This Week in InDesign Articles, Number 79
If you follow my twitter feed, you probably know that I was away all last week in a cabin in northwest Connecticut with no laptop, no cell phone reception, no power, no plumbing. Rustic, as my mom likes to say. It was wonderful, but apparently the rest of the world didn’t stop while I was away! So here’s a collection of articles and videos and cool things you should know about:
- Do you use Lion (Mac OS X 10.7)? Do you use Extension Manager? You need an update!
- I have to admit that I love print books. So I’m pleased to see publishers making them as attractive as possible so that readers will choose them instead of, or in addition to, ebooks.
- Okay, so it’s December now, but that doesn’t mean the November “free for all” at creativepro isn’t full of awesome goodness!
- True, you’re primarily an InDesign user, but jeez, you need to use Illustrator sometimes, right? Here’s a great little intro to AI by Von Glitschka.
- Adobe has made it clear that CS6 is coming next year (probably in the spring… we hope right around the time of PEPCON), but they have been making some very weird announcements about their upgrade policy. It has a lot of us worried. I’m glad to see Scott Kelby wrote this great open letter to Adobe, addressing many of the significant concerns. I have high hopes that Adobe will see the light and make the right choice. Yes, they need to make money, but they need to be reasonable, too.
- Speaking of upgrades to CS6… Adobe is also rolling out a huge new thing called the Creative Cloud. We’ve mentioned it before, but here’s another article about it.
- If you like alphabets and character sets, you have to spend some time playing with shapecatcher. It’s great fun, even if you just make up crazy characters and see which unicode characters it guesses.
- And, on the topic of alphabets and scriptology, I love this two part article at Smashing Mag on the Beauty of Typography from Around the World (and here is part 2).
Interactive
- Keith Gilbert wrote up a good tip for DPS users wanting to create video with a transparent poster image.
- Colin Fleming has been making movies again! Here’s one on how DPS helps publishers create content for the Kindle Fire.
Enjoy!
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A propos of your second item, I note that the article says nothing about the binding quality of the books, only their appearance. Recently I’ve had a couple of paperbacks with pages falling out after the first reading, and some hardbacks (which, like many hardbacks these days, are obviously just perfect-bound with a hard cover) which don’t look likely to last much longer. If you’re trying to sell on quality you need to provide quality, not just the appearance of it.