Fooling Around with InDesign

Since April 1st is just around the corner, I thought it would be a good idea to show off a few different ways in which you can mess with a co-worker on April Fools day. Be warned, you may not be employed on April 2nd if you try these techniques on your boss. I don’t recommend doing all of these because it will be obvious that you did something. Just choose one or two and observe the results from a save distance, preferably behind bullet-proof glass.

Change all of your layers colors to white
This will make it impossible to for anyone to tell if they have anything selected. Bonus points. Edit the layer and uncheck print, now everything on this layer will be non-prining.

Change the keyboard shortcuts
Cmd(ctrl)+S changed to Quit
Cmd(ctrl)+Q changed to Save

Hiding Menu items.
Under the edit menu, you can choose menu’s at the bottom. In file menu, turn off save, save as, save a copy, place, print and package. Since you have changed the keyboard shortcuts, they will probably try the menus next, but they won’t be there!

Default Font
Change the default font in the basic paragraph style to something lovely like comic sans 72pt magenta 3pt leading.

Swatches
Rename the colors in the swatches panel. If you are clever (which I am not), you could create sentences with the names. For bonus points, change them all to spot LAB colors.

Preferences

• Change the tools tips to none (who needs reminders)
• Turn the thumbnail previews for placing off.
• Turn on auto collapse for panels (this will drive them mad)
• Change the ruler units to custom and put in 256 pt

• Change the snap zone for guides to 36. Now if you even get remotely close, everything will just get sucked over to the guide.
• Move the raster image view settings to the far left which will grey out every image.
• Change the Greek Type Below to 128 pt. Good luck editing

Misc
If you are looking for other non-InDesign related pranks I recommend my favorite subtle prank. Every morning go to a co-workers desk and remove all of the staples from their stapler before they get to their desk. Do this every day consistently. At first they may not notice, but eventually it may drive them mad.

Coolest.Technology.Ever.

While reading my weekly posts from around the design web, I ran across this amazing new tech called Augmented Reality. AR, as it is referred to in the industry, integrates 3D objects into live video, the video is digitally processed and “augmented” with the 3D components. In other words this digital processing mixes real and virtual worlds together, in real time.

So after researching this a bit and finding cool video snippets (see below), I actually was able to demo this myself using several websites (see further below). After playing around and showing this to the office, I can say that this is the coolest thing I have seen come out of technology in a long time. Leading the way with AR is Total Immersion.  They have even signed with Topps Baseball Card Co. who is jumping the shark and using AR in their 2009 lineup of specialty cards.

Video examples of AR:

2007 demonstration:



Mini Cooper Germany Demo:

Topps Baseball Cards Website. 

Demonstrations. In both cases, you must print out the marker PDF and have a webcam. 

Demo #1 (scroll past demo video to see directions)

Demo #2 

Take the next step...

In August 2008 the Creative Transitions Conference inspired participants to evolve into creative supergenuies in just 3 days. The CTC team knows professional development can't stop there, so we're bringing on the NEXT STEP in your evolution, the Creative Transitions Series '09!

We identified three hot industry topics that will help supercharge your skills:

* Web Skills for Print Professionals
* Best Practices in HTML Email and Social Media Marketing Implementation
* Advanced InDesign Skills to Enhance Workflow and Efficiency

Each $99 session provides participants six hours of expert instruction and, as take-aways, video tutorials and printed reference materials.

C2 Events plans to expand the series to provide year-round professional development opportunities for creatives in Madison and Milwaukee. Our April C2 NYCU newletter will provide more details about the Creative Transitions Series '09.

Why can't I just learn Dreamweaver?

Let's talk about web design for a minute.

In the print world, if you know how to use InDesign or Quark you essentially know how to create any document or page (with a couple caveats based on background knowledge like: placed images need the proper resolution, no accidental spot or RGB colors, etc). What you see is what you get.

Web design is different in that just knowing the Dreamweaver program does not allow you to make proper web pages. Or maybe a better way to put it is that there is much more required background knowledge before you will be able to build a professional, useful, successful web page. With that knowledge, Dreamweaver is a great tool for building websites but that background knowledge needs to come first.

What do you need to know before Dreamweaver is useful?

1 - You need to learn the rules for saving images for the web. Easy.

2 - HTML is how you get "stuff" on the page. You need to learn HTML and semantic markup (a fancy way of saying "tag things by their meaning, not their look"). It sounds like programming but it's really not, it's typing. You have to learn about 10 basic tags for HTML and then you're up and running. You can get a working knowledge of HTML in a couple hours. Fairly easy to learn.

3 - You need to learn CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). This is, admittedly, the difficult part of web design. Everything you think of as "Design" is CSS on the web - from font control to page layout. CSS has to be created by hand by typing text to create a set of rules - you can't use a tool like the frame tool InDesign to draw a box. This isn't as difficult as it may sound - you only use about 20 CSS properties on a regular basis so that's another 20 words to understand. But yes, CSS takes a while to learn because it's really more about judgement and problem solving than learning some "code words". And that's why when people ask me "Why isn't there a program where I put stuff where I want it then makes a web page for me?" I have to tell them there isn't a program like that because the act of laying out a web page involves creativity, judgement and problem solving and no program can do that for us (yet).

Acceptance that web design is not done the same way as print design is the first step.

We have 3 web related classes:

In our Standards-Based Web Design class we use Dreamweaver as we learn the 3 topics above and we create websites at the highest level of professionalism - what's known as "Standards Based web design" - This class has my strongest recommendation.

We do have a Dreamweaver specific class that teaches all the "parts" of Dreamweaver but it is for people who are part of a team that already uses Dreamweaver and that person is not responsible for creating pages but maybe updating them or doing a couple specific things using Dreamweaver. Recommended only for special cases.

We also have a class dedicated to Creating HTML Email - even though they may look the same, the rules are completely different for web pages and email HTML pages. This class uses a very specific subset of Dreamweaver's tools along with Photoshop.

Flash CS4 Tips and Tricks

Remember the new tweens live on the object, NOT the timeline, so select the object first then move the red playback head to the new frame and make your changes. The changes are "property changes" not "keyframes".

You want an object to finish its tween then stay in that state for an extended time? Shift-drag the last frame to the right (if you just drag, you extend the animation).

Be very careful with the scroll wheel on your mouse when you are over an editable field in the property or motion inspectors - most of the fields are active the moment your cursor is over them and scrolling the wheel changes values (handy if you're aware it's happening, annoying when you're trying to navigate).

BONUS TIP: If you are using the scroll wheel to change values, adding the SHIFT key changes the values by 10, COMMAND-Mac/Control-windows changes values by .1