This Week in InDesign Articles, Number 137

David Blatner

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My goodness there’s a lot of great material for InDesign users out there this month! I’ve been out a-collectin’ and I think you’re going to like these articles and videos:

• Ilene Strizver has done it again: Here’s a terrific article about designing with lead-ins (like run-in heads, drop caps, first lines, and more)
• The folks at Canva came up with a lovely little typographic glossary you should take a look at.
• This was very funny… Nick Shinn included the word “gadzooks” in an article about typography some years ago. The article in the last link referenced the gadzook and it turns out that several people have mistakenly picked up Nick’s word (which he did not intend to use as a definition). See the (funny and a little rude) commentary on reddit.
• Working with Adobe DPS and you have a WordPress or Drupal site, too? See how you can integrate the CMS into DPS!
• Speaking of DPS: You know that Adobe has a new version… here’s an overview of Adobe’s launch of it, earlier this summer. And here’s a nice article on how to convert InDesign and HTML files into the new .article format for DPS.
• What’s the future of publishing? The folks at the MIT Media Lab are sponsoring CODEX Hackathon to see if they can find out! (I read about this in this excellent article about the last hackathon.)
• Have you ever needed to edit a PDF? Jeff Witchel shows why Acrobat DC makes it easier than ever before.
• Jeff then follows up with another video on how to make a table of contents in InDesign (plus tips!)
• Who knew pasting stuff in InDesign could be so complicated (and so fun)?!
• As Keith Gilbert noted in this post recently, the new iPad Pro “could turn the iPad into an amazing content creation/ideation platform for illustrators, artists, and designers.” That seems even more true when you read this comparison of Cintiq and the new Apple Pencil.
• I think there are probably easier ways to achieve this image-in-image effect in InDesign, but it’s a cool one nevertheless.
• My favorite thing about this article (about why people aren’t using serif fonts as much anymore) is that the web site uses a serif font.
• Woodwing also seems to agree that HTML is the future of publishing, so they’ve created a new tool called Inception (which, among other things, appears to convert InDesign files to HTML).
• That said, great design almost always wins, which is why it’s so lovely to see Tina Henderson’s article on “Working with a book typesetter.”
• And here’s a blog called The Alphabetts that I hadn’t seen before. Lovely!
•  Need a good refresher on setting the space between letters (kerning and tracking)? Look no further!
• And here’s another one at Adobe (this time a video by our friend Chad Chelius) on making interactive pdf files from InDesign.
• Okay, one more, this time a video I’ll try to embed… a short, fun piece on the history of typography.

Enjoy!