Starting this May (2009), Creativetechs is offering a free, 10-week, worldwide, InDesign course. To make this happen, we need at least 1,000 people signed up to participate, so help us spread the word!

Want to enroll? Sign-up here: InDesign CS4 Course Enrollment.

Jason Hoppe, our Adobe Certified Instructor, has designed a comprehensive course that covers InDesign CS4 in detail. If you’ve been meaning to improve your InDesign skills, now is the perfect opportunity:

Week 1, May 14 – Interface & New Document
Week 2, May 21 – Working with Type
Week 3, May 28 – Shapes, Smart Guides, Pathfinder
Week 4, June 4 – Color
Week 5, June 11 – Images and Links
Week 6, June 18 – Layers, Making PDFs, Printing
Week 7, June 25 – Style Sheets
Week 8, July 2 – Master Pages
Week 9, July 9 – Tables
Week 10, July 16 – Finishing Details.

And yes, you can pass this offer along to friends, or even post it on your blog. Help spread the word. As I mentioned, we need a minimum of 1,000 people enrolled to make this free class viable.

Read on for an extended Q&A, and to ask your own questions in the comments. Jason is currently working on the class materials. If you have a topic you’d like to see him cover, mention it in the comments below.

 

 

Every graphic designer eventually finds themselves facing this client request. You’ve designed a newsletter layout in Adobe InDesign. The client loves it, but they want a template in Microsoft Word they can edit themselves.

 

Creativetechs happens to be located in Seattle, just across the lake from the Redmond campus of Microsoft. Needless to say, we get this question a LOT from various graphic designers in our area. There isn’t a perfect solution, but here is a technique that does a surprisingly good job.

 

You thought the old InDesign vs. QuarkXPress rivalry was dead? In the past three months both Adobe and Quark have published free downloadable guides showing how their competitor’s customers can best work with their software.

Adobe: Quark to InDesign CS4 Conversion Guide (PDF)

Quark: QuarkXPress 8 Integration Guide for Adobe Creative Suite (PDF).

These are both well designed and useful guides. Interestingly they are both geared to QuarkXpress users. Adobe’s ebook helps you plan a migration and smooth your transition from QuarkXPress to InDesign CS4. While Quark’s ebook helps you stay with QuarkXpress, while integrating with the rest of Adobe’s Creative Suite applications.

Source: I ran across these books at different times on two of the best online resources for QuarkXPress and InDesign knowledge: PlanetQuark maintained by Jay Nelson of Design Tools Monthly. And InDesignSecrets founded by David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepcion.

It’s a sign you really know your way around Photoshop when you’ve mastered the keyboard shortcuts for moving around the Layers palette. Here are a couple reminders: Select Layers: Bracket keys [ or ] while holding Option (PC: ALT). Move Layers: Bracket keys [ or ] while holding Command (PC: CTRL). Adobe has a full […]

Here is a quick, easy way to add a centered guide to any Photoshop document:

Choose View > New Guide, and enter a position of 50%.

That’s it. Want to mark the center of your document? Repeat the process twice with both horizontal and vertical guides. This technique works for all percentages, so if you want a guide at 1/3 the width of your image, just enter a percentage of 33%.

For several years, photographer and designer Trevor Morris has maintained a great set of Photoshop keyboard shortcut cheatsheets. We’ve linked to his collection several times for previous versions of Photoshop. If you’ve upgraded to Photoshop CS4, download this handy PDF cheatsheet, print it out, and keep it near your computer:

Photoshop CS4 Shortcuts (Mac)

Photoshop CS4 Shortcuts (PC)

If you haven’t upgraded to Photoshop CS4 yet, we’ve got you covered. Trevor keeps an archive of his previous cheatsheets all the way back to Photoshop 5. We’ve got links to his full archive past the jump.

This week’s tip was pulled from a collection of rapid-fire speed tips for working with guides in Jason Hoppe’s Moving Faster in InDesign CS3/CS4 webinar. Ever want to quickly delete all the guides on an InDesign page? Here’s how:

You can quickly select all the guides on your page by typing Command-Option-G (On the PC, that’s Ctrl-Alt-G). Then hit the Delete key to delete them.

A new feature in InDesign CS4 makes it even easier, Right-Click or Control-Click on the ruler or a guide and choose Delete all Guides in the pop-up menu.

Tip: If some guides have been locked in position, select all guides first and then choose Object > Unlock Position or type Command-Option-L to unlock them. This technique does not delete guides from Master Pages.

Recently, I needed a photo of my friend Steve Laskevitch’s new book to illustrate a tip. The problem, his book doesn’t ship until the end of February.

That’s where a remarkable set of scripts from Photoshop trainer Mark Monciardini saves the day. Mark has designed Cover Action Pro, a collection of specialized Photoshop Actions that magically turn your flat artwork into book covers, software boxes, dvd cases, magazines, and other images perfectly suited for e-commerce sites. The full collection of Photoshop Actions costs $127.

Read on to download two free Photoshop Actions from this collection.

As someone who writes lots of tips about the Mac, I spend plenty of time working with screen captures. A new $15 screen capture utility named Layers is going to save people like me a lot of time each week.

What does it do? Simple. Layers captures your screen as a layered Photoshop PSD file. All windows, menubars, and (in some cases) icons are isolated on individual layers. Even better, it creates layer groups like “Main Menu”, “Dock”, or “Desktop” to group related elements together.

Layers — Capture your screen as a layered Photoshop document.

In the image above, I took a single screen capture of my Mac using Layers. Then I created a quick animation showing how different elements can be turned on and off, showing what is below or above them.