Thanks for all your contribution during the morning and see you again soon,

Karen

I have made the changes you suggested and you are, of course, absolutely right - the leaflets look much better now.

Thank you

Annie

Good luck with everything, I shall be sure to keep an eye on your blog!

Feel free to take a look at mine too and comment on anything that catches your attention, again its all design-related, and im hoping to try and build it up to become somewhat of a reference to other designers with many links to other blogs/websites, so might be a good place for inspiration in the future??

I definately feel that you will get a whole lot further with the title of graphic designer, especially if you state the areas you specialise in, it sounds far more professional than desk top publisher, desk top publisher just sounds like someone sat at home using Microsoft Templates to whip things up in their spare time.

…And from the sound of things, you seem far more serious than that! And therefore should give yourself a fighting chance, probably more so if you go to companies offering your services as someone who can improve their existing brochures etc, or can design new things for them to improve their marketing. I feel you could slip into quite a niche, one that combines the design qualities, and your apparent marketing knowledge and confidence.

Thank you very much for these posts - I am grateful for your input regarding this. I am in the middle of rebranding myself and want to concentrate on layout design. As part of my clear, concise and uncluttered theme I hope, through this blog, to educate my readers into how a publication, whether it’s a newsletter or a leaflet, should be properly laid out for legibility and readability purposes. And not only that, but to take into consideration basic marketing theories such as a catchy headline and strapline, benefits rather than features, a relevant picture, an incentive through a call to action and clear contact details.

What terminology would you say I should call myself then?

I don’t see any problem in mixing software packages though, if you know what you are doing and can take full advantage of, for example, Photoshop for image manipulation, Illustrator for any vector-based imagery and Quark Xpress for page layouts and typography, then there is no problem, just some of the quality can sometimes be lost between Adobe software and Quark, so it depends solely on the job in hand I guess, but mainly down to the idea at the core of it all, and which choice of software would do it most justice.

I would be interested to know why you refer to yourself as a desktop publisher, when in fact it would seem to me that you are infact more a graphic designer using Quark rather than some other, less professional desktop publishing software that would usually be the reasoning behind the Desk Top Publisher title.

Please don’t confuse what a graphic designer needs to those a desktop publisher uses. There are, of course, a myriad of design packages available for all kinds of artwork and design, but if one particular kind is used effectively, and absolutely fantastic work is produced through it, then is there necessarily a need for that ‘designer’ to use any others? Wouldn’t combining too much software be as bad as mixing together too many fonts or colours?

I was a little hasty in saying nobody should step over their line - certainly if we didn’t we wouldn’t learn new skills, styles, methods and concepts to explore other worlds.