You just completed a complex design made up of hundreds of overlapping rectangles using just two color fills, red and blue. You save the design, but you would like to experiment with alternate colors. So you do a “Save As” and name your new version. You select one of the red shapes and use the Select menu to select the rest of the red shapes – Select > Same > Fill Color. You change the red fills with one click of a swatch. Now you’re ready to select the all the blue rectangles. You could first deselect all the “newly colored” rectangles and then click on a blue rectangle and use the Select menu to select all the rectangles with the same blue fill color. Or, even better, with all the “newly colored” rectangles still selected, go to Select menu > Inverse and every object that is NOT selected (all the blue shapes) will be selected and the “newly colored” shapes get deselected. Even faster!
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You’re working with the Direct Selection tool to adjust the position and handles of the anchor points in a variety of flowing curvy paths that are part of a group. One path is finally just right and you need to select it and move it into position in the design and continue editing the next path. Is there a way to switch to the Group Selection tool when using the Direct Selection tool? This would be a huge time saver with the number of paths that need to be edited and moved.
When using the Direct Selection tool, hold down the Option key (Alt key on PC) to temporarily access the Group Selection tool. The reverse is true as well. If you’re using the Group Selection tool, the keyboard shortcut will temporarily activate the Direct Selection tool.
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In ordinary layout programs, you can view your page at up to 800% of actual size. In rare instances, this is just not close enough. That’s why in InDesign you can Zoom in a lot closer – five times closer than what other page layouts consider to be close up. So if you want to [...]
Recently, I got the following question from an InDesign artist who was just getting into Illustrator: “In InDesign, after I apply a stroke to a path, I can choose from all types of stroke style presets right in the Stroke palette. I find nothing like that in Illustrator’s Stroke palette. Am I missing something?” Nope! [...]
After six months of writing Tips of the Day for InDesign, I uncovered another feature that I can’t do without. The Find/Change feature (Edit>Find/Change), which you can find in virtually all layout and word processing applications, is taken to a new level in InDesign. Hidden under the More Options button is a whole new world [...]
You’ve created a pie chart using the Pie Graph tool in Illustrator. With lots of beautiful alterations, your chart looks nothing like the standard Illustrator gray graph. You even pulled one of the slices out of the pie and put a drop shadow effect under it under it for added emphasis. As soon as you [...]
One of the most overlooked settings in the New Document Setup window is “Number of Pages.” If you know that you’ll be designing a 20-page, 8½x11″, three-column newsletter with bleed, why not set up the entire document from the very beginning? I’ve been producing a 20-page newsletter for one of my clients based on the [...]
You’ve been playing around with all kinds of fills, strokes, and effects for selected objects, but now you want to get back to Default – a white fill with a 1 point black stroke. You could go to the Appearance palette and select any Effects listings and delete them, and then change the fill and [...]
One of my advertising clients supplies price listings of sale items in an Excel file which I Place as a Table in my InDesign layout. It’s almost inevitable that the Table will have an extra Column or two as well as some extra Rows at the end. So before I start formatting, I make a [...]
You have created a very complex illustration with a lot of objects and numerous layers. As the illustration moves along to completion, you decide to tidy up a bit. Some of the layers only have a few objects in them and really do not need to be separate layers. So you decide to combine some [...]
