Choosing colours while designing

kuler

Choosing a group of colours can be a daunting exercise. OK, so there’s some golden rules to follow, like “always choose from the same third of the colour wheel”. Golden rules are made to be broken. Adobe has a colourful website to make this a bit easier. If you sign in you can download the [...]

Things I love about designing in InDesign that I couldn’t do in Quark

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I was thinking this was going to be a short post but the ideas just keep on coming. Maybe a little unfair, I’m comparing InDesign CS2 with Quark 6.5, but anyway! X and Y You can choose where your x and y measurements for page objects are taken in the Control bar – top left, [...]

Designing screen PDF newsletters – Why and How?

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Question: How can you disseminate a graphically interesting, beautifully designed small book to a large number of people cheaply? Answer: Email a PDF. Almost every computer has Adobe Reader (formerly called Acrobat Reader) and PDFs are widely used as a way to present information with a fixed layout similar to a paper publication. Question: Why [...]

Designing PDF newsletters

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The first rule of making PDFs is easy… do it in InDesign, don’t even think of doing it in Quark. Navigation, linking to the web and even playing movies can be sorted out in InDesign first before the PDF is made. This way when the client has added his changes these elements don’t have to [...]

Runaround/Text Wrap in InDesign

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We all know how to stop text running over images in InDesign – go Window > Text Wrap (Command/Control -T if you have selected the Quark keyboard shortcuts) and choose one of the self-explanatory icons. But what if you want some text boxes to wrap around images and others to flow over? Move to front [...]

Hanging indents without tabs

hangbull

The keyboard shortcut for a hanging indent (commonly used with bullet points) is command (PC control) + backslash(\). Use this with Quark and in InDesign default shortcuts. When you view invisibles it shows as a dotted line in Quark and a dagger in InDesign. The shortcut for a bullet point? Option -8.

For Quark users using InDesign for the first time

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The best advice for a Quark user working for the first time in InDesign is go Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts… at the bottom of the menu and choose, obviously, Shortcuts for QuarkXpress 4.0. While you’re there you may want to remind yourself of the more useful ones. Command-shift-option- R whilst your type tool has clicked [...]

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