JOBS SEARCH
BEAT UNEMPLOYMENT WITH
COMPUTER GRAPHICS DESIGNING
BY
Mike Okhihiemen
With
an estimated 60million youths jobless in Nigeria and a threatening 24 million youths in the nation’s secondary, one wonders what future awaits our
youth with a particular reference to employment.
Although
we all collectively shout that there is unemployment in the country, the truth
remains that some sectors of the economy are panicky looking for trained hands
to man sections of their mills. A vivid example is publishing industry where the most important stages of production
involve the use of computers graphics design , popularly powered by the software called CorelDraw. (Other software
exists).
The
scenario described here illustrates the picture intended.
Mr. Raymond
is a small scale book publisher. As part of the process of book
publishing , trained computer Graphic Designers are needed
to page – plan his books into neatly arranged pages like you find in most
books.
Consequently,
he rode off from his office to Shomolu, a part of Lagos known for various kinds
of printing activities. He approached a graphic design office. He was told to wait : All designers are busy. He refused, and
moveed to another, some metres away. “I don’t have time for book work “ that
one complained. Yet again he searched for another (They are many here ) and
found one without much upheaval . That
last one agreed to page plans the look
for him at N150 per page.
They
negotiated, and he struck a deal of N20,000 to page the 150 paged book which he
wanted published for his client’s birthday celebration two weeks away. But the
graphic designer insisted he must wait for
five days to enable him do a good
job. The publisher hesitated, thinks twice, angrily he agrees, and leaves the
job for the designer. A good chuck of his time is already taken by the
designer.
He
sits, thinks, and decides to employ a designer for his office down town. He
reaches home, writes a notice:
“VACANCY
Graphic Designer
Wanted”
.
He
pastes it on a glass door in his office.
Two weeks, two months, no graphic artiste appears. Frustrated, he tells
his friends to help him out. They too have the same problem. They are searching
for graphic arties too.
As
he moves round Shomolu in the process of printingm he too begins to notice
vacancy for graphic Artist signs. He’s
convinced it is a serious problem getting them. But his books must be
published; and that timely too. So something must be done.
He
thinks hard, arrives at a conclusion: what
if I study the Graphic myself? He asked himself Again he decides fast,
approached computer graphic company. Face to face with director, he hears
“N18,000
for computer Graphics
Duration:
3 months
Evening
classes 2 hours daily”
“You mean I would be able to design
my works there after months?” He asked
“If you are serious”
Of course I will be”
the student to be replied
That
same evening, he began his training. On
the eight day of his lectures, he had mastered the CorelDraw environment. His confidence
builds up. Within the period, he received a manuscript for publication.
Again
he would urgently need a graphic designer. Instead of . begging a designer with N20,000, he decides to try his
hands on his own work. He picked a published book, studied it hard, with assistance, he
started the design of his own
book. Within 5 hours, 90% of the job had
been done reflectively. He had saved N20,000; he had saved time and avoidable inconvenience ;
finally, he sat back on his chair and wonders;
“
Why are graduates roaming the streets and crying there are jobs when a little training
an Corel Graphics can earn them a comfortable living and independence?”
Unlike
Microsoft word, CorelDraw has the beautiful possibility of designing and
illustrating ideas through images. It has the ability to manipulate pictures
with ease and flexibly. The pages of the medium through which you are reading
this piece can easily, with trained hands, be laid and developed through the professionals
use of Corel Graphics; book covers, books, pages, magazines, calendars,
complimentary cards e.t.c are a few of what the software can do for you.
Some
designers may choose to specialize in a particular line of design. For example,
book production which principally involves the artistic design
of the cover page as well as the inner pages will demand specialization .
The commercial cost of designing a
book page of up to 100 covered costs
between N10,000 and N15,000, depending on the competence of the designer. A designer
could comfortably work on a book or two in a day. That implies that for
book design alone, a good ,hardworking designer, all things being equal ,
could earn up to N20-30,000 daily. Even if he makes only N5,000 per day, that still
would add up to about N30,000 per month less Sundays. Can you see what we mean?
Yet,
many established small scale businesses are cap-in hand searching for graphic
artistes and our graduate and schools leavers are rotting away in the midst of
waiting opportunities.
Perhaps someone needs to rise up and do the
link up.
History
of CorelDraw
In 1987, Corel
hired software engineers Michel Bouillon and Pat Beirne to develop a
vector-based illustration program to bundle with their desktop publishing
systems. That program, CorelDraw, was initially released in 1989. CorelDraw 1.x
and 2.x runs under Windows 2.x and 3.0. CorelDraw 3.0 came into its own with
Microsoft's release of Windows 3.1. The inclusion of TrueType in Windows 3.1 transformed CorelDraw into a serious
illustration program capable of using system-installed outline fonts without
requiring third-party software such as Adobe
Type Manager; paired with a photo editing
program (PhotoPaint), a font manager and several other pieces of software, it
was also part of the first all-in-one graphics suite.
Supported
platforms
CorelDraw was originally developed
for Microsoft Windows 3 and currently runs on Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. The current version, X6, was released on 20 March 2012.
Versions for Mac OS and Mac OS X were at one time available, but due to poor sales these
were discontinued. The last port for Linux was version 9 (released in 2000, it
did not run natively; instead, it used a modified version of Wine to run) and the last version for OS X was version 11
(released in 2001). Also, up until version 5, CorelDraw was developed for Windows 3.1x, CTOS
and OS/2.
Several innovations to vector-based
illustration originated with CorelDraw: a node-edit tool that operates
differently on different objects, fit text-to-path, stroke-before-fill, quick
fill/stroke color selection palettes, perspective projections, mesh fills and
complex gradient fills.[citation needed]
CorelDraw differentiates itself from
its competitors in a number of ways:
The first is its positioning as a
graphics suite, rather than just a vector graphics program. A full range of
editing tools allow the user to adjust contrast, color balance, change the
format from RGB
to CMYK,
add special effects such as vignettes and special borders to bitmaps. Bitmaps
can also be edited more extensively using Corel PhotoPaint, opening the bitmap directly from CorelDraw and returning
to the program after saving. It also allows a laser to cut out any drawings.
CorelDraw is capable of handling
multiple pages along with multiple master layers. Multipage documents are easy
to create and edit and the Corel print engine allows for booklet and other
imposition so even simple printers can be used for producing finished
documents. One of the useful features for single and multi-page documents is
the ability to create linked text boxes across documents that can be resized
and moved while the text itself resets and flows through the boxes. Useful for
creating and editing multi-article newsletters etc.
Smaller items, like business cards,
invitations etc., can be designed to their final page size and imposed to the
printer's sheet size for cost-effective printing. An additional print-merge
feature (using a spreadsheet or text merge file) allows full personalization
for many things like numbered raffle tickets, individual invitations,
membership cards and more.
CorelDraw's competitors include Adobe Illustrator and Xara Photo & Graphic Designer. Although all of these are vector-based illustration
programs, the user experience differs greatly between them. While these
programs will read their native file types and vice versa, the translation is
rarely perfect. CorelDraw can open Adobe PDF files: Adobe PageMaker, Microsoft Publisher and Word, and
other programs can print documents to PDF using the Adobe PDFWriter printer
driver, which CorelDraw can then open and edit every aspect of the original
layout and design. CorelDRAW can also open PowerPoint presentations and other Microsoft Office formats with
little or no problem.
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