Alistair Dabbs is a professional journalist with more than 20 years of experience, 16 of those as a freelance, and a strong background in editing and sub-editing – what Americans call ‘copy editing’.
Alistair is a member of the London Freelance Branch of the National Union of Journalists. Click on the following links to view his NUJ Freelance Directory profile and his entry in the dwpub Freelance Journalist Directory.
Technical journalism
Alistair specialises in technical and computing subjects, making complex material easy to understand. He has written regularly for the mainstream and trade IT press over the years, and was editor of PC Direct, a columnist for IT Week, and a prolific public relations copywriter for IT organisations ranging from Oracle to THUS.
He was the first journalist outside the US to test Apple’s original iMac, and the resulting feature review became a world exclusive. For many years, Alistair was a contributing editor to MacUser, focusing on the print production industry and conducting lab tests of digital imaging hardware.
Alistair currently writes a weekly column for Register Hardware, the reviews-focused sibling of the notorious IT website The Register. Previously, he wrote a regular monthly column on client computing for IT Week magazine (now incorporated into Computing) between 2004 and 2008. Archives can be read online here.
Consumer writing
Outside the world of IT, Alistair’s byline has adorned non-technical stories about travel, sport and entertainment, featuring in consumer and trade titles, online publications and in-flight magazines. He was even author of some 40 issues of Manga Force, a DVD collectors’ series for Japanese anime distributor Manga Entertainment.
Books
Alistair has authored a number of technical books, often in collaboration with other experts. These include:
The Print Manager’s Handbook 09/10 (2009, 128 pages, ISBN 978-0954904966)
The Print Manager’s Handbook 08/09 (2008, 240 pages, ISBN 978-095490494x)
The Print Manager’s Handbook 2006 (2006, 176 pages, ISBN 978-0954904915)
The Print Manager’s Handbook 2005 (2005, 160 pages, ISBN 978-0954904906)
How To Do Just About Anything With Your Digital Photos – Reader’s Digest (2006, 128 pages, ISBN 978-0276441844, awarded 4.5 STARS on Amazon UK)
FREE DOWNLOAD: The Insider’s Guide to QuarkXPress 7 - 250 Essential Tips & Tricks (2006, 64 pages, originally distributed inside the QuarkXPress 7 retail box)
InDesign Essentials - The Fast Track to Mastering Adobe’s Revolutionary Page Layout Application (2005, 192 pages, ISBN 978-1904705703, awarded FIVE STARS on Amazon UK, published in the US as InDesign Production Cookbook)
Digital Designer’s Bible (2005, 256 pages, ISBN 978-1904705277, awarded FIVE STARS on Amazon US)
FREE DOWNLOAD: The Insider’s Guide to QuarkXPress 6.5 - 250 Tips & Tricks (2005 US edition, 64 pages, originally distributed with Computer Arts)
Interface Design - Effective Design of Graphical User Interfaces for the Web and Multimedia Pages (2002, 192 pages, ISBN 978-0304361960)
Alistair has also written a number of booklets in the Unity Guides series:
The Unity Guide to Workflow (2006, 36 pages)
The Unity Guide to Better Document Creation (2003, updated 2004, 24 pages)
The Unity Guide to Colour Management (2003, 24 pages)
The Unity Guide to Handling Digital Images (2003, 28 pages)