Over the last few weeks we’ve been getting a lot of questions about printing, and prepress in our weekly InDesign classes.

For an understanding of the issues involved in reproducing your digital designs on old-fangled ink and paper, I highly recommend a newly updated book by Sandee Cohen:

Book: From Design Into Print

This book reads like a visual quickstart guide for professional printing, and does the best job I’ve seen of boiling down complex printing issues into a friendly, readable guide.

Web: From Design Into Print Blog.

iTunes: From Design Into Print Podcast.

For even more printing wisdom, check out Sandee’s related blog and podcast. The podcast in particular is a hoot.

Last week, Jason spent some time working with rounded corners in InDesign. But here is a question that came up during our class Q&A that we didn’t have an immediate answer for:

What if I only want to round a couple corners on my rectangle?

You could draw those rounded corners by hand with the Pen tool, or combine two separate boxes using InDesign’s pathfinder tools. But that’s kind of time consuming. Instead, it turns out there is an easy solution in the built-in script samples that Adobe provides.

Pull up the Scripts panel by choosing Window > Automation > Scripts. Look in the Application Samples and you’ll find a script named CornerEffects. Select a box and double-click on this script. You’ll be presented with a (somewhat clunky) dialog that lets you apply the rounded effect to specific corners.

Our friend James Dempsey at The Graphic Mac has a good write-up:

The Graphic Mac: Creating rounded corner boxes easily with InDesign scripts.

If you download a lot of custom Photoshop brushes, you have probably found yourself looking for an easy way to preview what those brushes look like before loading them into Photoshop and trying them out.

Our friend, James Dempsey at The Graphic Mac wrote up two handy tools that make previewing your custom brushes a snap. Both tools are quicker and easier than loading all your brushes into Photoshop in order to see what they look like.

Lots of web designers rely on Chris Pedrick’s Web Developer extension for Firefox. It’s one of many reasons Firefox is such a popular browser for web development. I’ve used this Firefox every week for years. We covered this in a tip back in 2006:

Archive Tip: Great Web Developer extension for Firefox.

So you may appreciate my happiness at discovering the greatly improved web inspector Apple has built into the new Safari 4 beta. Apple’s marketing claims this is the best set of development tools ever included in a browser. As I get to know Safari 4 better, I’m inclined to agree.

Need to build some Flash skills? Swinburne University in Australia has posted almost 10 hours of free Flash videos taught by members of their design faculty. You can access the tutorials directly from their podcasts website, or subscribe in iTunes:

Swinburne Podcasts: Faculty of Design – Flash

iTunes U: Swinburne University Flash Tutorials

This collection of tutorials features training in Flash MX 2004. That’s a few versions back, but the learning applies to newer versions of Flash as well. It’s a good, free place to start building your Flash skills.