Adobe – MEMORANDUM

It’s Free. It’s Adobe Creative Cloud.

Students working on computers, courtesy of UAB Image Gallery

By: Summer Guffey

Want to sharpen your digital literacy? Well now you can!

Adobe Creative Cloud is available to all UAB students and faculty members. The university’s agreement with Adobe allows students and faculty to create documents and edit photos for business and academic purposes. Students can hone their visual, audio, animation and organization skills digitally in the classroom. UAB believes that the teaching of digital literacy will propel students into the job market with advantages over their competitors.

Students have access to the cloud which includes a myriad of programs that can be used for design storage and photography files. Programs in the student design are:

Photoshop
Illustrator
Acrobat DC
After Effects
Premiere Pro
Dreamweaver
And many more!

Every student is eligible for a free Adobe Acrobat Pro license. Adobe Acrobat is accessible through your Creative Cloud license as well.

Acquiring Your Creative Cloud

Students can access Adobe Creative Cloud in five simple steps. However, if there are any issues that you run into, it is best to contact UAB’s IT department. The instructions are to be carried out as followed:

Visit adobe.com, then click “sign in” in the upper left-hand corner.
Click “sign in with an Enterprise ID.”
Enter your BlazerID (the email including @uab.edu) and password. This will redirect you to UAB’s single sign-on page where you can log in with your BlazerID and DUO 2-factor authentication.

You will then be directed to your cloud where you can install the programs you want to use onto your laptop.

Utilizing Adobe: Tips

The difference between Acrobat Pro and Creative Cloud is important for successfully utilizing each program for your desired purpose. Acrobat Pro allows you to create and edit PDFs; this includes the addition of interactivity for PDFs. When it comes to saving documents, Adobe Acrobat is used in accordance to other offered cloud storage, such as the methods of UAB One Drive.

In contrast, Creative Cloud provides a collection of the various programs offered in design, publishing, video and image applications. You can store your designs and various photograph styles in your Creative Cloud.

For those in need of publishing applications, InDesign is useful for such projects. With this software, you can create brochures, zines, books and flyers. Graphic designers, publishers, artists and marketers all use InDesign to format their digital documents. This will be useful in professional careers that require you to develop layouts. In the professional market, InDesign is commonly used in conjunction with Photoshop and Illustrator.

Photoshop is ideal for editing photos, but can also be used to sharpen your graphic art. You can retouch your photography, combine and organize images and isolate undesired objects. Illustrator helps you create two-dimensional objects and images, such as logos, which are pertinent to most professional businesses.

The Illustrator application is also used to create vector-based designs such as your own graphics, comics and fonts. Developing the ability to work through the Adobe software will provide you with a desired set of skills which employers are looking for in the workplace.

Career Spotlight: Online Content Editor

By Kalyn Wells

XML coding

With everything becoming more web-based, it is no surprise that there are more careers evolving around this medium in publishing today.

For example, online content editors spend most of their day creating content for the web. In addition to working with and adding content on the web, they must code their content with HTML and XML codes to properly publish it on the Internet. They strategically plan how the website should be laid out based on research and statistics of previous approaches the company has put forth on their website. So, getting to know the company and the company’s online history is a crucial part of this type of career.

Similar to most publishing careers, communication, research and proofreading are all skills an online content editor should acquire. An employer looking to hire an online content editor would look for these skills in a potential employee, but they would also look for a person who has developed coding and computer skills in order to successfully publish text and images onto the company’s website.

Creative Pool is a helpful site that gives more information about what online content editors do, what kind of environment they work in and more.

UAB offers courses in the Professional Writing curriculum that will help a student succeed in this type of career. There are courses such as Developing Digital Documents in which a student will learn more about Adobe software and how to construct a publication. Digital Publishing is another helpful course in which learning how to code for websites is one of the important objectives of the course.

You can find more Professional Writing course offerings in the UAB Catalog. A student could also take additional courses from the Communication Studies curriculum to help them gain more knowledge on the history of media.

The PWC at UAB

Having the ability to communicate well is a desired trait that all employers are looking for. An integral part of that is written communication. The Professional Writing Club at UAB (PWC) has been established to help students understand and excel in written discourse. The PWC was founded last year by a group of Professional Writing Majors whose goal of was to create an open forum where the field and study of Professional Writing could be shared and explored across all fields of study at UAB.

The PWC has since achieved official recognition by the University. With this recognition and under the guidance of UAB faculty advisor Dr. Jeffrey Bacha, the PWC now has the credibility and knowledge to help facilitate its mission: “To equip students interested in Professional Writing with knowledge and experience to prepare them for the workforce. To network with professionals in the field, and participate in industry-focused workshops. To come together with others and innovate the future of the Professional Writing and Public Discourse program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB).”

Following with this mission, the PWC has hosted several workshops on different elements of professional writing. These workshops have been on such topics as: résumé building, creating a Cover Letter and the basics of Photoshop. These workshops stressed the importance of good written communication and how to attract the eye of potential employers. Dr. Bacha lent his expertise and led the workshops, but they were planned and executed by the elected student officers of the club. The Photoshop workshop provided insight into one of the most widely used image editing software around and showed how design is an important part of professional writing. Having a good knowledge of these documents and the concepts associated with them is an important asset to have when job hunting. That is another key part of the PWC: giving students knowledge beyond what they might find in a classroom.

The PWC hopes to continue in this vain by hosting guest speaker events. The best way to learn about how professional writing crosses all sects of industry is to hear from those who use it in their professional lives. The PWC plans on having several guest speakers come and discuss with the club what professional writing means to them and how they apply the craft in their fields of industry. These speakers will show just how diversified professional writing can be, as well as, provide “real world” knowledge of the craft. Another way that the PWC will be providing real world knowledge is by executing professional level projects for UAB and the local community.