Oct 11
3 InDesign CS2 tips
2005 at 01.03 am posted by Veerle Pieters
Time for a creative break! This time it’s the new InDesign CS2 that gets a bit of extra attention. Here are 3 handy features I often use…
Wrapping text around an object
How often did you need to wrap text around an image? Nothing special about that, except it’s getting easier and easier each time. InDesign makes it very easy for you, no need to create a path in Photoshop just select your image in InDesign and check the option ‘Wrap around object shape’ in the Text Wrap palette (to open this palette choose Window > Text Wrap)
Loading Character and Paragraph Styles
If you have created a set of styles for a brochure and you want to reuse them in a new InDesign document then the ‘Load Character Styles’ is a very handy feature hidden under the palette options menu (arrow on the top left of the palette). Same for the Paragraph Styles, here you have the ‘Load Paragraph Styles’ option. Very handy and a real time saver if you need to create several printed matter for the same client. New in CS2 (if I’m not mistaken) is that you get a an overview of styles used in the chosen document and you can check the styles you want to load and uncheck those you don’t want to load.
Object Layer Options
This is new in CS2. You can now define the visibility of the layers of a Photoshop document from within InDesign. In the example below I use ‘Multiply’ as layer mode in Photoshop. To achieve the effect I want I need to have my background layer visible. I can simply do this in InDesign, no need to reopen my image in Photoshop. Select the image and go to Object > Object Layer Options.
There is more handy stuff to talk about but I hope these will do for the time being. But if you have more time on your hands and you have the Creative Suite 2 and you are familiar with the new app Bridge then try this : open Bridge, navigate to your ‘Documents’ folder, create a new folder and call it ‘Snippets’. Now drag layout items (footers, logos, combinations of titles and images, blocks of text, whatever) directly from InDesign into this folder in Bridge. These so called Snippets are graphical elements that you can reuse over and over again in other InDesign documents. The handy thing is transparency, positioning etc. everything remains exactly the same if you drag these items from Brigde in an InDesign CS2 document. A real time saver! :-)
5served
1
I love the new CS. Great design example. Thank you!
2
Cool!
More of this :)
3
Very well done… simple but elegant.
PS anyone know of a good book that goes through all the steps in creating an InDesign template for a Newsletter/Journal? I need to re-s=design and update our publication. i want to spice it up a bit… gracias
4
I’d loved to find a book like that, too. I guess if you’re very good with InDesign, you could create your own template using columns and setting up the pages, etc…
I like Veerle’s tip on defining the visibility of layers in Photoshop, inside of InDesign. Amazing what you can do with it. Your brochure looks very nice/elegant. Like the color choices with the red and taupe. The maps look very professional, too.
5
This is definately going to come in handy… thank you!