This Week in InDesign Articles, Number 29

David Blatner

5

Well, I have to admit I’m a bit distracted this week… our first-ever big conference is happening next week and we’re almost sold out! So much to do… so little time.

Well, when you have little time, you have to get efficient! And that’s where indesignsecrets comes in — we’re all about how to get efficient. Here’s this weeks’ roundup of articles, videos, and sites that we think might be useful for you.

• Cari Jansen wrote up this fun little trick on how to get vertical type by using GREP to insert characters. (She linked back to our site at the end of her article! Thanks, Cari!) I have a feeling that we’ll be hearing more from Cari very soon… because she has signed on to become a contributor to InDesignSecrets.com! Yay!
• Do you speak French? Do you live in Montreal? Check out the brand new Montreal chapter of the InDesign User Group! Croissant anyone?! (If you do not speak French, you can learn some here.)
• Into the Adobe/Apple (flash/html) debate? My favorite article of the week on the subject is by my friend Glenn Fleishman, over at TidBits. But my second favorite is funnier: Mike Rankin on Flash of the Titans.

CS5 Stuff

• We haven’t talked much about the new CS Live features, but I’m sure we’ll get some articles about that up here soon. In the meantime, Adobe has a page about CS Review, one of the most important new features that shipped last week, along with CS5.
• Can you get a free version of CS5? If you bought CS4 very recently, then… maybe! Here’s Adobe’s incredibly complex rules on free upgrades.
• Terry White’s creative suite podcast has a good video about creating an animated button (a button that moves when you roll over it).
• Terry has another video about CS5 here… this time about the Live Captions feature.
• Terry isn’t the only person doing CS5 videos! Here’s one by Arthur Lockman with another look at the new interactive features.
• Okay, this one is painful… Have you ever wanted to hear me (David) talk like I’m reading out of a marketing brochure? If you’ve been waiting all your life for that, watch the first minute or so of this somewhat embarassing (to me) video. Then turn it off and do something productive. (In my defense, Lynda.com made me record this… they said it was for people who don’t know what InDesign is. Oy.)

Type Stuff

• You’re a beginner but you want to know more about OpenType? Gotta’ read this article!
• Since we’re talking type, head over to fontshop and read this nice article about how to use Helvetica responsibly!

Well, that’s it for today. Share your favorite articles below, or email them to me at david at indesignsecrets dot com. I probably won’t be posting links next week because of the conference.

(Hey, speaking of the conference, if you’re on twitter, you can track it by looking for the hash tag #pepcon or follow us at @indesignsecrets )