Adobe(R) PageMaker(R) 6.5 Plus Productivity Kit (Classroom in a Book) (0201658976) - Reviews and Prices

Editorial Review:

Adobe PageMaker 6.5 Plus ships with over 300 fully customizable templates, clip art, photos, and design tips to help you quickly lay out professional-looking newsletters, flyers, stationery, business cards, and more. Photoshop 5.0 (LE Version), which is included in the package, gives you greater control over image manipulation, and automatic conversion of graphics to Web-friendly formats and support for HTML and PDF make publishing to the Web easier than ever before.

With all that's new in this release, you need a helpful--and fun--cookbook that shows you how to combine the ingredients. Adobe Pagemaker 6.5 Plus Productivity Kit pulls together these Adobe tools in unique and surprising ways to create designer-quality results. Full of design and productivity tips, each project lets you experiment with different features and new techniques. Whatever your skill level, you'll enhance your publications, whether they're for print or the Web.

Ever since the introduction of InDesign for professional graphic designers, Adobe has aimed PageMaker, its older layout application, toward business professionals, desktop publishers, and home users. To help these groups along, PageMaker 6.5 Plus includes over 300 professionally designed templates. The Adobe Creative Team has published Adobe PageMaker 6.5 Plus Productivity Kit to help users, especially beginning users, produce better-looking letterhead, business cards, and brochures.

The book is divided into 24 projects (newsletters, posters, direct mail pieces) presented as stand-alone lessons, which show in step-by-step, basic instructions how to customize each template to the reader's specific needs.

The book is cross-platform, and the directions for both Windows and Mac users are detailed and thorough, with numerous illustrations and screen shots. In addition, the authors have provided occasional "Design Tips" covering topics like how to manipulate images, create logos, work with colors, use contrast, and otherwise get the most out of the elements on the page to create a more personalized look. There's even advice on how to get a consistent design for your business.

The book avoids a busy look with its open layout that features a larger text size and only a few steps per page. The projects, like the templates themselves, vary in difficulty and complexity of design, but are all fairly easy to execute. While working on them, readers gain experience using the important features and tools of PageMaker, including master pages, layers, and style sheets. Adobe has an elegant corporate design, and (perhaps because of this) the lessons provide solid guidance in typography and layout. While the resulting projects are never subtle or complex, they are at least professional in appearance and, most importantly, doable by the average mom and pop business, or even your average mom and pop. --Angelynn Grant

Topics covered: Step-by-step instructions for creating business documents by using and customizing templates provided with PageMaker 6.5 Plus, including lessons on making stationery, business cards, brochures, posters, direct mail pieces, postcards, newsletters, CD labels, tickets, certificates, labels, signs, holiday cards, and other projects. Also included is advice on design, typography, printing, and production.

Customer Reviews:

Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0

Where's the CDROM:

I've returned 3 books already and just received the 4th still with no CDROM. According to the book, I'm suppose to be using one to work along with the tutorials. Is this an item I have to purchase separately or is the publisher mistakenly forgot to include them on their latest shipping batch?

Create professional looking business documents with PM 6.5+:

This book is a great way to learn how to use PageMaker if you are relatively new to this product. The projects in this book are business related and cover a wide range of items (business cards, mailers, flyers, menus, postcards, letterhead, etc). For some of the projects, the book assumes that you have purchased certain Avery brand products to print on. The nice thing is that it tells you the item number of the Avery product that you need.

The instructions are clear and the authors cover both the Mac and... more info

Read Description Carefully:

This book is a wonderful tool to learning how to use the templets included in Pagemaker 6.5 Plus...(you need to have 6.5 Plus). The nice thing about this book is that it gives the tips and hints/projects in both MAC and PC platforms. So, if you want to have a great resource for using Pagemaker 6.5/Plus then get this book. END

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