Suite 6, and the six newly released CS6 New Features courses on lynda.com, I thought this week’s Featured Five collection should expand to showcase six free movies from the lynda.com library. All of our new CS6 New Features courses (Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash, and Fireworks, plus Premiere Pro and After Effects CS6 which were released on April 12, 2012) are designed to help you discover the latest software updates, and how the new features may fit well with your workflow needs. With the introduction of the new Adobe Creative Cloud subscription model, which allows you to pay a flat fee to access all of the Suite applications, finding out what’s new across the Suite may now be more important than ever as you’ll be faced with new decisions during the upgrading process. To give you an idea of what our CS6 New Features courses have to offer, here are six free-to-everyone movies that discuss some of the interesting new abilities of the CS6 flagship applications. After you’ve checked out the featured six, make sure to let us know in the comments section which CS6 features have you the most intrigued.

1. Photoshop CS6 for Photographers New Features
You may have explored the Photoshop version of CS6 already, given that a public beta has been available for a few weeks. In Photoshop CS6 for Photographers New Features, Chris Orwig reviews the key features that are going to make a difference specifically for photographers. Some of the new features in Photoshop are pretty significant (not to mention extremely cool), but the one that might actually affect the most Photoshop users is the revamped Crop tool. In this free movie Chris demonstrates how the new Crop tool works in a much less destructive way than Crop tools of the past:

2. Illustrator CS6 New Features
Having just celebrated its 25th anniversary, Illustrator is a fairly mature product in the software world. Despite it’s industry years, there is no lack of interesting upgrades to the vector graphic program this year. For one thing, you’ll notice that like Photoshop, Illustrator has gone to a dark interface, which gives it quite a modern look despite its advanced age. There are also a few cool new ways to tackle old tricks, including a vastly updated pattern creator. Here’s a free movie from Justin Seeley‘s Illustrator CS6 New Features course that shows how the new Pattern Options panel works:

3. InDesign CS6 New Features
When I asked the author of this course, Anne-Marie Concepcion, what her favorite feature from InDesign CS6 was, she said, “I think my favorite feature would be the Auto-Size text frames option. It’s not exciting like the neat-o Liquid Layout, but Auto-Size is something I can use right now and something I will be using every day.” It’s always those features that you use every day and can’t remember living without that make a software upgrade significant, even if they’re not the sexiest new technology options. In this video from the InDesign CS6 New Features course, Anne-Marie talks about the new Auto-Size text frames option and why it makes her life easier:

4. Dreamweaver CS6 New Features
Dreamweaver CS6 has a bunch of new features, including interface, optimization, and FTP support enhancements, but it’s the CSS capabilities that have author James Williamson intrigued. By employing the CSS Transitions feature housed in a convenient new Dreamweaver panel, you can easily add and manage your transitions. You don’t need to take my word for it, though, you can hear the enthusiasm for Dreamweaver CS6′s support of CSS transitions in James’ voice in this free movie from the Dreamweaver CS6 New Features course:

5. Fireworks CS6 New Features
Fireworks is the Creative Suite app that helps you produce optimized web graphics for any device. In this excerpt from Fireworks CS6 New Features, Ray Villalobos shows off his favorite new Fireworks feature, which is support for creating and exporting CSS Sprites. In the video, Ray demonstrates how you can now use Fireworks to simultaneously help with graphics and the hover state of graphics:

6. Flash Professional CS6 New Features
The CS6 version of Flash Professional has new support for 3D, and a new framework for exporting HTML. In this free movie from Flash CS6 New Features, Anastasia McCune focuses on the new Captive AIR runtime option for creating Android, OSX, or Windows apps. You can now decide if you want your Flash apps to run with Captive AIR embedded or if you want to require that users download the AIR runtime. In this video, Anastasia considers why you might want to choose one option or the other:

If you’d like to see more free CS6 tutorials, we’ll have a lot more coming to lynda.com in the next few weeks. While you’re checking out the new CS6 Suite, also keep in mind that 10 percent of all lynda.com content is free to try. Just click on any of the blue links on any course table of contents page in our library to watch unlocked videos.

Free Movies

I’ll be back next week with five more free selections—but in the meantime, I’ll be checking out what CS6 has to offer. Which CS6 features do you have your eye on?

Tags: Adobe CS6, Dreamweaver CS6, Fireworks CS6, Flash CS6, Illustrator CS6, Photoshop CS6
Posted in Design, Featured Five tutorials, Photography, Web | No Comments »

This week’s Featured Five: Using efficient, organized communication

Published by Colleen Wheeler, content curator | Monday, April 16th, 2012

For this week’s Featured Five post, I’ve chosen five free movies from our library that emphasize efficient, organized, collaborative communication. Sometimes this means formatting your work so that people can find and use it easily, sometimes it means presenting your data in a visually organized way so that people can immediately comprehend it, and other times it means effectively using the features of your software application that are designed to help you track important collaborative notes. At the heart of it, it’s always about communicating in an organized way to make your work more efficient and your projects more successful.

1. Communicating effectively and efficiently with colleagues

Good organized communication is critical for collaboration. In this movie from chapter four of Effective Meetings, Dave Crenshaw discusses the importance of the one-to-one meeting, and why establishing one-to-one meetings can not only increase effectiveness, but efficiency as well:

2. Choosing your favorite images to share from a photo shoot

Lightroom is a great program for developing your digital photographs, but it also has a lot of pure organizational power that you can use to find just the right image you (or someone else) are looking for. In this movie from his new course Photoshop Lightroom 4 Essentials: Organizing and Sharing with the Library Module, Chris Orwig shows you how to use Lightroom’s built-in ability to quickly tag photos with picks, rejects, star-ratings, and colored flag labels. Then, once you have using notations and labels down, you can use your tags to quickly find the photos you want to share:

3. Sharing complicated information visually

Sometimes complicated information is best initially understood and communicated with graphics. In this movie from chapter one of Infographics: Visualizing Relationships, Shane Snow walks you through the infographic creative process and demonstrates setup on an infographic example that contains 24 entities, or ‘characters’ as he calls them:

4. Documenting your audio post-production session in Pro Tools

Creating a film or video with a lot of moving parts takes clear, documented communication. In this movie from chapter three of Audio for Film and Video with Pro Tools, Scott Hirsch takes you though the preparation and documentation process that makes a meeting between the film’s director, producer, music composer, and other creative forces effective. This meeting is called a spotting session, because its purpose is to spot exact points in the video where sound ideas can develop:

5. Making your web site accessible to improve human and computer communication

One main reason to have a web site is to communicate efficiently with others—and with web technology, that means being able to communicate across a multitude of platforms and interfaces in a language that is clear and easy for humans to understand. In this movie from chapter one of Improving SEO Using Accessibility Techniques, Morton Rand-Hendrickson demonstrates the communication benefits of implementing strong web site accessibility practices that will improve your SEO, and your human-to-human communication:

What other things have you learned on lynda.com about getting files, people, or entire groups organized? Are there any areas you’d like to see us explore in more depth?

Are you feeling inspired to explore more content? Remember, 10 percent of all lynda.com content is free to try. Just click on any of the blue links on any course table of contents page in our library.

Free Movies

See you back next week with five more free selections!

Tags: Dave Crenshaw, infographics, lightroom, Pro Tools, SEO
Posted in Featured Five tutorials | No Comments »