Don’t Open All Your Palettes!
Just a bit of fun for a moment: Trond Thorsen, who logged in from Norway to be one of the participants in this week’s Tips & Tricks eseminar, sent me an email reminding me that I made a comment about how InDesign had many panels (or palettes, or poodles, or whatever you want to call them). He said hearing that, he couldn’t help try opening them all at the same time, and sent me this great screen capture from CS3:
You can click on the image to see a full-size version. Look, there’s even enough room to do a little bit of work on a document!
Thank you, Trond, and thank you for everyone who attended our first eseminar. It was a great success and we’re already starting to plan the next several webinars (as Anne-Marie likes to call them). See you there!
Looks better than some designs I’ve seen…
Of course, if this were on a secondary monitor connected to your Mac, it would quickly become extremely useful and efficient.
I have most of the palettes that I use on a regular basis open on my monitor to the right. The document then takes up most of the space on the monitor in front of me. It’s done wonders for my productivity.
I still wish they’d stuck to CS2’s panel/palette setup so you could have more than one open at a time. It’s a HUGE pain in the rear, especially in Illustrator when making gradients, but even in InDesign I often get ticked off when having to switch between panels frequently.
Hey that’s fantastic.
It’s a piece of art.
The seminar was very good too. I took a lot of what was done and started applying it to my everyday workflow. What would be the point in attending a seminar and then not putting into practice the things I was shown.
Most of the things are good, like the pages panel, much more efficient.
I’ve dumped Quark shortcuts too… I know I know, I shouldn’t have used them anyway, but I found it more efficient to use the shortcuts I knew. But after a week (nearly a week) of using InDesigns shortcuts I have them all down. Not that hard to learn at all. That Enter key is still bugging me though, I’ll get that someday!
Still not 100% taken on layers, I can see advantages and disadvantages, but more of the former. I did design a 12 page brochure with layers and it worked nicely. The layers give many more options. Still finding it a bit clunky, but I’ll get used to it.
I’ve attended many seminars in my day (non-design related) and they always start at the basics and build up on that. It’s so easy to forget the basics and the basics can become sloppy or misused, so to be taken back to basics is a good thing.
You can learn a lot of things phonetically; you learn the letters of an alphabet, then you learn to create small words, then apply them to a sentence, then to a paragraph then to a story, then to an essay and then to a novel.
Without the basics you have no structure to build on. And that’s what David did during his seminar, worked on basics, without the basics you can’t be efficient. It’s all about maximum efficiency with minimum effort.
Cool, I now have the perfect excuse to get that 22″ cinema display!!
Anyone know where the menu at the top comes from, the one with the shortcut to PShop and Illustrator etc etc? Looks V useful!!
Thanks!
@Pete: The panel at the top (with the buttons for Photoshop and Illustrator) is the Command Bar (Window > Object & Layout >). It used to be called the PageMaker Control palette (or something like that).
@SoulSizzle: That’s great that you find having all your panels open on a second monitor helps your productivity. Personally, it would lower mine, I think. I really like having just the most important panels (base on whatever I’m doing at the moment) nearby.
Hey, I completely forgot that I had seen a similar “all the panels open at the same” screen shot someplace else recently: Mike Rankin used this technique for studying for the ACE. Read his very funny article here.
and yet here is another reason I think it would be nice to have a preference for translucent panels…
I realise now that I should have expanded the Script panel a bit more to make it even more overwhelming… My bad!
And maybe I could use this workspace to demoralize some newbie students on my InDesign courses here in Norway…
If he’d just delete his unused swatches, he’d have more room to work.
@Brian: The X-Ray plug-in from DTPtools lets you set panel transparency. It looks like perhaps they have not yet updated it for CS3, though. But if you’re still in CS or CS2…
I think its funny that I saw a couple of pallets that I have never opened nor do I ever plan to open. Some things are just easier to grab from a menu when needed rather than stare at it every day in a pallet.
@Pete Im not sure you really need that Pagemaker menu bar eating up screen space all the time.
Use Command Tab to toggle between apps (you can even drag and drop) or right click on images and select “edit original”. This frees up a few pixels more for your layout. As for the text editing functions, most of that is in your command bar anyway and the couple that are not can be easily worked abound if ever need them.
Trond, takker for ditt “elev-knugende” skjerm-bilde! Jeg har nettopp sendt det til to av mine egne InDesign elever, med beskjed om å “lære alt utenat” til mandag morgen.
Takker Klaus! I love that “mandeg morgen” song by Fleetwood Mac. (That is the only phrase of your comment I understood until I jumped to translate.google.com.)
Hey David, not fair — Google-translation, that’s cheating!
With all the due credits, I plan to use it to ” impress” some students too.
I would urge Adobe to include this arrangement as a default workspace when shipping the next version of InDesign.
I made that my desktop background! Not sure how long it will last…its a bit too busy, and who wants to bet I’ll accidentally click on it expecting something to happen!
count me in with the “all my regular palettes open on monitor 2″ crowd. not everything, but a whole bunch. just makes life easier for me.
I have no palettes open at all (other than the control panel at the top).
I love working this way and I highly recommend it! Toggling palettes when needed means they can each sit in the optimum position at optimum length and you never have to slow down to find them. It also gives you the whole screen to work in (with rulers turned off).
Does that mean I have loads of keyboard shortcuts to remember? Not at all, it’s very simple. Here’s how I do it:
• Stroke and Swatches (docked together) are toggled with Enter (so I can turn them on with my thumb).
• Layers and Pages (docked together) are toggled with Apple+Enter.
• Loads of palettes have really easy-to-remember default shortcuts, like Links is just Apple+Shift+D (same as “place” only with a Shift) and Text Wrap is Apple+Command+W.
• Loads of palettes are actually redundant as you can do everything from the control panel at the top. I find it really useful to use Apple+§ to toggle the control panel between the character and paragraph panels. (The default shortcut for this is Apple+Command+6, which is extremely inconvenient to use and really requires two hands).
• There are loads of palettes which, I you’re like I was, you may only have open to use one or two buttons on them. These should absolutely all be replaced with custom keyboard shortcuts. For example, the only thing I used in Pathfinder was Add, Subtract and Intersect. I have replaced these with Command+Shift+A,S and D. (So A=add, S=subtract and D=intersect, which is very easy to remember as the three keys are in a row.)
• As for the toolbar: in my opinion, no professional should ever need it — they’re the functions we use all the time constantly, so knowing their shortcuts is essential. (It certainly saves a lot of time.)
The vast majority of the Toolbar shortcuts are exactly what you’d expect, or you can set them up to be whatever you like.
• Finally, good ones to remember are: x=toggle fill & stroke, comma=solid colour, period=gradient colour, and /=transparent.) Oh, and Shift+g = gradient feather.
• Oh and I can’t imagine life without having a custom key for Effects. If you haven’t already, go define one now!
Lee
Is there a keystroke to open ALL your palettes? It looks like fun to do. Just curious.
Pete
@Lee: I love your methods for keeping all the panels closed and using shortcuts. Well don!
@Pete: No, there isn’t, as far as I know. Oh well.
Pete, you could fake it. Open all the panels and place them where ever you want. Save it as a workspace.
Assign a keyboard shortcut to it and impress all of your friends.
Roland,
In CS3 you can go back to the CS2 version of palettes just by clicking the little button at the top of all your palettes that has two little arrows side by side. It kind of looks like a fast forward symbol.
Ha! I’m going to make this image my coworker’s desktop when he steps out for a smoke… a screen full of poodles that don’t work.