Category: Creative Professional

  • Change Measurement Systems on the Fly

    You probabaly already know that you can type into just about any of InDesign’s measurement fields a value based on any measurement system InDesign understands. For instance, if the document uses pica for measurement, you can still specify height, width, and numerous other values in inches by typing X in (for inches [also “ and…

  • Matching Portrait Head Sizes

    When laying out portraits or headshots close together, such as in a newspaper or magazine article or publications like membership directories and yearbooks, the golden rule is that all photo subjects’ heads should be the same size. In most cases regardless of background and pose, Fred’s head should be the same size as Themla’s, Daphne’s,…

  • Measurement Field Secrets

    A trio of (occasionally useful) tips for working with measurement fields to resize and transform type, frames, and other objects. Resize, Move, and Transform by Percentage Ever find yourself in need of cutting something down to half, doubling the size of type, or blowing up an image frame 319.2678%? (No, I don’t think I’ve done…

  • Share Swatches Between CS2 Applications Without Recreating Them

    In Creative Suite 2 Adobe introduced the Adobe Swatch Exchange (.ASE) file format. With it, you can create custom swatch colors in InDesign, Illustrator, or Photoshop, and import them into the rest without having to manually recreate them. Among several ramifications, that means for print output pros fewer instances of the common problem of the…

  • Overcoming the Top 5 Pain Points of Switching from QuarkXPress to InDesign

    A lot of designers are making the move from QuarkXPress to Adobe’s InDesign. But if you’re a proficient QuarkXPress user, some features of InDesign seem counterintuitive, confusing and downright frustrating. Below, learn how to overcome the top five pain points. 1. Quark’s Runaround versus InDesign’s TextWrap In QuarkXPress, runaround is the process of forcing text…

  • What is a JPF file and how do you use it?

    What is a .JPF file? JPF is the file extension for a JPEG 2000 file, which, at its most basic, is the next generation of JPEG (aka JPG). The JPEG file format was created in the Nineties by the Joint Photographic Experts Group (see the symmetry here?). JPEG 2000, also created by the Joint Photographic…

  • Creating Contracts:  Project Milestones & Materials Delivery Responsibilities

    Writing effective, professional client contracts is one of the top five most requested and most confusing business tasks facing graphic designers, web designers, and other creatives today. Designer Contracts is an ongoing series of articles designed to help creatives write better, more thorough contracts that protect creatives, their clients, and both parties’ rights, and helps…