You know what a scalloped edge is, right? Named after the humble marine mollusk, scalloped edges are made up of a series of curved projections, and can be found on everything from bricks and buckets to bikinis and blankets. Here are a few ways to make a scalloped edge in InDesign. Use a Custom Dotted Stroke […]
Continue reading
Reading about the anonymous students—calling themselves Dangerdust—at Columbus College of Art & Design who have been sneaking in and creating motivational chalkboard art, I had so many questions. The first was, “They still use chalkboards?” I followed that up with, “How can I turn my talents into a renegade art?” Well, I certainly can’t make […]
Continue reading
I was watching Justin Seeley’s recent video about making long shadows in Illustrator and I thought, “jeez, why would anyone use Illustrator?!” No, I’m just kidding! I love Illustrator. But I did think, “hey, let’s do it in InDesign!” Here’s how you can make long shadows in InDesign: Here’s what we’re starting with… just text […]
Continue reading
I remember the first time I tried to use the Pen tool in Illustrator back in 1989. I dragged along a curve that I wanted the line to follow. Instead of a curve, a straight line shot out nowhere near my original intent. Thinking it might get fixed if I tried again, I dragged along […]
Continue reading
You already know that InDesign has a “the last page number” text variable, right? To get that, you choose Type > Text Variables > Insert Variable > Last Page Number. And because it’s a variable, it automatically updates if the last page number of that document changes. Cool! But what if you want “the last […]
Continue reading
Recently, I wanted to make a quick table with transparent strokes around the cells. You may already know that this isn’t a standard feature in InDesign. If you have fill colors applied to table cells and set the strokes to [None], the strokes will disappear, but in their place you’ll see the cell fill colors […]
Continue reading
How can one Photoshop image grow and shrink dramatically during production, even without compression? It’s a question that comes up regularly. And the answer isn’t just academic, because understanding why could save you a lot of storage space on your hard drive or in the cloud. What’s the Document Size in the Image Size Dialog Box? […]
Continue reading
How to use InCopy’s Eyedropper tool to apply formatting to any range of text.
Continue reading
Readers familiar with my articles will be aware that I have made InDesign’s Data Merge feature do some useful and sometimes unusual things, but the majority of my day-to-day work using Data Merge is sequentially numbered stationery. The sequential numbers required for the stationery are typically prepared in a spreadsheet such as Microsoft Excel and […]
Continue reading