International CorelDRAW Summit Dinner

By the title of this post, you might think there was some fancy meeting or conference held. In this case it was just a dinner with Scott Georgeson (of Australia), his wife and myself. There were certainly a lot of subjects discussed that have absolutely nothing to do with CorelDRAW and graphic design. Yet I thought you might find some of the CorelDRAW-related discussion interesting. Normally I'd post a picture of us together. Unfortunately we were so busy talking that we forgot to take a picture.

First, some of you may not initially recognize Scott's name. He is the creator of the tutorial videos included with CorelDRAW X4, X5 and X6. When he isn't creating the videos for Corel, he is creating content for Click n Learn. Scott is a newlywed so I'm sure he'd really appreciate more purchases of his tutorials.

I had met Scott on one previous occasion, but we only had a limited time to talk because we were both very busy presenting information to CorelDRAW users. This time we did get to know more about each other and the creative process used. We're hoping to get together again before Scott goes back to Australia and I'll follow up with another post if there is more information of interest to share.

One of the topics we discussed was the method we used to create videos. When he is creating for Corel, the videos will have to be translated into a number of languages. That means everything needs to be scripted. Scripts are sent off for translation and tweaked until they are just right. Then someone who speaks the other languages will record audio to be used for the video. As the videos have to be on the DVD with CorelDRAW when it ships, he has to record them before the software is completed. This can make it difficult if a feature isn't quite ready when it is time to record.

Videos I record have a number of differences. Mine are not translated and therefore the exact wording is not scripted. While it would be great to have my products done as soon as CorelDRAW is released, I prefer to wait until the software is released so the information can be as accurate as possible. This isn't to say Scott's aren't accurate, but doing them before the software is finalized is extremely difficult. Of course I also have a written component to my training and that requires a lot of screen shots, example graphics plus thousands upon thousands of words.

We certainly covered a number of other topics about our respective businesses. That included how we approach marketing, challenges we face, funny stories and much more. This information was shared "off the record" so I won't be including the details here. As I said, we are going to try and meet again in the next few days and hopefully there is more information of interest to share.