InDesign

Adobe® Creative Cloud™ is a creative hub where you can explore, create, publish, and share your work using Adobe Creative Suite® desktop applications, Adobe Touch Apps, and services together for a complete ideation-to-publishing experience. The vision of Adobe Creative Cloud is to turn previously difficult, disparate workflows into one intuitive, natural experience, allowing you to create freely and deliver ideas on any desktop, tablet, or handheld device.

At its MAX 2010 worldwide conference in LA this week, Adobe will unveil its Digital Publishing Suite, a set of turnkey hosted services that will allow publishers to more easily create robust, interactive digital publications. The Digital Publishing Suite has already been used to create the iPad edition of Wired and The New Yorker.

Excerpted from InDesign Type: Professional Typography with Adobe InDesign, 2nd Edition (Adobe Press)

By Nigel French

The use of decorative letters as a design element has evolved from a long tradition of illustrated first letters stretching back to before the invention of the printing press. Before printing, books were dictated to scribes, and each book was regarded as a unique treasure. The scribes incoporated individual flourishes to distinguish their work from others. It was with the decorative first letter that a scribe could really cut loose and show his stuff. Each major section usually began with an illuminated letter made with metallic, mineral or vegetable pigments that were bound by glue or gum to the paper or parchment.

The purpose of the initial letter, or versal, was to call attention to the beginning of the book. By the 14th century, versals had evolved from enlarged heavy letters into elaborate illustrated works of art, most often used to decorate religious texts. An illuminated versal might flow down the whole side of a page, or extend up and around the top of the page. Sometimes a versal included illustrations and took over the entire page. In 1455, when Gutenberg printed his 42-line Bible—the first book to be printed in the western world with movable type—he acknowledged the importance of this tradition by leaving space in the printed text for a scribe to add a decorative first letter. As printing evolved, so did the forms of initial caps used by designers. The current variations include hung caps, several forms of dropped caps, and raised or stick-up caps. InDesign uses the term drop cap for all initial cap styling.

When working with highly decorative drop caps, the Align Left Edge and Scale For Descenders options may not be sufficient for the optical spacing of the opening letter, as you can see in the top example. In the bottom example, a thin space (Cmd+Shift+Option+M/Ctrl+Shift+Alt+M) was added before the dropped letter, and this space was then kerned back, which moved the F into the left margin.

Read further on Graphics.com

Full press release below.

Adapted from Adobe InDesign CS4 Bible (Wiley Publishing)
By Galen Gruman

A clipping path is essentially a shape that acts like a cutout mask—anything inside the shape displays and anything outside does not. It’s a very handy way of displaying just the pieces of a graphic that you want to display, such as masking out extraneous background or focusing on a specific portion of a larger image. Clipping paths are also frequently used to control text wrap around graphics.

InDesign can work with clipping paths that are already part of an imported TIFF, JPEG, Photoshop EPS or Photoshop image, or with clipping paths you create in InDesign. And no matter the source of the clipping path, InDesign lets you modify it.

There are obvious benefits to spending the extra time and effort grouping your layers into folders and naming them appropriately.

For one you will appreciate the organization if you have to work further on the file after considerable amount time went by. Second, your coworkers or your css programmer will appreciate a neat file as well.

There are some less obvious and immediate advantages to such tidy practices. Design is not done on paper or on screen. Design is something you do in your mind. You continuously evaluate your work and make further design decisions while you work. Design is an internal dialogue and the result is your design work.

When I launched InDesign CS4 for the first time, it took all of about ten seconds to see that I was going to like what I found. After a few hours of using it, my suspicions were confirmed. Every release of InDesign has brought new and improved features and speed bumps, but none have brought more than Adobe’s latest offering of its flagship page layout application.

While InDesign CS4 offers a host of small improvements and additions, such as inline notes, an improved Story Editor, contact-sheet placement, and a new zoom method, and numerous other small additions, I’m going to focus on some of the major additions that will interest virtually every graphic designer and production artist.

These new features include a new graphical user interface, rotatation of page views, smart layout features, Kuler integration, Flash export, and more.

Read Adobe InDesign CS4 first look.

Have you ever had a problem like the the picture above in InDesign?

All those red zones are above 300% inkt percentage.

So you need to change those percentages, there are a lot of ways of doing it, with profiles and so on...

I found an interesting way in Photoshop. Here it is...

Now it’s possible. Now it’s easy and fun. In this simple tutorial you will learn how to use improved bullets and numbering InDesign’s feature to get numbers on your tickets. Our goal will be to create 1000 tickets, numbered from number 1 to 1000.

Jim from Creative Guy pointed out the great site from Adobe presenting a free Video workshop about Adobe CS3. Have fun learning!