Responsive design has long been on the minds of web designers and developers, and over the last couple of years, it has become a focal topic among industry insiders and clients alike. Is the site responsive? Should it be responsive? Is responsive web design a good idea, or are we focusing on it as an exclusive solution to a much broader set of problems? Going to web design conferences these days you hear as many takes on the topic as there are people, and a common theme among them is that responsive design is profoundly confusing and complicated.
Adobe InDesign includes a Cross-References feature that allows you to link to other paragraphs and headings in your document and automatically update page numbering as your document grows.
In this week’s free InDesign Secrets video, Anne-Marie Concepción shares her tips for getting the most from cross-references. For example, you can perform text formatting at the same time you create a cross-reference, which makes cross-references doubly useful.
For more tips on getting the most out of cross-references, watch the video and follow along with the tips outlined below.
In this week’s InDesign FX video, I show you how to use Adobe InDesign to divide an image into several pieces that fit together like a puzzle. This would be a pretty tedious chore to manually create all these separate frames and then position the images correctly inside them.
Fortunately, there is an easier way to create this effect.
What happens when you want to print a spot varnish or apply an effect over a small area of your document like a logo or an image? In this week’s free InDesign Secrets video, David Blatner shows you how to convert a vector clipping path into a frame that can be filled with a spot color or effect of your choice.
Watch the video above and use the companion text below to help with each step.
It seems like just yesterday when new features were added to Muse, but surprisingly it has been a few months. Unlike last quarter’s update, which featured major new features, this quarter is more about refining existing features to help you better work with Muse. In my opinion, the two most important changes to Muse this time around are the addition of a spell-checker and the ability to base master pages off of each other.
There are also other minor enhancements and additions you can read about below.
It’s time to get excited about an oft-neglected dialog box in Adobe InDesign, which can actually save you a lot of time when you’re proofing your documents. In this week’s free InDesign Secrets video, Anne-Marie Concepción shows you how to use the Find/Change dialog box to find and fix mistakes in a busy layout, whether it’s reducing stroke width, adding drop shadows, or modifying any other object attributes.
Watch the video and use the companion text below to help with each step.
1. Press Cmd+F (Mac) or Ctrl+F (Windows) to open the Find/Change dialog box. Choose the Object tab.
2. Change the Search dropdown to Document to make sure you’re searching the entire layout. However, to narrow down your results, change the Type. For example, if you’re looking to format text, you would choose Text Frames.
3. Click the icon next to the Find Object Format pane to define some search criteria. When the dialog box appears, make your selections from the Basic Attributes, Effects, Stroke, and Gap Color menus. In this example, we’re looking for a Stroke with a Weight of 1 pt.
4. Back in the Find/Change dialog, perform the same steps for Change Object Format, entering the new values you want.
5. Now click Change All if you’re sure you want to commit your edits. Sometimes it’s easier to click the Find button and commit your changes frame by frame.
The Find/Change dialog box also presents an excellent opportunity to apply styles to graphic frames without affecting any of their other properties, such as text wrapping behavior. Simply create an object style and disable all the other attributes except for the one you want to change, such as a 1 pt stroke for image frames. Then select the style from the Style Options in the Change Object Format Options dialog.
And voilà! An easy way to make small, consistent changes to objects throughout a document.
In this week’s InDesign FX video, I show you how to add fancy ornamental frames to placed images in Adobe InDesign.
More than any clever technique, this effect highlights the idea of using the resources you already have handy to create unique and interesting graphics, so you don’t have to draw them. Specifically, the fancy frames are made from a simple solid stroke embellished with a series of characters from the Adobe Wood Type Ornaments font.
In the video, I start by making a copy of the frame containing the photo. This way I can place the ornaments in the duplicate frame and know they will be positioned precisely where I want them over the photo.
Then it’s time to find a suitable ornament. Here, you can think of the Glyphs panel like a library of clip art. You probably already have several dingbat, symbol, or ornamental fonts at your fingertips, each containing hundreds of interesting shapes.
After selecting a single interesting glyph, you can scale and duplicate it to make a series of ornaments, and then use a frame as a vector mask to crop the glyphs and show just the parts you want for the picture frame.
Use a frame that contains your favorite glyph as a vector mask.
With that basic set of steps you open up a million other possibilities by incorporating different fonts, glyphs, scaling, and so on.
Use the InDesign Character panel to adjust the settings for each glyph you use.
Another example of using a frame as a vector mask for your selected font.
The final effect, created entirely in InDesign.
I also have a member-exclusive video in the lynda.com library this week called Framing photos in letters. It shows you how to use merged letter shapes as photo frames.
Interested in more?
• The entire InDesign FX biweekly series
• Courses by Mike Rankin on lynda.com
• All InDesign courses on lynda.com
