Identify the Adornments Contest Answer and Winner!
It’s time to reveal the solution—and the winner—for this month’s InDesignSecrets contest!
But first, a confession. This contest was nearly a total flop: only one person entered! This was shocking to us since a lot of our contests get over 100 entries, and most folks who enter have the correct answer. It seemed so bizarre that I had to test my email account to be sure it was working right. Surely a bunch of entries mistakenly got sent to my spam folder…nope. So we tried getting the word out with extra social media posts. Nothing.
For these monthly contests we try to come up with questions that are hard enough to be interesting, but still easy enough so a lot of people can answer correctly and have a shot at winning the prize. We thought we had a good one this time: identify seven of the small adornments that can appear on frames in InDesign. We thought it would be somewhat challenging, but apparently it was a lot harder than that.
We need your help here to figure out what went wrong. We know how smart you all are because we see your entries in all the other contests. Was it simply the case that this question was way too hard? Should we have allowed partially complete (“best out of 7”) answers? Maybe no one works with frame edges showing? Or has no one ever seen the cloud adornment before? Was it something else?
Please, let us know in the comments!
Now for the good news. We do have a winner: Kristin Lam! She wins a license for Style Utilities from In-tools (and our undying gratitude for preventing us from stumping the entire InDesignSecrets community with this contest). The other copy of Style Utilities we’ll save for a future prize.
Here are the answers to the contest:
- Â
locked frame 
 linked content (missing)
interactive button
animation
 Adobe Stock image placed from CC Library
 list box form field
 InCopy content (available)
And while we’re on the topic, I’ll point out that there are many more adornments you might come across in your InDesign documents. Here are 10Â of them:
overset text
live corner control
anchored object control (currently unanchored)
 anchored object control (currently anchored)
linked content (up to date)
linked content (modified)
InCopy content (currently editing)
InCopy content (checked out by someone else)
PDFÂ form field (signature)
 note (technically not a frame adornment, but good to know nonetheless)
Be on the lookout for another (easier) contest with a new great prize next month! And please let us know in the comments what you thought about this one. Thanks.
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Several reasons I did not participate:
1. I still use CS6 and it seemed that some of these adornments are only applicable to CC.
2. The prize didn’t appeal to me.
3. I had a bunch of client work to do.
So I took a pass.
All good answers ;-) Thanks for commenting!
FWIW, only the Cloud icon one is CC-only. (I thought it was safe to include because we recently published a post about the feature which showed the cloud adornment in a screen shot, circled in red, and talked about it in the story.)
Mentally, the holiday season extends through January, so maybe just bad timing. As for me, I only see about three of those adornments; the rest are just not part of my workflow.
Yep…I didn’t participate because I knew I had only seen two of those adornments before. Not knowing the answer completely has never stopped me before–the contests frequently get me to open InDesign and start messing around to see if I can figure things out. But, with such a large ratio of known to unknown, I figured it would take forever to try and track them all down. Plus, as usual, I assumed that everyone else out in InDesign Secrets world is always using all of the cool features that I don’t, so there was no chance I could win!
I agree with Colleen. Some of these adornments are not part of my workflow and are not likely to become part of it. So tracking them down seemed like it would take way too much time.
It’s a lot more fun to get a mystery to figure out than to figure out what something is called. I am much more likely to participate when I think I can learn something I may be able to incorporate into my work.
Totally agree.
I usually enter the contests, but I only knew a few of the adornments. That’s because I only work in book publishing and not the interactive stuff or animation. And we don’t work with InCopy nor Adobe Stock images.
Hi all,
I only say that it is not normal that I did not win!!
Oups ! je n’avais pas joué !
I entered the contest but couldn’t figure out number 7. I even asked some co-workers but we were all stumped by that last one. Best out of 7 would have helped me!
Thank you all! Great feedback. Keep ’em coming ;-)
I somehow missed seeing the contest. I use CS6 and work with frame edges hidden because they distract me. I turn them on if I need. I usually work with the document grid displayed so my screen is busy enough!
Here is the strange thing: I thought this was such a simple contest that many, many would react and they would all be correct as it was simply too easy! So I thought I would not stand a change so I didn’t bother. Go figure! I regret that now…
I actually felt the same way! I decided not to bother because I didn’t see the contest until a day or so after it was posted so naturally assumed that someone had won! Oh well.
Interesting! Remember that your chance of winning the contest is the same whether you read it the day it was published or six days later. One prize is for the *first* correct answer, yes, but we always reserve a second copy of the prize for a randomly-chosen reply received anytime during the 7 days after the post.
I didn’t enter so that someone else would have a chance of winning… and it worked… a little too well…
I was going to enter this morning but then I saw this. It wasn’t open very long!
Normally I look forward to the challenge of solving a mystery. However in this case it involved workflows I’m not familiar with and so I couldn’t figure out a few of the icons and so decided to pass on this one. Next time I’ll still give it a shot though :)
The selection of adornments was, as you might expect, taken from a variety of workflows. If you don’t do interactive documents, you won’t have seen the List Field or Animation or Button adornments. If you don’t use InCopy, how would you have ever seen the InCopy adornments?
The ones you chose were not mainstream enough for someone who doesn’t spend their life as an ACE. I would say that most people who read this site are enthusiasts, yet still have a narrow workflow as compared to Mike, Anne-Marie, and David. That doesn’t mean there aren’t enough people that did know or would have known all these adornments, but as some of the comments show, there are plenty of people like me here, too. Personally, I didn’t enter because I hadn’t seen the majority of adornments. Now I know why.
As you might have surmised, this was one of the tougher contests. I prefer the ones that require some troubleshooting skills (which all of us have to some degree – you have to in order to work with Adobe products). The ones that ask why something doesn’t show up the way you expect, or things disappear because an obscure setting was changed. We have all had this kind of experience, regardless of our workflows. This one was like trying to identify the meaning of all the hidden character marks like column break, sixth space or index marker. Not everyone sees the majority of these either. Even when you use them in your workflow, the only time you are conscious of them is when there is a problem.
I’m a newbie at indesignsecrets.com and excited about future contests! Being a bit of a geek about details, I’m pleased to have learned that the icons featured in your last contest have a name: “adornments”…who knew! : ) Although I may have recognized the functions of several adornments I wouldn’t have been able to name them so succinctly! Thanks for the good news that I will surely be able to use as I stumble across them from no on.
I was so bummed to see the end of the contest in the CreativePro newsletter realizing that meant I had missed the initial post (and I don’t twitter, so missed that too). I really look forward to participating in the contests (and won one a few years ago!), this one totally slipped by me.
Admittedly, I haven’t encountered most of these, but time permitting enjoy the opportunity to find the answer through trial and error.
Please keep the contests coming!
Perhaps the contests could be added to the email newsletter that goes out? If it was already, I apologise.
To be honest I haven’t seen the question when it was posted, but now I have to say that I would be clueless about the answer although I’m pretty comfortable in InDesign.
The reason? Because even though I use InDesign a lot I have never yet placed an Adobe Stock photo from my library, nor have I used any animation or an interactive button. (To be honest, I don’t use InDesign so much for digital solutions).
Ironically enough, I was more familiar with the other set of icons that you just posted.
But I would agree with Eugene Tyson’s comment that perhaps you should send out contests to the email newsletter list. I love to take part in these contests, but sometimes I arrive too late in the game and the answer is posted already.
Thanks!
I am an infrequent user of InDesign CS4; I had been working professionally a long time ago, now do mostly flyers and personal work. I only got this far because I was reading the e-mail in more detail than usual—InDesign > Word would be helpful for me, but I will not buy a subscription-based program (one reason for stopping with version CS4; no need for Web features being the other). So I got to this week’s contest and figured I would check the results of the previous one. I think I will make a stab at this week’s.