Mark Gatter is an Adobe Certified Expert
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Courses & Consulting

with Mark Gatter

For the past 27 years I have worked in the graphic design and commercial printing industries. I've been production manager of print shops in both the UK and the USA, and founded my own graphic design studio in California in 1990. On countless occasions I have been amazed at the 'knowledge gap' between designers and printers, and thus came to realise two important points:

1) Printers (generally) don't talk to graphic designers, and...
2) Graphic designers (generally) don't know that they SHOULD talk to printers.

Because of this, when a job is sent to a print shop the results are often tragic. Colours may change; images which looked bright and clear on-screen may now look awful; type may have reflowed, completely changing page layouts.

These and more are the things that make graphic designers wake up at 3am, biting their nails as they wonder what their work will look like when they get it back from the printer. This is a ridiculous situation. Deadlines make graphic design stressful enough, and none of us need this additional burden.

Publications:

Getting It Right In Print
I decided to do something about the woeful state of affairs described above and wrote a 2-day intensive IT course called 'Digital Repro and Prepress', aimed specifically at those either already working in graphic design or about to embark on it as a career. Over the next two years the course material grew into a book, Getting It Right In Print, which was published in 2005 by Lawrence King Publishing in the UK and Harry N. Abrahams Inc. in the USA. It has since been translated into Spanish, German and Chinese. See the table of contents for a description of the subject matter covered in each chapter.

Software Essentials for Grahpic Designers
I have also written additional courses covering all the major graphics applications that, as a designer, I find myself using on a daily basis: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress and Adobe Acrobat. For those involved in website design there are also courses in Dreamweaver and Flash. The material from each has now been combined in a single publication called Software Essentials for Graphic Designers, published in the UK in August 2006 by Lawrence King Publishing and in the USA (October 2006) by Yale University Press. Read more about this book.

See some comments from recent course attendees.

Courses:

You can book all the above courses and more for delivery either on-site at your own place of work or at state-of-the-art training studios in Guildford. See the entire list of courses showing the subject matter covered.

As well as the course outlines listed you may also choose:

Bespoke courses: created to meet your specific requirements, including combination courses covering two (or more) software applications simultaneously. Please email with a list of the desired programmes / subjects.

Floorwalking training for larger companies: an ideal option for organisations that prefer training to be delivered on a one-to-one basis at the employees' desk. This is a particularly efficient way of dealing with a number of employees who may be working with different applications within a common production process.

Consultation: