TIW: Print Program (Week One)

A week ago last Thursday night I officially started my part-time course at Toronto Image Works. For our first class, the instructor took us on a tour of the Mac operating system. For the Mac users, like myself, this was somewhat dull and boring, but for those students who came from a PC environment it was an excellent crash course in how Macs work.
On Tuesday night at my second class at Toronto Image Works, my instructor took us on a great adventure into the land of Google. Or to put it another way, everything we wanted to know about Google but didn't know.

First, he demonstrated Google's prowess as a search engine, which includes a wealth of advanced search options, such as boolean operators and advanced operators, that allow you to introduce certain parameters to make your searches more specific and relevant. Beyond its amazing search capabilities he showed us how complex and dynamic Google is with its incredible array of services and tools which, if you know where to look, are right at your fingertips. Some of these services are quite obvious, such as Google maps, Gmail and Blogger. Others are more esoteric, such Google Translator, which can translate words and passages or entire web pages from one language into another, and Google Labs, which focuses on all sorts of cool web-based experiments.


Last Thursday night we extensively explored Bridge CS4, which is a tightly integrated component of the Adobe Creative Suite. Adobe sums it up as, "a powerful, easy-to-use media manager for visual people, letting you easily organise, browse, locate, and view creative assets." After getting down and personal with this application, I can tell you that it is certainly an amazing and dynamic piece of software. I love it!

One of the really cool features we delved into that night was how to create web galleries and PDF presentations. It was incredibly easy to do. At the same time, it revealed how one could create visually powerful statements.