Digital Graphic Design Work-flow

Graphics workflow basically involves 3 things. • Raster Work (Photos & Continuous tone images) • Vector work (Logos & Line Drawings) • Layouting (Final Assembly of all the elements and formatting it with text content) Usually the layouting stage comes last. The graphic designing is spoken in terms of ‘Print media’ & ‘Online or Electronic Media’. Depending on the output media, the the final layouting stage will defer. The other stages are applicable everywhere. A typical work flow would be 1) Create all necessary elements (Logos & Icons, Photos, Backgrounds & Textures, Charts) in the relevant applications. (Be sure to use the appropriate colour models CMYK for print, RGB for web, also check the resolution of raster images for print or web). 2) Export them to the required formats (EPS, JPEG, TIFF). 3) Create final layout by assembling all the elements along with the text content. 4) Create Output ready files. There are separate softwares for each of these stages. Vector work (Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, Denba Canvas, Macromedia Freehand), Raster work (Adobe Photoshop, Corel Photopaint, Macromedia Fireworks), Layouting for print (Adobe Pagemaker, QuarkExpress, Adobe Indesign), Layouting for web (Macromedia Dreamweaver, Microsoft Frontpage). Well Corel Draw is a Mixture of Vector Editing & Layouting (Print & Web) application. Since the layouting stage is the final stage, layouting applications also support its relevant media features. eg. QuarkExpress or Indesign is used mainly for print layouting, it can output in postscript language and has print related features like Trapping, Overprinting, Colour Separations etc. while Dreamweaver and Frontpage being web layouting applications output in HTML & support web related features such as Frames, Button Functions, Scripting etc.