Adobe InDesign continues to refine and improve it’s tools. The video below is a review of the Column Splitting and Spanning feature, which helps eliminate the need for multiple text boxes. This is ESPECIALLY handy for magazine and newsletter layout, where you might have multiple headers and the potential for far too many text boxes. If you’ve been doing Graphic Design and Page Layout for very long, you’ve no doubt already dealt with clients or editors who’ve made very substantial changes, maybe even massive re-writes, which requires a major amount of reflowing and rearranging of your layouts. Life will be so much easier if you use this simple and handy technique to eliminate unnecessary text boxes and keep things neat, tidy, and easy to rework if needed.
Adobe Illustrator has also been the Graphic Designer’s “go-to” program for creating and manipulating vector based artwork. It’s withstood the test of time, and each release keeps getting better and better. Granted, some people will always defend their personal preference (Like those die-hard, loyal CorelDRAW fanatics, who are convinced their program is the best.) Personally, I actually enjoy illustrating with Flash because I think Bézier curves are a bit archaic and Flash handles line art in a more fluid and hand drawn manner…. but that just MY opinion.
Our previous blog (6 sites EVERY Graphic Designer or Printing Professional should know) was so well received, that we decided to share five MORE. Check out these sites for even MORE tools and information!
These six websites are LOADED with great tools and information. If they aren’t bookmarked in your browser yet, they SHOULD be!
Earlier this year Microsoft released their newest Office bundle, Office 2010. For many people who upgrade to Office 2007 a few years ago, their Ribbon Interface was a huge and often unhappy surprise. They changed their entire navigation layout, making it very difficult for even the most knowledgeable Word, Excel, and PowerPoint users to find what they were looking for. Most annoying was the lack of a File menu, which had been replaced with a strange little “Office Pearl.” In Office 2010, they have brought back the File menu, and even enhanced it to become a very complete File Panel complete with file properties, permissions options, and other features making for easier document sharing and collaboration.
Universal Printing installed our copies of Adobe Creative Suite 5 three days after the major upgrade release in April 2010. We’ve had a few patches and a few minor program updates to address crashing, some PDF creation issues and general compatability, but all-in-all, it’s a worthwhile, stable upgrade with some nice new features.