HerGeekness Articles at CreativePro.com
May 5th, 2008My co-host here, Anne-Marie Concepción, is so modest and humble that she’s not going to stand up here and shout about the other work she’s been doing, so I figger I’d better do it for ‘er. Here’s the deal: If you haven’t been reading her new column at CreativePro.com (titled “HerGeekness Says”, you’re missing out. My favorite so far is the quite awesome piece she did on converting the cool stationary you designed into a template that your client can use in MS Word. As always, she takes real world needs (no matter how distasteful) and provides a cool and not-terrible solution.
This week she wrote a piece about finding some cool resources for free in the various CS applications (such as clip art). Also very good.
These articles are in someways extensions of the articles that she writes for her own free newsletter, DesignGeek, in which she writes about lots of design topics that go outside the realm of InDesign (but are still relevant to all of us ID users). If you don’t subscribe to that, you owe it to yourself to do so.
Yeah!
You forgot to mention her appearance on Adobe TV with Tim Cole and Rufus Deuchler. She talks about nested styles. Superb tips. Thanks Anne-Marie.
She was awesome at the caffe fibonacci!! I just can’t live without adobe tv anymore!! lol
Wonderful stuff - I tried it all out. Only one nagging issue - When I took the named path from Photoshop to InDesign I found (each time) that the option to Convert Clipping Path to Frame was greyed out.
Could you possibly expound on what I might be doing wrong here? This would be a nice question to answer here or maybe it is a MOGO question?
Otherwise all the other stuff worked well and taught me bunches - thanking you for this wonderful essay!
Gary Spedding.
aww thanks everyone.
Gary, when you say you “took the named path from Photoshop to InDesign” how exactly did you take it there? Did you place the .psd file?
If so, you need to either select the clipping path in the dropdown in Import Options,or select it from Object > Clipping Path’s dropdown menu. Then I think it should work.
By the way you may want to re-post your question (and I’ll repost my answer) in the Comments to the article on creativepro.com, in case anyone else is having the same problem.
Anne-Marie,
OK, I will post at the original site. However the issue is one of InDesign not accepting the file (psd) with clipping or work paths. I tried and researched to ensure I was doing this in Photoshop correctly but my options to select the path when placing in InD are always greyed out. I looked at preferences to see if anything was needed to be checked there but do not see anything.
A general discussion on exactly how to do this in PS and in InDesign may be required.
Aha,
Solved the issue I think! After saving the path and naming it you must open the flyout menu (in paths panel) and hit the clipping path option before saving out the entire file.
As you had it it looked as though you only had to name the file to have it save out as a clipped path. At least that was my, perhaps naive, interpretation.
Gary.
Your explanation at CreativePro is very nice and very helpful. I note you can easily delete the color of the placed object (getting a new “X” frame in the shape of the object) and recolor and stroke as desired. Nice!