Winchester, Massachusetts
It's all in the alignment.
Creating aesthetically pleasing designs to convey your ideas and information
About
Paula Queen, Designer
In the mid-nineties, I lived in Charleston, South Carolina for a short time. I was working for a temp agency at the Charleston County Parks and Recreation Department. While I sat, waiting for the phone to ring (and it hardly did), one of the managers noticed my frustration with having nothing to do. He asked me if I had ever used Corel Draw, which I had not. He gave me a brief overview of the program and the information to create a poster announcing a Fall event in the park. He said to "have fun with it" and "see what I come up with." I started playing around with the fonts and the images, balancing them on the page. Leaves were falling down the side of the page. It was like magic in my hands. The colors, the background, the layout. I had so much fun that afternoon and got so much satisfaction out of the final copy. I couldn't stop looking at it. Upon returning to Massachusetts, I got a job for a printing company. I was introduced to Macintosh computers. Shortly after, I began taking night classes at Middlesex Community College learning graphic design theory, color and design, layout, basic drawing and of course all of the software programs related to it. Back then, it was Quark Xpress and Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and Pagemaker. In those years, I got a fair amount of experience in print production and getting camera ready prints and film out of an old style imagesetter. I still remember, it was an AGFA PROSET 9400. A very touchy machine to say the least! Now, things are much easier. So much of the printing is digital. The print formatting is much simpler. We use Adobe Creative Suite now, which includes Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. Things have changed so much, but never my satisfaction of seeing it all come together, just like that first day long ago in another place, when the leaves were flowing down the page. That feeling will never change.