Alistair Dabbs is a freelance editor, writer, publishing production expert, editorial consultant and qualified media trainer.
He was rescued from unemployment in Leeds by a computer magazine in London, where he was taken on as editorial assistant in 1987. After a brief diversion into advertising production and print buying, he retrained at the London College of Printing (now the LCC) as a sub-editor in 1989 and that same year became an early participant in the UK publishing industry's 'desktop publishing' revolution.
After some years as a production editor, Alistair went to live in France for a year, returning in 1994 as a freelance journalist. Over the following ten years, Alistair became closely associated with the UK's MacUser magazine, where he continued to cover the digital arts revolution in publishing, achieved a world exclusive for being the first journalist to review Apple's original iMac, became notorious for massive lab tests of outrageously expensive digital imaging kit (printers, scanners, displays, digital cameras), and was dubbed "legendary" by music journalist and MacUser columnist Tony Tyler.
By the beginning of the noughties, Alistair had written countless booklets about page layout and computer graphics, all cover-mounted on magazines, and began contributing to larger works on similar themes. His first published book, 'Interface Design', has become a snapshot of computing history; his tips book for QuarkXPress 6.5 was bundled in Quark's retail boxes; and the classic 'Digital Designer's Bible' became a best seller in multiple languages.
From the mid-noughties, Alistair became more involved in editorial training. He began teaching his unique 10-week sub-editing short-course at the London School of Publishing (still running today, with an entry waiting list) and is also qualified as both an IT trainer and an Adobe Certified Instructor. His much-promised 'Sub-editor's Handbook' remains a work in progress but looks set for a 2012 publishing date.
Alistair's main focus these days is in editorial production for bringing publications to digital tablets and smartphones.
