Two New eBooks: Graphic Effects & Top 40 Tips

Anne-Marie Concepcion

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We’re very pleased to announce the immediate availability of two new InDesignSecrets eBooks: Mike Rankin’s labor of love and crazy genius The InDesignSecrets Guide to Graphic Effects; and InDesignSecrets Top 40 Tips, an edited collection of our most popular and useful blog posts.

If you’re a regular InDesignSecrets.com blog reader, you surely recall reading contributor Mike Rankin’s wild “Eye Candy” series of posts (parts 1, 2, and 3 will get you started) he published last year. Mike talked about ways to create all sorts of useful and fun graphic effects like stickers, holes, drips, and “shiny things,” using only InDesign tools and techniques – no trips to Illustrator or Photoshop required.

The enthusiastic and overwhelmingly positive feedback he received from readers (“This is awesome. The bullet holes are my favorite” “Can’t wait to try this out!” ) inspired him to devote an entire book to the subject. In his 150-page PDF eBook Guide to Graphic Effects ($9.95),  Mike reprises and refines the techniques from his Eye Candy series and adds a ton of  new, never-before-published effects that will get your hands itching to try them out for yourself, such as interlocking objects, creating chrome, putting text in text, wood carvings, and special effect photo frames like Polaroids and mattes.

While the step-by-steps and sidebar tips in Guide to Graphic Effects are all you need (well, in addition to InDesign CS3 or later of course) to create these effects, you may also want to get the companion Sample Graphic FX ($7.95), a .zip file that Mike put together with the final finished artwork shown in the ebook as editable InDesign files ready for you to pick apart and reuse. (To save money, you can purchase the eBook and sample files as a bundle for $14.95.) The samples are in INX and IDML format, meaning you can open them in CS3, CS4, or CS5 and save them as INDD files on your computer.

Free Sample: Here’s a sample chapter from the eBook: Banners and Ribbon Curls (a 6-pg. PDF, 600K) to learn how to create crisply-folded banners and ribbon curl artwork using basic InDesign tools like gradients and groups.

Our other new eBook, InDesignSecrets Top 40 Tips, (104 pp, $9.95) was written by … well, by all of us! David and I went through the blog and chose 40 of our favorite posts written by ourselves or our contributors. The posts we selected were the ones we know people are using to help themselves figure out InDesign, even if the post was written three years ago – like “Rebuilding InDesign’s Preferences,” probably one of the most frequently accessed posts we’ve ever published. That’s the first of the forty tips you’ll find here.

InDesignSecrets.com contributor James Fritz took the helm in laying out and producing this eBook. We gave him a list of links to the top 40 blog posts, and he extracted and formatted the text, reprised or redid the screen shots, and in many cases, even pulled the most useful comments our readers added to the posts and included them in sidebars. Each tip has a link to the original post on the blog if you’d like to read all the comments.

If you attend any InDesignSecretsLive! event like our seminars or conferences,  you receive a copy of this eBook for free. But if you’re not planning on going to one in the near future, and would like the ready resource of a single PDF containing the top posts from this blog, go to the InDesignSecrets store and get yourself a copy of the Top 40 Tips. I think you’ll love it!