I received an eLearning Professional Development Grant and used the funds to purchase a Lynda.com subscription to help me respond to changing technical and client needs. Lynda.com online tutorials are unique aids for studying new and updated software needed for my work in print design and for my ability to move into web design. I am mainly concentrating on Dreamweaver, InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat, and Flash. In moving to be proficient in web design, I must understand HTML, which has moved on to HTML5, and CSS, which is transitioning to CSS3. Recently I learned that CSS3 PIE code allows certain new features (border radius, box shadow and gradients) to work within older non-supporting browsers.
A couple of my recent goals have been to set-up an interactive web page with drop-down lists and a slide show and to be able to also create a web page that held a magazine which had buttons to enable a visitor to turn pages. I had viewed another online class which showed how to remake a web page, but that class created interactivity by searching the internet for free JavaScript. I had some minor success at that, but was frustrated at being able to find JavaScript to control the actions I wanted in my web page. I had long wondered how I would be able to incorporate interactive features without knowing how to read/write JavaScript.
After searching and viewing Lynda.com classes, I learned about spry widgets that are incorporated into Dreamweaver and about the widgets browser. The widgets browser opens into Adobe Exchange and has navigation tabbed panels and menu bars, video players, special menus, flash zoom, spry slideshows, YouTube players, Google Maps — a huge variety of widgets that I can copy to My Widgets and customize. This will keep me busy experimenting. Also, I worked with Dreamweaver spry widgets such as menus with drop-down menu lists to see if I could place and control them.
I wanted to be able to give our clients the option to put their magazines online with interactive buttons for readers to move from page to page. I found that I could do this with InDesign or Dreamweaver. Using InDesign — I created a fake magazine with buttons and actions to go to pages and also applied a page-turn (SWF-only) page transition and exported an HTML file. I could also accomplish this within Dreamweaver using a slide-show widget and individual images for each page or spread not dependent on Flash.
InDesign has new features such as the new animation panel with motion presents (basic canned animations that can be personalized) and advanced animations. This seems like a mini-version of Flash right within InDesign. The bookmarks panel is a new feature for creating and organizing PDF bookmarks and exporting to an interactive PDF. The new articles panel helps to create tagged PDFs for screen readers. Tags help enable screen readers to read the text in the proper order. I am still investigating to see if it functions properly with screen readers.
Adobe Acrobat features are also a priority and currently am studying forms and how to use the form wizard — all the intricacies of forms are available in the well organized Lynda.com classes.
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Editor’s note: Please find opportunities to access lynda.com at http://lt.osu.edu/lynda and the eLearning Professional Development Grant at http://lt.osu.edu/grants.
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Lynda.com Experience
I received an eLearning Professional Development Grant and used the funds to purchase a Lynda.com subscription to help me respond to changing technical and client needs. Lynda.com online tutorials are unique aids for studying new and updated software needed for my work in print design and for my ability to move into web design. I am mainly concentrating on Dreamweaver, InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat, and Flash. In moving to be proficient in web design, I must understand HTML, which has moved on to HTML5, and CSS, which is transitioning to CSS3. Recently I learned that CSS3 PIE code allows certain new features (border radius, box shadow and gradients) to work within older non-supporting browsers.
A couple of my recent goals have been to set-up an interactive web page with drop-down lists and a slide show and to be able to also create a web page that held a magazine which had buttons to enable a visitor to turn pages. I had viewed another online class which showed how to remake a web page, but that class created interactivity by searching the internet for free JavaScript. I had some minor success at that, but was frustrated at being able to find JavaScript to control the actions I wanted in my web page. I had long wondered how I would be able to incorporate interactive features without knowing how to read/write JavaScript.
After searching and viewing Lynda.com classes, I learned about spry widgets that are incorporated into Dreamweaver and about the widgets browser. The widgets browser opens into Adobe Exchange and has navigation tabbed panels and menu bars, video players, special menus, flash zoom, spry slideshows, YouTube players, Google Maps — a huge variety of widgets that I can copy to My Widgets and customize. This will keep me busy experimenting. Also, I worked with Dreamweaver spry widgets such as menus with drop-down menu lists to see if I could place and control them.
I wanted to be able to give our clients the option to put their magazines online with interactive buttons for readers to move from page to page. I found that I could do this with InDesign or Dreamweaver. Using InDesign — I created a fake magazine with buttons and actions to go to pages and also applied a page-turn (SWF-only) page transition and exported an HTML file. I could also accomplish this within Dreamweaver using a slide-show widget and individual images for each page or spread not dependent on Flash.
InDesign has new features such as the new animation panel with motion presents (basic canned animations that can be personalized) and advanced animations. This seems like a mini-version of Flash right within InDesign. The bookmarks panel is a new feature for creating and organizing PDF bookmarks and exporting to an interactive PDF. The new articles panel helps to create tagged PDFs for screen readers. Tags help enable screen readers to read the text in the proper order. I am still investigating to see if it functions properly with screen readers.
Adobe Acrobat features are also a priority and currently am studying forms and how to use the form wizard — all the intricacies of forms are available in the well organized Lynda.com classes.
—
Editor’s note: Please find opportunities to access lynda.com at http://lt.osu.edu/lynda and the eLearning Professional Development Grant at http://lt.osu.edu/grants.