When creating an online version of print design projects, a designer must create a high quality PDF optimized for WWW distribution. For example, a PDF weighing less than 5Mb might need to be generated from a 100Mb print-quality PDF. Also, you will want to lock down the PDF to prevent theft of it’s text and images, and include a copyright notice. Follow these easy steps that explain how to optimize and secure a print PDF for web use.
This three minute YouTube video by Adobe XD evangelist @Pinskymust-see for designers wanting to get into screen design.
Adobe XD makes ‘responsive resizing’ design easy for those used to fixed document sizes in print layouts
From Fixed Layout to Shifty Divs
People often start their design career by learning Adobe software—namely Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop.
Those applications are all over twenty years old. They were built with predetermined paper-based (or eventually with fixed pixel-based) sizes in mind. The apps weren’t developed with the notion that the page’s size can vary.
On the other hand, designing for a digital screen implies that the virtual page we work on is responsively resizing. In other words, whether you display your design on a smartphone, a tablet or a desktop computer – or you hold the device in portrait or landscape mode – the screen shape is isn’t the same.
Every designer weened on visually building fixed layouts faces the challenge of suddently having to previsualize a set of shifting rectangles before starting to build them out of code in order to be able to see them in the first place.
This new conceptual and analytical skillset is often diametrically opposed to the coordinated visual and gestural mouse-weilding skills that originally got students interested in visual design.
Responsive Resize to the Rescue
Adobe XD’s Responsive Resize feature lets designers visually create fluid layouts that adapt across different screen sizes and layout ratios using familiar drawing tools like the rectangle and circle.
Responsive Resize lets a whole range of previously acquired design skills suddenly translate to the dynamic nature of interactive screen layout and design.
