A stand-in for black, navy can be a cool neutral. On the Web, the color called navy is a quite a bit bluer than black. Explore the power of navy blue.

Even if you don't consider yourself a professional designer, when you're creating any type of desktop publishing document you are designing it. Even if you're using a template you still have to decide what kind of document you want and which template has all the elements that best fit what you want to design.  If starting from scratch, there are decisions about the overall look, the colors, the fonts, and the images to be made.  Much of the design phase comes before you even fire up the software. You may spend a lot of time on this phase or just a little. For some, the design decisions are made on the fly while arranging text and images. However or whenever you do it, Day 43 of our Daily Dose of DTP looks at what you need to know  about designing a desktop document.

Graphic design and desktop publishing is not a linear process. There are certain things that do come before or after another but there's a lot of back and forth, flip flopping, and skipping over some steps depending on the project. But to make it easier to learn and discuss in our next several lessons we're putting everything into 6 phases from design to printing & finishing. The object of this lesson is to simply introduce those 6 phases and look briefly at what is involved in each phase.

For the past 11 days we've looked at the Rules of Desktop Publishing. Those lessons and rules involved font and image choices and how things are arranged on the page. This last rule is about the software -- specifically the software defaults. Relying on software defaults is a bit like using a stock template and not changing out the placeholder text. It might look OK but is it really saying what you want it to say?

This lesson also includes a preview of the final week of our Daily Dose of DTP. Just 8 more days to go.