Letter from Lynda  Hello, everyone! June greetings (I am pictured with my sequined Minnie ears, at our company celebration this last May). Learn about our latest releases and projects below:
Chris Orwig’s ‘Narrative Portraiture’ series
We are very excited to announce a new series with photographer and veteran lynda.com author Chris Orwig. Created as live-action instructional videos focused on techniques rather than software tools, Chris shows how he uses elements such as location and natural light to create portraits that go beyond the typical headshot to tell stories about their subjects.  In the first installment of the series, Narrative Portraiture: Foundations of Portraiture , Chris describes his vision of narrative portraiture, illustrating it with examples from his work. He describes composition and lighting techniques and discusses ideal portraiture lenses. Along the way, he shares insights aimed at enabling photographers of all experience levels to take more emotionally powerful portraits.
 In the second installment in the series, Narrative Portraiture: On Location in New York City , Chris travels to New York to photograph a Broadway performer on the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s an opportunity to watch a working photographer as he engages with his subject, responds to changing lighting conditions, and takes advantage of unexpected circumstances. After the shoot, Chris reviews the best of his shots and concludes with some assignments.
Chris’s portraits have an authentic, organic quality—as he says, he strives for honesty rather than flattery. We’re excited to share his approach to portraiture in these and future installments of his new series. Stay up to date with access to the Online Training Library®! We are constantly adding new software training courses and inspirational documentaries to help reach your creative and career goals. 
‘Photoshop for Designers’ series This month, we’re launching the first installment of a new series created specifically for designers who want to work with confidence in Photoshop, created by another veteran lynda.com author, Nigel French. The premise of the series: Nigel shows how a particular Photoshop feature works, and then demonstrates how that tool works in a real-world design project.  In the first installment of Photoshop for Designers: Layer Effects , Nigel explores the under-appreciated but vastly useful Layer Effects feature in Photoshop. He shows how to create editable, non-destructive effects such as shadows, glows, and bevels, and covers the use of layer effects like Drop Shadow, Inner Shadow, Bevel and Emboss, and Gradient Overlay. He also explains creating effects with blending modes, transparency, and textures. With these techniques, designers can finesse type and graphics, control light, warp text, and extrude shapes, creating drama and adding depth to compositions. In the end, all of these features are used in the context of building a beautiful alphabet poster project that creatively exploits this useful set of features.
New installment of ‘Illustrator Insider Training’ series with Mordy Golding  We’re getting wonderful member feedback for our series featuring Illustrator teacher extraordinaire Mordy Golding. This series is for people who already know Illustrator, but want to see how legacy features have been updated or become more sophisticated over the years, and to learn best practices and current techniques. The second course in the series, Illustrator Insider Training: Seeing Through Transparency , is now available. Mordy teaches how to create transparency effects and ensure reliable printing results. This course reviews the history of vector transparency and covers features such as knockout groups, opacity masks, and transparency flattening. Mordy also shows how to establish a safe workflow when placing Illustrator graphics containing transparency in PostScript, PDF, and InDesign files. This course includes a downloadable worksheet that allows you to test whether you are processing the key concepts in the course. Five new courses on HTML5 Over the past year, HTML5 and its associated technologies (such as CSS3) have been taking the web development world by storm. While HTML5 is still in its adolescence, with neither the specifications nor browser support truly complete, its capabilities are powerful and flexible, and are being used widely to add new functionality to web sites and applications deployed through desktop and mobile browsers. Last year, we published HTML5 First Look with James Williamson, an early survey of the HTML5 landscape. James described the HTML5 APIs at a high level, and pointed out many useful resources for web developers who wanted to get started with the technology. In June, we’re following up with a cluster of new courses that describe how to implement specific aspects of HTML5: HTML5: Structure, Syntax, and Semantics with James Williamson
HTML5: Graphics and Animation with Canvas with Joe Marini
HTML5: Local Storage and Offline Applications in Depth with Bill Weinman
HTML5: Web Forms in Depth with Joe Marini
HTML5: Video and Audio in Depth with Steve Heffernan The first course is designed to get you started with HTML5. It describes how to create an HTML5 web page, and some of the most important syntactical conventions you need to know about. James Williamson talked about it on our last week. Each of the other courses describes specific HTML5 features, with hands-on exercises to help you explore how you might use the technology in your own sites. We published these courses together to help you get started quickly with these important techniques. And there’s more to come—we’ll periodically publish additional short courses on other HTML5 features such as web workers, browser history, drag and drop, and more. And as the world of HTML5 evolves, we’ll review these courses to continue to keep them up to date. Let us know if these courses are working for you, and what other information you need as you get started with HTML5. Check out our blog series with interviews with the course authors. Updated social media courses Facebook and Twitter are continually evolving, and each new release, each new feature, and each revised set of privacy settings brings new opportunities and challenges. Members have asked us for up-to-date training on Facebook and Twitter, and in May we released completely updated versions of two courses, with a third due to release mid-June.  In Facebook Essential Training , author Garrick Chow answers all the pressing Facebook questions: How do I separate my friends from my coworkers? How do I post all my vacation photos in an album on Facebook? How do I control who sees information about me? How do I uninstall FarmVille??? Garrick provides plenty of tips in his signature friendly style, and will have you feeling confident about connecting on Facebook in no time.
 We also just released a new version of Social Media Marketing with Facebook and Twitter with Anne-Marie Concepción. If you are interested in taking advantage of the reach of Facebook (more than half a billion users) and Twitter (200 million-plus users) to market your organization or business, you won’t want to miss this completely revised course. Anne-Marie Concepción shows dozens of ways to promote a company’s brand, increase sales, drive traffic to a site, and engage with customers using Facebook and Twitter. Whether you’re a business owner, creative professional, sales professional, or marketer, this course will get you up and running with two of today’s hottest venues for social media marketing.
On June 10, we release Twitter Essential Training, a course that Maria Langer has completely rerecorded to reflect recent changes to the interface and to cover new features. Maria is a seasoned Twitter teacher and user, and in addition to the basics of setting up a Twitter account, she also gives advice for writing good tweets, finding information you’re interested in, and getting more followers. The course also has expanded coverage of using Twitter on mobile devices and of using tools like Twuffer and TwitPic to get the most out of the service. Doyald Young documentary selected for London film festival  We’re very pleased to announce that one of our Creative Inspirations documentaries has again been accepted into a major film festival. Doyald Young, Logotype Designer has been selected to screen at the Open City London Documentary Film Festival on June 17 at 1:30 p.m. (BST). The documentary team at lynda.com is honored by the recognition that our films have received, and we’ll continue to strive to deliver excellent, compelling, and inspiring stories.
Announcing lyndaCampus: Technology and software training for everyone at your school, any time, anywhere  We are really excited to announce a new training solution for schools. lyndaCampus integrates with your existing school portal or IP network, and provides unrestricted access to the entire lynda.com library of instructional videos. Like our individual memberships, it includes the ability for users to create personal profiles, and access bookmarking and certificate of completion features. It also has robust reporting features to track usage, course views, movie rankings, computer setups, and more.
Other highlights include: - Provides campus-wide online learning solution for students, faculty, and staff
- Delivers high-quality training for building technology skills
- Supports different learning styles and provides self-directed learning paths
- Teaches skills so teachers can concentrate on the big picture
- Significantly lowers the dependence on expensive, quickly outdated textbooks
- Saves time and cost over off-site technology training or consultants
- Integrates with your existing school portal or IP network
- Supports Shibboleth and CAS
- Works with an existing IT environment
- Implemented with co-branded personalization for campus identity
To find out more, contact a lynda.com Training Solutions Advisor: email sales@lynda.com, or call (888) 335-9632 or (805) 477-3900. Call +44 (0) 1252 302366 in the U.K. Live with Lynda features education reform Visit the archived webinar that lynda.com co-produced with New Media Consortium to watch an interview between Lynda Weinman and Esther Wojcicki, an American journalist, educator, and vice-chair of the Creative Commons Board of Directors. Wojcicki has been a pioneer in exploring the interface between education and technology, and has taught at Palo Alto High School since 1987, where she currently teaches journalism and English. There, she started the journalism program that has grown to become one of the largest in the nation. Esther has engaged her high school students to become avid bloggers, videographers, writers, and journalists. She started with a class of 40 students, and has expanded the program to include over half the population of the high school. That’s all for this month, with more to come soon to fuel your interests and curiosity. Until then, happy learning! | 
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