Design Support and Training

I first began using Adobe InDesign while working as an IT Manager for a restaurant group. Owing to my background in art and design, along with my digital design skills, the group asked me to take over responsibility for updating and revising their menus. This shift allowed my department to handle the work in-house, significantly reducing the costs of outsourcing to a design agency. From there, I expanded into using other Adobe application including Illustrator, Photoshop, and Lightroom for a variety of projects.

Since going freelance, I´ve continued to work with these tools as and when needed. Many of my clients have asked me to create entirely new menu designs or adapt and update their existing ones. I´ve also helped them set up InDesign templates that their food and beverage staff can easily maintain. Today, quite a few of my clients manage their own menus in InDesign, thanks to the affordability of single-app licenses.

This is a significant improvement from years past, when many restaurants relied on Microsoft Excel or Word to piece together menu layout, often with frustrating results. While the initial setup of a menu in InDesign can be a bit taxing for F&B teams, once the core layouts are in place, maintaining and updating the template files is straightforward and well within their capabilities.

I have also frequently been asked by clients to assist them in preparing design assets or recreating vector logos. They may have lost access to their original vector files and cannot locate the person who originally did the artwork. Then later they require a resized design for a specific design job but only have small png or jpeg files to work with.

I have assisted smaller restaurants and art groups to standardise their design and branding with the assistance of simple style guides. These documents can then be used by multiple content creators to standardise the look and feel of their brand. They also assist less design savvy creators to keep their contributions looking reasonably professional and consistent. Like with my IT work, having simple documentation that contains key information in one central location can save a great amount of time. Having fonts, font sizes, RGB, HEX and CMYK colour codes for brand colours etc can greatly improve the speed and efficiency of creating design items. Also, finding a central storage location for key design asset files can also make life much simpler. This kind of sounds obvious, but it is amazing how many SME's and groups I have worked with in the past, fail to do this.

At times I have also done group talks and individual coaching with clients to help them understand image preparation for their website and print projects. In my work with art groups, I am often dealing with older clients who are not fully digitally native. All the different image file types can be confusing. Then resizing, re-naming, optimizing these image files for their website or print requirements can be quite demanding when they do not understand the terminology and sequences required. Not everyone is interested, or open, to learning how to undertake these digital tasks. However, for those who are, I am always happy to explain the principals and coach them into undertaking basic image editing tasks for themselves. Often I also produce simple cheat sheets, or training documentation, to prompt them when they undertake the design tasks they require to do.