Wanting to instruct/help...

As I mentioned in a previous post, I would like to talk about a user manual I created. The Institute I attended received some new equipment during my time there and for a project, an instructor of mine assign me and another student to create a manual for the said equipment. He believed that the manual that was provided with it wasn’t of the best and thought that we could do a better job. However, the other student (who shall remain without a name) didn’t do that much (if anything) for the project so I had to go at it on my own and was able to accomplish the task myself.

To do the project right, I had to learn how to use it myself before I got started. It was for a Digital Scanning back Camera along with it’s required software. It was great to be one of the first to use the equipment and I really got a good idea on how to go about it. Once I knew how it all worked, I started to formulate what would have been the best way to present it and started working on it. I had to create the copy for the manual first so that I would know what would have been the images I would need. Once the copy was written, I took the needed photographs and screen-captures to display what was being talked about. Some photographs didn’t turn out the best they could have been so I had to create some Digital Illustrations for those images. The photos that were taken well needed a little work so I had to correct some of the images. After all of that was done, I simply just had to decide what would have been the best format for the manual and put it all together.

For the most part, I had to use everything I had learned up to that point for the project. I had to create the proper copy to be used in the manual which dealt with Copywriting. I had to do some Photography and correct the images in Photoshop along with taking some screen-captures. For the photos that didn’t come out as well as they could have been, I used Illustrator for some Digital Illustrations; along with recreating the logo for the cover. Lastly, I used InDesign for the layout of the project and set it up for print. As I know far too well, Graphic Design is not just for one application or aspect of a project.

Here are some samples of the pages I created for this manual, including the cover and a photo of the printed manual:



Until my next post.