Jon Frank - NPower Seattle
Tips, Tricks & Answers for your Technology Needs.
Updated: 1 year 19 weeks ago
The New & Improved NPower blog!
OK most of you know I started this blog at the beginning of 2008 to help you all with software related issues. Cool tips & tricks when using various programs. And Patrick Shaw, NPower’s manager of web & database projects, has had his blog to help with questions around web design & databases. So now what? Well these 2 blogs cover 1/2 of the services that NPower has been providing to nonprofits for the last 10 years. With a new year, it seemed like a good time to get our other 2 managers involved. We can’t have all of the blogging fun. So we’ve combined all of our ...
Image Resolution & InDesign
Now for the longest time I’ve told students in our InDesign classes that the way to tell if your photo is high quality is to open in up in Photoshop. Now InDesign CS4 will tell you the resolution of your graphic in the newly updated Links panel. This is one of those moments where I’m reminded that I don’t know everything. And when it comes to the Adobe products, that’s doubly so. Turns out that InDesign can & will tell you the resolution of your graphics in the older version. It just so happens that the Info panel, a panel that I stopped using when I switched ...
Making Snowflakes with InDesign
Since it’s been snowing so much here in Seattle, which is unusual for us; it seem appropriate that the folks over at InDesign Secrets have posted this handy tutorial on how to create snowflakes with InDesign. Or other really cool fractal designs.
Check it out, I’ve already creating several. Besure to ready the comments too, there are some great tips there. And you can do something similar using Illustrator, I posted about that a while back.
Creating Image Text with inDesign
For those of you who’ve taken NPower’s InDesign Intermediate, you may remember this handy trick. How you can use an image and make it appear inside your “text”. So that the characters are made up of the picture. It’s a cool trick and can make your document really stand out. The folks over at InDesign Secrets have a great posting about this. They do a great job explaining how it works, how to do it, and why the obvious method doesn’t work. That being, using the None or Paper choices in the Swatches panel. But this brings up an entirely different ...
Deleting Guides from Your InDesign Document
I know that lots of use work with Graphic Designers. We can’t all be design experts. Or you may have inherited InDesign documents from a previous staff member, etc. And lets just say that the way the did things doesn’t quite mess with your style. One of those migh, just might, be the use of guides. I’ve opened up some documents where the author had gone whole hog with the guides. I mean they were everywhere! I could hardly see the content on the page through the forest of guides. Now if this has ever happened to you, let me share a little trick that the folks over at ...
Working with a Designer pt.2
Well this week seems to be my week for follow-up posts. Recently I commented on working with a graphic designer and who owns what. Well today I came across a post that dealt with the same issue but from a web site perspective. It apply to print too and the author makes some fantastic points.
You can check it out at http://blog.pixelita.com/23/who-owns-your-web-site/
Hidden Characters in InDesign, pt. 2
A while back I posted a link to Adobe’s website that listed hidden characters that InDesign can show you for spaces, tabs, etc. Well the folks over at InDesign Secrets went one step further (and better). They created a great PDF of these characters. What makes it better is it’s LARGE, so you can actually see the characters easily. And it shows them in context.
Check it out!
Stripping out Styles from an InDesign Document
InDesign Secrets has an interesting post on their website where they answer a graphic designers question about stripping out styles & master pages from a document that one of their clients requested. For me this isn’t of any value at all. I don’t think most people really need to know how to do this in the first place. However, it does bring up a good point to keep in mind if your nonprofit is working with a graphic designer. For some reason, there are designers out their that feel that they “own” the pieces they created. Even though your organization may have paid ...
