Archive for May, 2011

-=Urbanite Jungle=-

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

It’s time (probably way past time) for Mrs. Knightly to update you (all 6 of her faithful readers) on her Urban(ite) Farm. Did you know that when searching craigslist.org for free piles of concrete chunks, you get more results if you also type in “Urbanite”. Fancy.

All winter long, I had this idea for the front yard, and it kept growing and growing until late February when I just couldn’t stand it anymore. The first stop was Lowes for a big roll of water permeable weed blocker $39.00, 5 cedar trellis’ $50.00. Then on to craigslist for two tons of concrete, rock and bricks – Free, what appeared to be 7 square yards of wood chips from a local tree company – Free, culminating in the purchase of $204.00 of four-way soil from Mt. Scott Fuel. For un-gardners, that is 5 square yards of dirt. The dirt part of the program is where it comes in handy to have a strapping young son because what he did in two and a half hours would have taken me at least a week and would have been accompanied by copious amounts of tears interspersed with words not fit for polite company.

Here’s what I did.

Now, if they could just turn Spring on a littler harder so my seeds will sprout!

From The Garden,
Mrs. Knightly

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InDesign Dimensions Include Stroke Weight?

Thursday, May 26th, 2011

One thing that has driven me crazy about InDesign is that by default, unlike Illustrator, the dimensions of an object include the stroke weight. So if you draw a box that is 1″ x 1″ that has a 1 pt. stroke applied to it, then remove the stroke, you no longer have a 1″ x 1″ box. You have a 0.9861″ x 0.9861″ box. Conversely, if you draw a 1″ x 1″ box and then add a 1 pt. stroke, it becomes a 1.0139″ x 1.0139″ box. This has plagued me ever since I started using InDesign and has wreaked havoc when trying to align things.

I wanted it to work like Illustrator. In Illustrator, If you draw a box and add a stroke, it does not include the stroke weight as a part of the dimensions. One way I would get around this in InDesign was to align the stroke to the inside of my shapes. This worked all right until I butted two shapes up against each other. If those two shapes had a 1 pt. stroke then where they touched it created a 2 pt. stroke, again, raising my blood pressure to new heights.

So finally, after years of insanity, I decided to see if I could find a way to fix this and I found it! I don’t know why I didn’t search for it sooner. It is very easy fix but somewhat hidden. You would think it would be in InDesign’s Preferences but it’s not. (Believe me, I looked there many times!) The setting is located in the fly-out menu of the Transform palette! Duh.

If it is not already showing, you can find the Transform palette under the Window menu then Object & Layout.

Then in the Transform palette, in the fly-out menu, uncheck Dimensions Include Stroke Weight.

Much better.

(You can also find this setting in the fly-out menu of the long, skinny Control palette at the top of the screen when you are using the Selection Tool (black arrow)).

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How developers order lunch

Thursday, May 26th, 2011

Today the Dev team at Zoom Creates is having a meeting were we are getting Chinese food brought in.

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<?php
function lunchOrder($rice = "Fried Rice", $entre = "General Tso") {
    return $entre." with ".$rice;
}
 
$developers = array("Justin" ,"Kris", "Kurtis", "Nick");
 
$order = array();
 
for ($i = 0; $i < count($developers); $i++) {
    $order[$i] = $developers[$i]." would like to order ";
 
    if ($developers[$i] == "Kurtis" or $developers[$i] == "Justin") {
        $order[$i] .= lunchOrder("Steamed Rice");
    } else {
        $order[$i] .= lunchOrder();
    }
}
 
foreach ($order as $whatEachDeveloperWantsToEat) {
    print $whatEachDeveloperWantsToEat."<br />\n";
}
 
?>

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Find All Open Paths in Adobe Illustrator

Monday, May 23rd, 2011

A few weeks ago, I was working on an illustration and I noticed that the Divide function in my Pathfinder palette was not working the way it was supposed to. After a little troubleshooting, I found out that it was because one of the shapes I was trying to divide was not a closed path. I looked to see if Illustrator provided an easy way to find and select unclosed paths to no avail. It seemed to me that you should be able to find it under the Select menu where you can select stray points, all text objects, same fill or stroke color, or same blending mode etc. It seems like selecting all unclosed paths would be a pretty common query. Nope.
I did a Google search to see if anyone else had this problem or knew something that I didn’t. I ran across a free plug-in that adds Open Paths as well as 17 additional object types under Illustrator’s Select menu. It is awesome. Now I can easily select Guides, Open Paths, Closed Paths, Filled Paths, Unstroked Paths, etc. instead of spending valuable time and sanity hunting these rascals down.

The screen-caps above show Illustrator's Select Menu without (left) and with (right) the SelectMenuCS3 Plug-in.

You can find this and many other useful Illustrator plug-ins here. Thank you Rick Johnson! Download the file and then drag the plug-in into Illustrator’s “Plug-ins” folder. (On the website, it says it only works with CS3 and CS4 but it works for me in CS5).

The above plug-in only finds open paths. It is up to you to close them. I found a script that will find and close all open paths in Illustrator. I found this one on vectips.com. It actually contains 2 scripts; one that closes all Open Paths and one closes all selected Open Paths. To use the scripts, in Illustrator, under the File menu go to Scripts then Other Scripts… and navigate to the downloaded script and click Choose.

A dialogue box will open and let you know how many open paths it found and ask you if you want to close them all.

If you want your scripts to show up automatically without having to navigate to find them, store all your scripts in Illustrator’s Scripts folder. You can find Illustrator’s Scripts folder here: Applications/Adobe Illustrator CS5/Presets/en_US/Scripts.

Sweeeeeeet.

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Get up and Goe

Tuesday, May 17th, 2011

Just introduced in 2007, Pantone Goe System has finally made it’s way into our grasp! Today we received a large box with coated and uncoated swatchbooks, as well as a set of coated GoSticks (sticky backed color chips). The Pantone system, if you are unfamiliar, allows for a precise and reliable way to print color during the offset printing process by the use of specified inks. It felt like Christmas morning, opening the box and discovering the magic inside. The Pantone Goe system offers more than 2,000 NEW colors in addition to the original Pantone Matching System. In the past, the old pallet could feel very limiting; I couldn’t quite get just that right shade of orangy-red, soft green, or 50′s sea-foam blue. It’s great to have such a new and large selection of colors to play around with. I’m definitely excited to see a HUGE array of green and blue hues (my favorite!). Better yet, they are now arranged in an intuitive, chromatic order, simplifying the process of selecting the perfect shade without having to jump through the color palette. The new chip books also have nice sticky backs, so we’ll easily be able to play and experiment with colors, and then attach and share with fellow Zoomers and clients. I just can’t wait to start experimenting!

My current top picks from the Goe System:

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