This Month in InDesign Articles, March 2016

David Blatner

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The world is all topsy turvy with an American political campaign that I’m pretty sure is simply a poorly improvised reality TV show, but one thing is for certain: InDesign is awesome. (OK, that was pretty much the worst segue ever, but jeez, any one of the links below is sure to give you something more meaningful and practical than reading yet another article about how Tr#@p wants to make InDesign great again.)

• I love the trailer for this movie Graphic Means (which I first learned about on Kickstarter)
• Bob Levine explains what it means that Adobe DPS has become Adobe AEM-mobile
• Want a 100-MB PDF with all the unicode characters in it? Here it is. (It’s amazing just flipping from page to page to see all the different glyphs!)
• Tony Harmer recorded a great little video on how to auto-number cells in a table. (It’s similar to Bart’s article here, but he has his own take on it.)
• If you haven’t read John McWade’s article about why design and story matters, you should.
• Want a great overview of creating an interactive document in InDesign and publishing it to Adobe’s Publish Online? Check out Tony’s video here.
• Ever wonder which font to choose? Alan Gilbertson shares his insights into how fonts evoke feelings and connotations. Definitely check out the link in his article to another AIGA article about “cheap vs. expensive” fonts, too!
• Fascinating look at how trends show that the “persistence of print” is ensuring that print books are surviving and thriving.
• Creating a non-fiction ebook? Don’t forget the index! (Search is not the same as a good index.)
• Can’t find just the right color you need in the swatch books? Consider buying your own color!
• Want to create an interactive branching quiz (where each answer takes you to a different question)? Keith Gilbert explains how to do it (and many other fun interactive tricks) in his new course “InDesign: Fixed-Layout EPUB Interactive Techniques & Publish Online.”
• Hanging punctuation is easy to get inside InDesign!
• Have you ever wanted to make your own typeface? Here’s a nice rundown of the steps.
• Speaking of which… who doesn’t love a free typeface, especially when it’s so pretty?
• Looking for an alternative to Adobe DPS (now called AEM)? Here are 10 reasons Twixl might be for you.
• I love this peek into designer’s sketch notebooks. So cool.

Enjoy!