Design Criticism and the Creative Process 8:08 AM

This an interesting article that i came across.Hope it is useful in your career.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/design-criticism-creative-process/

InDesign CS 5.5 Announced 11:03 AM

Adobe today announced a significant release of InDesign and the Creative Suite, dubbed 5.5! While there is a little for everyone — there’s one or two features that will excite every CS5 user — how much you’ll want 5.5 directly correlates to how much work you do with interactive documents (EPUB, DPS, HTML, and accessible PDF files).

interactivity in indesign cs5 5:14 AM

This interactive book was created using primarily InDesign CS5. It is a really beautiful showcase of what you can create! http://bit.ly/i4osra

Adobe CS5 suite review 10:43 AM

To begin, I must say that I detected in the suite CS5 one of the major flaws of the CS4: it requires too much RAM and memory. Adobe software, in the past few years has shown a very annoying tendency to double the memory required to install the newer version of every software they own. 600 Mb in Photoshop CS2 turned into 2 Gb CS4, and now, as expected, you’d better have 3 and a half gigabytes to spare in your hard drive.

Another defect of this new suite is the very unpractical habit of sucking 110% of the resources of the machine, requiring an insane RAM and a demented graphic card for the programs to work properly. It makes me laugh that all the Adobe promotional videos are made with Macintosh computers, presumably more powerful than the sword of He-man, and yet all the new tools make them work slowly. The brushes have a good "delay, you will have to wait about 30 seconds (if no more) to apply certain filters ... and so on.

I must say, as a point in favor of the suite, that this time Adobe has had the detail of not having the whole interface changed, they have kept the CS4 design.

In the case of Photoshop, the 3D aspect has been polished. As a plus point, I must admit that the professional versions of the programs are well prepared to work all together because they are fully compatible. However, if God invented compatibility, the devil invented Bridge, a plague they didn’t got rid off in this new version.

I got really upset when I reviewed the new batch of tools of CS5. Each and every one of them (and I mean this for every program, not just Photoshop) are designed to make the softwares more accessible to the public. Don’t get me wrong, but as an artist with experience in the suite, cause I use it continuously to work, I feel infinitely ignored by programmers.

There are few improvements to make life easier for the professional user, such as being able to edit multiple layers at once. But the new tools are basically a candy collection for the general public, to make them able to play with digital creation. They have finally released "Flash Elements" under the name "Flash Catalyst" to make the creation of multimedia environments accessible to the average designer.

In conclusion. The CS5 suite is a somehow an extended version of CS4,but with many bugs solved; with a collection of tools for the public to play with the digital creation, but with little improvement for the professionals.


Adapted from deviant http://news.deviantart.com/article/114507/

Universal Punctuation Keyboard Shortcuts 12:42 AM

You won't find em dashes, ellipses, and other common punctuation and special characters on your keyboard. Within InDesign, you can insert these characters the long way using the Glyphs palette or the Type > Insert Special Character menu. Or you can memorize the InDesign-only keyboard shortcuts. Or, you can save that bit of brain space for other things and instead use the standard keyboard shortcuts below, which work in almost any app:

Sort Paragraphs Alphabetically in indesign 12:28 AM

For basic alphabetical sorting of paragraph text -- bulleted lists, numbered lists, or just plain paragraphs -- use SortParagraphs.jsx, a script that comes with InDesign.

In InDesign CS3 and CS4, go to Window > Automation > Scripts to open the Script panel, click the spinning arrow beside the Application folder to see its contents, then Samples, and finally JavaScript. That's where you’ll find SortParagraphs.jsx. In InDesign CS2, first grab the script from the Adobe Web site, then drop it into the Presets/Scripts folder under your InDesign CS2 installation folder.

To sort your list, highlight a selection of paragraphs and double-click SortParagraphs.jsx on the Scripts panel.

Adobe InDesign for wireframing in website design 3:02 AM

I have relied on InDesign for almost all my wireframing needs and it has served me very well. However, I am aware that InDesign might not be such a widely used tool within the Interaction Design community and it was therefor decided to use Illustrator for the wireframing workshop. Having now worked in both these packages, here are my thoughts on why I prefer InDesign to Illustrator.

One Package
This issue refers partly to the pagination problem. Essentially, you are using the same functionality in Illustrator to draw the wireframes than in InDesign. It is possible to draw all you need right within Indesign but it is impossible to make a proper document Indesign-style in Illustrator. This means that you are using two applications in stead of one to get the same job done.
Styles
Illustrator isn’t as good with paragraph styles, compared to InDesign. Although it is possible to define paragraph styles in Illustrator, it simply is not as robust as InDesign. I have the feeling that paragraph styles are an afterthought in Illustrations, whereas in InDesign it forms a major part of the functionality.
Masters
Masters are a powerful tool in InDesign. It allows you to create templates that repeat themselves throughout your entire site. Indicating where the fold is, for instance, can be done on a master page. Recurring elements such as a header can be designed and placed in a master and simply applied when needed.
General Document Design
Using and knowing InDesign teaches basic document design skills, but more importantly, it teaches typography

Whilst Illustrator is a far more advanced illustration tool (as the name suggest) than InDesign, the drawing functionality found in InDesign is more than sufficient to develop high quality wireframes.

Free History Menu for InDesign 3:14 AM

Free History Menu for InDesign

It's so very cool that InDesign has an unlimited number of Undo's. Until you need to use them.

The problem is you can only Undo one step at a time -- there's no History palette, thus, no way to click on a 'state" ten or twenty steps back. Just gotta keep on pressing that old friend, Command/Ctrl-Z, over and over again till you arrive at the point right before you screwed something up.

You can get a bit more control if you don't mind using the menu command, Edit->Undo, instead of the keyboard shortcut. The Edit menu tells you which action is on the chopping block: Undo Typing, Undo Scale, Undo Deletion of a Mess of Pages You Shouldn't Have Trashed You Imbecile, Undo Typing, like that.

65bit Software, an InDesign software developer from the UK, leveraged the program's internal tracking and turned it into a *free* plug-in called MultiDo. It's been available since January for InDesign v2.X, but they recently upgraded it to work with InDesign CS. Both versions, in Mac and Windows permutations, can be downloaded here:
http://www.65bit.com/products/multido/multido.shtm

MultiDo adds two dropdown menus to the Edit menu: Undo Multiple and Redo Multiple. They slip nicely into place directly below InDesign's regular Undo and Redo menu items.

Each of MultiDo's menus lists up to 100 of your undoable/redoable actions, the same information that InDesign already knows about, and would tell you eventually if you chose Edit->Undo over and over. The cool thing is that because of the menus, you can simply choose an action that's 10, 20 or 76 steps back, instead of having to click the keyboard shortcuts that many times.

Fix Flaky Files 10:30 PM

If your InDesign file is behaving erratically, it may be damaged. One easy troubleshooting technique is to choose File > Export and export the file in the InDesign Interchange format. This will create an .inx file. When you open the .inx file, InDesign rebuilds the file from the ground up -- hopefully without the problems of the original.