Pariah Burke Consulting & Training with Creative & Publishing Workflow Expert Pariah S. Burke | Informing & Empowering Creative Professionals™

when: Every Tuesday: 11:00 AM–12:00 (PT) / 2:00 PM–3:00 PM (ET)

where: Everywhere http://​experts​.na3​.acro​bat​.com/​D​e​s​i​g​n​T​u​e​sdays

price: Free!

Next Tuesday with Pariah

22 February 2011: InDesign Tips, Tricks, and Little Known Features

Continuing the dis­cus­sion from my 1 February 2011 pre­sen­ta­tion to the San Jose Adobe Creative Suite User Group and the Vancouver, BC Adobe InDesign User Group, I’ll be talk­ing about the fol­low­ing items and prob­a­bly more:

• Gridify image place­ment in InDesign CS5
• Gridify text frame cre­ation in InDesign CS5
• Importing Word doc­u­ments to InDesign with­out a mess
• Tips for orga­niz­ing styles into groups
• More

Join in the discussion!

(Scroll down for past Tuesdays’ recordings.)

Series Description

My career—my passion—is entirely focused on doing any­thing I can to Empower, Inform, Connect Creative Professionals™. I’m extremely lucky that I’m able to make a liv­ing doing that through writ­ing books and arti­cles and appear­ing at con­fer­ences and in videos and webi­nars. I love doing all that, but in all of those activ­i­ties there’s one thing miss­ing—dis­course. In all those media it’s me doing the talk­ing and every­one else the lis­ten­ing, read­ing, or watch­ing. Out of all the dif­fer­ent types of work and projects I do for the cre­ative pro­fes­sional com­mu­nity, the most inter­ac­tive is my train­ing and con­sult­ing, but even that is lim­ited to cer­tain com­pa­nies and groups, in cer­tain places. I want to have a con­ver­sa­tion with any designer who has the time to sit down for an hour and talk, no mat­ter where he or she hap­pens to be at the moment.

So, inspired by my friend Mordy Golding’s Fridays with Mordy weekly webi­nar, I’ve started Tuesdays with Pariah, a Designers’ Discourse.

In these weekly free web con­nect ses­sions I’ll be some­times instruct­ing in soft­ware like InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat, or some­thing else, and at other times talk­ing about the busi­ness of design, such as intel­lec­tual prop­erty rights for cre­atives, help­ing non-Web design­ers get online, tax con­sid­er­a­tions for free­lancers, and any­thing else that you bring up. Throughout the pre­sen­ta­tion and after, Tuesdays with Pariah are a con­ver­sa­tion where I hope to learn as much from you as you learn from me. Think of it as a bunch of cre­ative folk get­ting together over vir­tual cof­fee and talk­ing, teach­ing each other some­thing new, or debat­ing dif­fer­ent sides of an issue design­ers face.

So, come on, join the con­ver­sa­tion this Tuesday!

PS: If you’d like to point friends and col­leagues here, please use this short­ened URL: http://​bit​.ly/​a​6YJsR

Past Tuesday Recordings:

19 October 2010: Acrobat X First Look Live

Get a look at the lat­est ver­sion of Acrobat Pro announced just yesterday.

Watch the recorded ses­sion here.

12 October 2010: InDesign to HTML

Go from InDesign to the Web with the excel­lent built-in HTML (and Web image!) export.

Watch the recorded ses­sion here.

5 October 2010: XRefs, Hyperlinks, and Text Variables (Oh, My!)

We dis­cussed cre­at­ing hyperlinks…

• to Web resources
• e-mail addresses (with pre-filled sub­ject line!)
• PDFs
• exter­nal files

…Creating and using cross-references, and text vari­ables for…

• mak­ing tem­plates more efficient
• cre­at­ing run­ning head­ers for direc­to­ries, cat­a­logs, and dictionaries
• track­ing mod­i­fi­ca­tion and proof­ing dates
• more

Watch the recorded ses­sion here.

14 September 2010: Pros' Power Tips & Tricks in InDesign and InCopy (Part 2)

Picking up where we left off on the 7th, we con­tin­ued with InDesign & InCopy tricks and tips of the pros, includ­ing mak­ing jumplines, how Text Variables can be use­ful to you, AutoCorrect as a short­hand sys­tem, and more.

Watch the recorded ses­sion here.

7 September 2010: Pros' Power Tips & Tricks in InDesign and InCopy (Part 1)

In this hour and a half episode we talked about…

• InCopy, includ­ing what it is, how it can ben­e­fit InDesign users, and why, if you design as part of a col­lab­o­ra­tive work­flow, you need it.
• InDesign/InCopy assig­ments and packages
• A bet­ter way to man­age file col­lab­o­ra­tion and ver­sion­ing locally or with remote employees
• Changing text case automatically
• Using the Placed File Collaboration Workflow
• And more!

Watch the recorded ses­sion here.

31 August 2010: Nested Styles & GREP Styles in InDesign

Harness the power of auto­matic text for­mat­ting in InDesign with Nested Styles and GREP Styles.

Watch the recorded ses­sion here. Note: The record­ing was dam­aged, and only the last half of the show is available.

24 August 2010: Skipped

I was out sick.

17 August 2010: Creating Interactive PDFs with Buttons and Multimedia from InDesign

Picking up from last week’s show where we talked about cre­at­ing and mod­i­fy­ing PDF eforms effi­ciently and with­out the usual has­sles of mak­ing forms in Acrobat, doing the heavy lift­ing in InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, or QuarkXPress, this week, with some great input from Scott Citron and Andrew Robinson, among oth­ers, we talked about…

• mak­ing rollover but­tons in InDesign
• auto­matic hyper­link cre­ation in InDesign CS5
• cre­at­ing hyper­links in InDesign that stay hyper­links in PDFs
• mak­ing engag­ing PDF pre­sen­ta­tions in InDesign
• adding movies and sounds in InDesign
• set­ting and con­trol­ling movie and sound options
• link­ing to spe­cific points in movies
• con­vert­ing “legacy” media files like QuickTime MOV, AVI, and MPG movies to FLV and more with Adobe Media Encoder
• going from InDesign to iPad
• …and more!

Watch the recorded ses­sion here.

10 August 2010: Creating Interactive PDFs & eForms from InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, and QuarkXPress

I’m often asked about the nuances of cre­at­ing inter­ac­tive PDFs and PDF eforms effi­ciently (and with­out headaches), so let’s spend an hour talk­ing about that. We’ll cover…

• easy PDF form field cre­ation directly in InDesign or Illustrator
• defin­ing fields in Acrobat
• edit­ing PDFs in Illustrator
• …and more!

Watch the recorded ses­sion here.

3 August 2010: Potluck

We dis­cussed what­ever came to mind, includ­ing the fol­low­ing topics:

• The value of Adobe ACE, ADA, and ACI cer­ti­fi­ca­tions and exams to designers
• Fractals in Photoshop with the Genuine Fractals plug-in
• Croptima’s InPlate impo­si­tion plug-in for InDesign (much bet­ter than the built-in Print Booklet function)
• CS Review, includ­ing a hands-on review that we all did together
• …and more.

27 July 2010: A Barrel of Freebies

Designers–print, Web, motion, fash­ion, mobile, or any other kind–have to pay a lot of money for their soft­ware and other mate­ri­als. So, when­ever I can help them save a buck, I will. This show I’ll focus on all sorts of free, high qual­ity, free, royalty-free, and free (did I men­tion free?) resources to take some of the finan­cial bur­den off design­ers of all types. I’ll show you where to get the fol­low­ing types of free­bies and more:

• fonts
• cli­part
• image tex­tures and backgrounds
• Photoshop brushes
• InDesign scripts and resources
• Illustrator plug-ins and resources
• iPad, iPhone, Android, and other mobile media user inter­face design resources
• …and much more!

Sponsored by Free for All on CreativePro​.com, a twice-monthly col­umn of free­bies for designers.

Watch the recorded ses­sion here.

20 July 2010: Web Design & CSS Export from InDesign and Illustrator

Illustrator has always been my tool of choice for Web design sketch­ing, comp­ing, and even final graph­ics out­put. And I’m not alone in that pref­er­ence. Others have learned to use InDesign for the same pur­poses. Both appli­ca­tions can eas­ily out­put Web graph­ics, HTML, and CSS, and have become pop­u­lar for such work for both HTML-challenged design­ers and vet­eran HTML and CSS pros.

This Tuesday with Pariah we’ll cover:

• Slicing in Illustrator
• Web-optimized text anti-aliasing in Illustrator CS5
• Pixel align­ment in Illustrator CS5
• Saving Web-ready graph­ics from Illustrator
• Exporting InDesign doc­u­ments to HTML and CSS
• Creating Web-ready graph­ics from InDesign
• …And more

Watch the recorded ses­sion here.

13 July 2010: Get Warped: Warping and Distortion in Illustrator for Fun and Profit

Need to cre­ate dig­i­tal mock­ups of promo items—maybe putting a com­pany logo on a cof­fee mug, drink bot­tle, or other non-flat sur­face? I’ll show you how.

Wish there was an easy way to add folds and waves into fab­ric? There is.

Ever needed to put a tat­too on a model’s arm—and make it look like the tat­too was really ink in skin? That’s a pain­less process.

View the show’s record­ing to learn how to do all of these things and more in Adobe Illustrator—any ver­sion from CS1–CS5.

Watch the recorded ses­sion here.

29 June 2010: Easy Realistic Painting in Adobe Illustrator with Gradient Mesh

Vector, every­one knows, is res­o­lu­tion independent—drawings can be enlarged or reduced to infin­ity with­out loss of qual­ity. The prob­lem is, get­ting smooth, real­is­tic color tran­si­tions in vec­tor isn’t easy… Or is it?

Realism and photo-realism in Illustrator is actu­ally quite easy to cre­ate when you know the secret—gradient mesh.

Start to fin­ish I showed you how to achieve real­ism in Adobe Illustrator—any ver­sion from CS1 through CS5—and why and when gra­di­ent mesh draw­ing is bet­ter than Photoshop paint­ing. We also looked at numer­ous gor­geous exam­ples of gra­di­ent mesh art­work from artists all around the world. (Examples here, here, and here; note: some exam­ples con­tain artis­tic rep­re­sen­ta­tions of nudity.)

Watch the recorded ses­sion here.

This Tuesday with Pariah was spon­sored by OnlineInstruct​.com, fea­tur­ing eClasses by Kelly McCathran, Michael Stern, and yours truly.

15 June 2010: Uber Cool InDesign Type Effects to Wow (Part 1)

In this ses­sion I’ll showed off some awe­some text effects that can be accom­plished in almost any ver­sion of InDesign, from CS3 and CS4 to CS5 and beyond. The effects included…

• Setting Vertical Side Heads
• Filling Type with Imagery
• Adding Automatic Borders to Paragraphs
• Dynamic Text Highlighting
• Subhead Background Colors with­out Using a Separate Frame
• Headers that Span Columns (New to InDesign CS5)

Watch the recorded ses­sion here.

8 June 2010: Auto-Formatting Text with Nested & GREP Styles in InDesign

Continuing with the awe­some power of auto­mated styling, this time we went deep into the world of Nested Styles and GREP Styles. Using these you can for­mat an entire com­pli­cated document—even some­thing as style-rich as a prod­uct cat­a­log or mem­ber­ship directory—almost entirely automatically.

Also included:

• A down­load­able sam­ple file to help you learn Nested Styles and GREP styles.
• Where to learn GREP for GREP Styles (CS4 and CS5) as well as for using the GREP tab in Find/Change.
• Bob Levine, the InDesign Guy, whom you can fol­low and get help from on Twitter @IDGuy.
• The upcom­ing awe­some­ness of the Design/Developer Workflow Conference
• Upcoming eSem­i­nars with me: Twitter for Creative Professionals and Typography in the Creative Suite.
• The great sem­i­nars and classes avail­able from Kelly McCathran’s OnlineInstruct​.com.
• Exactly how green are my lim­er­ick green office walls?
• And more!

Watch the recorded ses­sion here.

1 June 2010: Paragraph & Character Styles in InDesign and QuarkXPress 8

Paragraph and char­ac­ter styles are the key to keep­ing your san­ity while work­ing with lots of text. In this Tuesday with Pariah we went deep into the power and util­ity of para­graph styles and char­ac­ter styles in InDesign CS3, CS4, and CS5 and in QuarkXPess 8. We talked about method­olo­gies for work­ing with style-shy Word edi­to­r­ial per­son­nel. And I showed super secret, awe­some tech­niques to auto­mat­i­cally change para­graph styles as you type as well as how to style an entire story—from 1 to 1,000 pages—with a sin­gle command.

Watch the recorded ses­sion here.

25 May 2010: Change Defaults and Customize InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator

Out of the box, InDesign mea­sures every­thing in pica. Illustrator, out of the box, loads a basic and rather bland set of brushes. Photoshop, by default, loads generic col­ors instead of your cor­po­rate col­ors. Wouldn’t it be nice to have every new InDesign doc­u­ment use Inches Decimal as its mea­sure­ment? How about load­ing your favorite brush set every time Illustrator opens? How much faster would Photoshop be if its default color palette included your cho­sen col­ors instead of Adobe’s?

This Tuesday with Pariah is about chang­ing these and many other defaults, cus­tomiz­ing the envi­ron­ments of InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator, to meet your needs and work habits. We had a full house and went a whop­ping two hours learn­ing about chang­ing and shar­ing defaults and pre­sets in our most often used tools!

Watch the recorded ses­sion here.

8 May 2010: InDesign CS5 Column Spanning and Splitting

The topic for Saturday 8 May 2010 was InDesign CS5’s amaz­ing new Column Spanning and Splitting fea­tures. I showed you how to use them, then answered ques­tions about Live Corner Effects and Live Captions.

Watch the recorded ses­sion here.

Your Host

Pariah S. Burke (http://​iampar​iah​.com) is a soft­ware trainer and design & pub­lish­ing work­flow expert bring­ing cre­ative effi­ciency into stu­dios, agen­cies, and pub­li­ca­tions around the world. He is the author of the first InDesign book writ­ten for expe­ri­enced InDesign CS3/CS4/CS5 users with jobs to do, Mastering InDesign for Print Design and Production, and other books on Creative Suite, Adobe Illustrator, and QuarkXPress; author of more than 250 pub­lished tuto­ri­als and arti­cles; co-author of the InDesign CS4 & CS5 and Illustrator CS4 & CS5 Adobe Certified Expert exams; an Adobe Community Professional; the for­mer trainer and tech­ni­cal lead for InDesign, InCopy, Illustrator, Photoshop, and Acrobat to Adobe’s own tech­ni­cal sup­port team; a free­lance graphic designer with 20 years expe­ri­ence; a WordPress and social media evan­ge­list; and the pub­lisher of a net­work of Websites, com­mu­ni­ties, and tools for cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als, the Workflow: Network (http://​work​flownet​work​.com). When not on the road train­ing, con­sult­ing, or speak­ing, Pariah lives in Portland, OR where he writes (a lot) and cre­ates (many) projects and pub­li­ca­tions to Empower, Inform, and Connect Creative Professionals™.