This Week in InDesign Articles, Number 127

David Blatner

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What a busy few weeks! Lots of learning and talking at conferences (including our own InDesign conference), lots of planning, writing, travel… whew! But I’m starting to get caught up and wanted to pass along a few really cool resources for all my InDesign friends:

• A little bit of Nigel French’s “Designing a Magazine Cover” video title is now at Adobe’s Learn. In fact, all kinds of good videos there!
• A couple of weeks ago I went to the Books in Browsers (BiB) conference. It was awesome. The sessions were only part of what made it great, but the sessions were certainly fascinating. Fortunately, you can watch them here!
• I’m totally excited to learn that fonts from the Hamilton Wood Type foundry are showing up on Typekit!
• Every type-lover wants InDesign to have ever-more elegant ways of managing fonts; here’s one person’s idea for how Adobe might implement a new OpenType panel.
• I didn’t realize until last week, when Blurb demoed at The InDesign Conference, that they had gone far beyond just photo books. Here’s a good overview of their whole publishing model.
• Speaking of books, here’s a nice tutorial on “An Introduction to Typesetting Books in Adobe InDesign.”
• Should you single-source all your content as HTML and then use that to publish to multiple outputs (including print)? Sanders Kleinfeld of O’Reilly thinks so.
• Did you miss Adobe MAX last month? Here are Keith Gilbert’s takeaways from the event. And here are most of the sessions, in video form, including the InDesign Tips & Tricks session that Anne-Marie and I did.
• One of my favorite MAX sessions is “Sneaks,” where they show fun projects they’re working on. This was awesome: Project Layup!
• Curious about all the different ways to publish to an iPad or tablet (DPS, Aquafadas, Twixl, and more)? Here’s a nifty $4 ebook from Douglas B. Hebbard that compiles information about them all.
• If you make or design fonts, you may be interested in how Adobe has open-sourced some of their own font-building technology.
• Are Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps compatible with Mac OS 10.10 Yosemite? (Which, by the way, is pronounced “yo-sem-ih-tee” — I’ve heard it mispronounced a few times recently.) Here’s Adobe’s FAQ.
• I’m getting increasingly curious about the world of Augmented Reality (where you can hold up a camera phone and get info about whatever it is you’re looking at). Did you know that Metaio even has an InDesign plug-in to help you move your InDesign content into their system?
• People have been asking about Blatner Tools and other DTP Tools products for CC. Turns out that they are in an extended “public beta,” so you can try them if you email the company. More information here!
• What’s a good font for a museum exhibit, which will use everything from print to digital to 1000-point 3D lettering? Maybe Monotype Akko?
• Did you know that QuarkXPress still exists? They have a new version coming next year and they’re already promoting some of the amazing new features, such as: Open PDF after export, Define your own custom paper sizes, and User-definable shortcut keys (Mac only). Seriously. QX2015 will finally have features that InDesign had 15 years ago. I don’t mean to diss the folks at Quark, because I believe that a little competition would be good in the world of page-layout software. But… oy.
• Okay, her’s another not-necessarily-relevant-to-InDesign link, but if you produce events, you should take a look at the cool social networking tools available from Pathable. That’s what we use for our PePcon event each year!

Enjoy!