About ... me, Eric Force:
My background is in Letterpress & Offset printing during the pre-digital era then, as
the digital age emerged, computer programming and graphics design. The skills
learned during my commercial printing days (Force Printing Company) were carried
over and merged with Desktop Publishing as graphics design, scalable fonts and
page layout software became available for personal computers.
Adobe's PDF file format is what ties this all together today in making it possible to
provide the same quality "pre-press" documents used by commercial printing firms
available to anyone via a simple file download. The ability to print these types of files
on most any desktop printer is what sparked the concept for this website.
About ... my current tools:
While individual skill plays an extremely important part in any design process, having
the appropriate computer hardware and software can make a huge difference in the
end result. Like any craft, there’s nothing like having the right tool for the right job at
the right time. Here are the computer tools that I currenty use - all hardware
components were purchased from Newegg.com. (a really great source in my opinion
- I’ve never had a problem with them)
Hardware: (Custom built PC by me)
- Cooler Master HAF-932 full size High Air Flow tower case .
- ASUS M5A97 Main Board
- AMD 8350 4.0 Ghz 8-Core CPU
- AMD Radeon HD 7850 Graphics Card
- 32 GB Crucial High Speed DDR3 RAM (4x 8 GB sticks)
- 4 Western Digital "Black" hard drives (12 TB total storage in C, D, E & F drives)
- Operating System: Windows 7 Professional 64 Bit.
Software: (used for most of my graphics projects)
- CorelDRAW X7 (for vector based work and most of my design projects)
- Corel Paintshop Pro V7 (for bitmapped based & photographic work)
- Xara Web Designer v11 Premium (Used to create this website and others)
- PowerBasic CC for Windows v6.03 (create apps to manipulate and update files)
- PosteRazor (used to create multi-panel PDF files)
Software: (Backup - The MOST important software I have)
- Casper v7 (from Future Systems [fssdev.com] used to create "Cloned" drives C ->
D, E -> F daily) There’s an old saying with respect to a hard disk drive that’s as true
today as it was decades ago: “It’s NOT a matter of IF it will fail, it’s a matter of WHEN
it will fail”. “Casper” has saved my tail at least 4-5 times over the years!
Odds & Ends
- I do a LOT of printing so the cost of ink & toner cartridges could be an issue if I
purchased only OEM replacements. I don’t! … and haven’t for years! For my inkjet
printers, I use refillable cartridges and for my laser printer, I use 3rd party Non-OEM
cartridges, The cost savings for my inkjets is about 90% and about 80% for my laser
printer.
My First Commercial
Printing Press
A Chandler & Price 8 x12 Platen Press. I LOVED this little press and wish I still had it. (Photo from Google Images)
