Claudia McCue

Published by Claudia

To contact me: claudia [at] claudiamccue.com

For more information on my training offerings, please visit my my training site, Practicalia, LLC.

In The Beginning…

There was artboard and India Ink, and 6×0 jewel-tip Kohinoor Rapidographs kept clean by judicious rinsing and acts of faith. I still have a 30-year-old wad of artgum: It’s a bit petrified, but after a good kneading can still fulfill its purpose. French curves, lovingly polished free of nicks, and rulers with strips of tape to lift the edge long after the cork was gone. Prestype (I still have the burnishing tools somewhere), striping tape and ruling pens. The production art job was a respite from life in the lab as a chemistry major. “I’ll take a break,” I thought. “Then I’ll go back and finish my degree.”

Then I became a film stripper. (“But you seem like such a nice girl!”) Eventually I attained, to the horror of a politically-correct roommate, journeyman status. I’m sorry, but “JourneyPerson” does not capture the melding of art and science that befits a craftsman. Craftsperson. Craftsbroad…

My toolbox was well-stocked: two Ulano knives for Rubylith, assorted sharpening and polishing stones, double-headed cutters, every size of technical pen and marker. Winsor Newton sable brushes and that wonderful red Grumbacher opaque. I was the Knockout Queen: give me the bicycles! The fans! The plants with tiny leaves! I treasured my ParaMag for the molecular view of registration marks. Yum: Exactitude. The same love of pattern and form that had made Chemistry appealing was repurposed. Once, I had contemplated the Periodic Table, but soon atomic weights gave way to Pantone numbers.

When color electronic prepress systems came on the scene, I was fortunate to get in on the ground floor, running a Crosfield 820 system in 1981. No color monitor: just a keyline display to show where graphics were positioned. High-tech stuff! In 1984, my employer sprung for a Crosfield 860, with a color monitor. (Mind you, Crosfield was a British company. If you’ve ever owned a British car, you have some sense of the reliability of the electronics.) I went on to run Scitex systems, and bought a Mac in 1990 so I could learn Photoshop. I did a stint as a shift supervisor, then took a tempting fork in the road and became a software trainer.

Now I’m a trainer, consultant, and writer in the graphic arts realm. I’m the author of Real World Print Production with Adobe Creative Suite Applications (Peachpit Press, 2009) and Fearless Flash: Use Adobe InDesign CS5 and the Tools You Already Know to Create Engaging Web Documents (Adobe Press, 2010). I’ve also contributed to Real World QuarkXPress 7 (Peachpit Press, 2007) and Professional Design Techniques with Adobe Creative Suite 3 by Scott Citron (Peachpit Press, 2007).

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