At first glance, this tip may seem a little frivolous. Creating word-search puzzles isn’t a skill that is in high demand. Yet as we dig below the surface, this project is a great demonstration of InDesign’s ability to place Excel spreadsheets as a table. Which can be pretty handy for many types of information-heavy design projects.
This tip was written several years ago when one of our clients needed coaching in how to create word-search puzzles for a monthly magazine she produced.
Digital photography fans can download the free monthly issues of PhotographyBB e-magazine in PDF format.
Link: PhotographyBB Online Magazine
PhotographyBB is a free online magazine composed by a hardworking team of volunteer contributing authors whose goal is to teach beginners all about digital photography and image processing.
The June 2009 edition features articles on photography techniques and issues facing today’s digital photographer. Readers will learn tips on composition and how keeping things simple can lead to great photography.
The issue also examines how to overcome photographer’s block when lack of inspiration occurs. Included is also a Photoshop® tutorial on creating an urban grunge type effect for dramatic impact.
I love uncovering basic tricks I should’ve already known. This is a great one that will save me time almost every day.
Need to match a color from a web page or something else while working in Photoshop? Just click with the eyedropper tool somewhere in your Photoshop file, and drag the cursor off to sample colors from anything visible on your screen.
That’s it!
This eyedropper trick has apparently worked since Photoshop 7. Wish I’d known that a few years and a couple thousand screenshots ago!
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.
Longtime readers of this tips newsletter know we love a good cheatsheet. When I’m mastering a new graphics application, I’ll tack a concise list of keyboard shortcuts on the wall next to where I’m working. If you are anything like me, you’ll dig these free shortcut guides from Noble Desktop:
Noble Desktop Keyboard Shortcut Guides
This collection of free PDF cheatsheets include guides for InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and QuarkXPress (Mac or PC format). Download a few, print them out, and start saving time.
When you are drawing with the Adobe pen tool, keep an eye on those small modifiers that appear in the lower-right of the pen icon. They change as you use the pen tool depending on what you do or which part of a path you hover over.
If you are new to the pen tool (or want a quick refresher) print this handy cheat sheet and train yourself to pay attention to the subtle cursor changes. Once you get to know them, the different icons remind you of the action you are about to perform.
