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Names You Can Trust – Deke McClelland

Wednesday, March 9th, 2011

Deke is a verb.

If you have seen Deke McClelland work, you know of what I speak. If you want to watch good videos on Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator and you are up for a “strong cup of coffee” – go find Deke.

Here are a few places to start…
deke.com
Deke on Lynda.com
Deke’s O’Reilly video – 101 Photoshop tips in five minutes

Strong cup of coffee?

On one of the Pixar movie DVD extras (The Incredibles, I think) there are interviews with people from Pixar about Brad Bird and what it was like when he came on board. One person described him like this: “He’s a strong cup of coffee. Of course, I like strong coffee” (with a little smile). The man is brilliant… and excitable… and intense. I’ve come to love that phrase.

One thing I’ve discovered is that there is a sliding scale of intensity for video trainers. Ok, for good video trainers. At one end is Terry White, at the other is the Deke Pod videos – Not Deke – just those videos. The others he does for Lynda.com are mellower. It seems totally appropriate to me that Deke would be on my rating scale twice.

Videos are not all he does though. Some of the best books in my office are his. It is impossible for me to get a book about a design package, like InDesign, that has a horrible, dull, or amateurish layout. it’s why I stopped buying the InDesign Bible series when they overhauled the design. You think I’m kidding? I’m not. How can you trust that the author knows good design if his or her book is a second-rate train wreck.

Deke’s work is clean, graphically beautiful, with lots of clear images and white space.

How can you not love the man? The pen tool as a sex ed lesson? Brilliant!

Tags: design guru, Photoshop, Video
Posted in Adobe, Illustrator, InDesign, Names You Can Trust, Photoshop | No Comments »

Wireframing interaction design with InDesign and Illustrator

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

UX Matters has a series of article – Wireframing.
Don’t bother trying to follow the articles that follow… the links to his blog and to the other articles all send you to a 403 Forbidden page (bleh)

Posted in Adobe, Illustrator, InDesign | No Comments »