This is a short 3-minute segment taken from the live webinar InDesign Style Sheets on September 10, 2008. The full version of this workshop covers the fundamentals of InDesign’s character styles and paragraph styles, and quickly gets into tips, tricks, and shortcuts that should please even the most seasoned InDesign user. Style sheets can be a huge time saver for designers — especially in the creation of long or multi-page documents. [View all Upcoming Webinar Topics]
Save All Open Documents in InDesign.
Here is a terrific hidden InDesign keyboard shortcut. Say you’ve got a bunch of InDesign files open that you’ve been jumping between, and you need to save them all before stepping out for lunch. Use InDesign’s Save All command to save all your open documents. Mac: Command-Option-Shift-SPC: Ctrl-Alt-Shift-S Source: This tip was one of Scott […]
Pending Orphan Works Legislation
Every creative professional should know about the details of the Orphan Works legislation currently being considered by Congress. This is a terribly important issue for people like us who make a living with our ideas and images. Here are some resources to help you educate yourself: Creative Industry Websites: Graphic Artists Guild: Orphan Works News […]
Subscribe to Origami Tutorials on iTunes U.
We like to take a break from our technical focus during long weekends. So, in honor of the extended Labor Day holiday, we encourage you to get away from your computer, and enjoy a little low-tech paper folding. Apple’s iTunes U serves up a fun collection of tutorial podcasts by physicist Robert Lang who is also one of the world’s foremost origami artists and theorists.
Link: Robert Lang on iTunes U
Subscribe to the podcast collection and learn how to fold a square piece of paper into a duck, a sparrow, and a swallow. A nice way to tip your toe in the pool of origami paper folding.
Special Character Shortcut Cheatsheets.
John Brandt’s Special Character Shortcuts (free) is a comprehensive PDF that shows how to access almost any special character in any font. The 16-page PDF includes cheatsheets for accented characters, ligatures, punctuation, currency, legal symbols, math, and greek symbols. Print out the pages for the characters you forget most often, and post them near your computer.
Link: Special Character Shortcuts PDF
Keystrokes are listed for Mac and Windows, as well as HTML codes for web pages. There is also a special section on special nonprinting characters in QuarkXPress 7 and 8, and a handy typographer’s glossary.
Proofreading With Your Eyes Closed.
Here is a technique I use every week while proofreading final drafts of this tips newsletter. When you need to proof your final documents or important email, have your computer read the text out loud to you and listen for mistakes. You’ll catch errors you might otherwise miss.
In many OS X applications, you can highlight your text and choose [Application] > Services > Speech > Start Speaking Text (if you are using Mail for example, look under the Mail menu next to your Apple menu).
As with last week’s tip, this trick only works in Cocoa apps. If you are using an Adobe or Microsoft program where this doesn’t work, just paste the text into a new TextEdit document and have your Mac read from there.
Shift-Click With Photoshop’s Eyedropper.
Even with a well calibrated monitor, it is more precise to color correct using numerical values. This is especially useful when correcting color casts in images with neutral gray areas, or when matching specific colors between multiple images. Shift-click up to 4 areas of your image with Photoshop’s eyedropper tool to identify color sample points […]
Press ESC for a Pop-up Autocomplete List.
It’s always fun to stumble across a little-known feature that’s been around for years. When you’re typing text in many OS X applications (Safari, TextEdit, Mail, etc), you can press ESC (F5 also works) for an pop-up list with words from the built in OS X dictionary. Note: This trick only works in Cocoa apps. […]
Visualize Your Website Using a Word Cloud.
Wordle is a fun website that generates word clouds from any text you provide. Word clouds are a visual way of looking at the words used on a website. The image above is a visualization of the words on the front page of the Creativetechs website. The size and color of each word reflects how frequently it appears in the overall page.
Wordle – Beautiful Word Clouds
If you design websites for a living Wordle is more than a toy. The words you use on your client’s sites form the online brand as far as Google is concerned. So you really have to pay attention to the words you use. Do they reflect the brand that you’re working to create?
Eliminate shadows in Leopard screen grabs.
Three months ago we published two Photoshop actions we developed to clean up shadows in Leopard screenshots when using the command-shift-4 plus spacebar screen capture technique. We received a number of thank-you emails, so those tips must have touched a nerve for some people out there. This week’s tip covers a different way to remove […]
