Generally I let the nerd herd (aka our talented team of web developers) be the ones to get excited about math related functionality. However, I gotta say, I do get excited about the way InDesign allows you to do math in the control panel. Probably because anything that does the math for me is exciting! How does it work? Imagine you have a frame with an image in it on the page and you know that it would probably fit better if it were 2.125″ bigger. In the Width field up in the Control panel, type +2.125 next to the existing size. When you’re done, press Tab or Return (PC: Enter) and InDesign will do the math for you to adjust the size of your frame. This also works in the X and Y axis fields — allowing you to move items by a specified amount without doing the math yourself. You can also use different functions, such as subtraction (–), multiplication (*), and division (/).
Posts Tagged ‘Tools’
Quick Tip: Math for designerds
Friday, July 16th, 2010Was this review helpful to you?
Wednesday, July 14th, 2010I’ve been having major cell-phone trouble. I couldn’t make a call longer than 5 minutes and I was unable to send out more than a couple texts at a time before my battery fully drained and my phone just shut down. It’s a horrible feeling being so disconnected. The solution: I needed a new battery. I wasn’t about to try to go to the Verizon store (I’m not much for waiting in line for hours) so I tried problem solving using good ol’ Google. I found a couple of online stores with batteries selling from $8.99-$49.99. I’m not sure why the battery pricing was so across the board, but I wasn’t about to pay over $30, and don’t even get me started about the additional shipping fees involved.
Amazon Review
In my search I found the holy grail of cheap batteries online for $3.99-$10.99 on Amazon. “How could this possibly be so cheap?” I asked myself. I of course was drawn to the cheapest battery ($3.99 new), but went straight to the buyer reviews, because how could such a sweet deal exist? Well, to my dismay…it doesn’t. I found out that some people (out of 21 reviews) had luck, but the majority found the product to look used, be scratched, and the new battery would still not hold a charge. So what did I do? I went for the $4.99 (new) version with the more positive reviews.
User reviews can definitely be a valuable resource for users and sellers. Reviews help build trust in a product; They let us see how a product will look or work in real life by someone who has actually experienced it first hand. A buyer can learn if their potential purchase will be reliable and good quality. A review can also help narrow down all of the other potential choices out there (such as my million other battery options). If a product is perceived as favorable by a consumer, product sales can take off. And vice-versa, a negative review can impact how much you sell (like the $3.99 battery). (more…)
This web site asks the simple question:
Friday, July 9th, 2010
Simply type in a password, one at a time, in to the box provided. When you’re finished, the site tells you approximately how many seconds/minutes/days/months/years it would take to “crack” your password. The estimate is based on a fancy algorithm which takes in to account the number of characters typed, the frequency of characters being re-used, upper & lower case, numbers, and special characters. Then, it calculates how long the average repulsive script kitty or 1337 |-|4x0r5 would spend trying to crack it. It’s just like what you would find on any other web site registration page which displays how “weak” or “strong” your password is. However, this one doesn’t submit or store any data, and doesn’t require you to sign up for anything. Also, according to the site, it works by utilizing “50% mathematics, 51% witchcraft”.
Check it out. It may help you decide to change one of your not-too-secure passwords, or you might high-five yourself for having a password which wouldn’t be cracked for “three-hundred thousand years”.
Visit: How Secure Is My Password?
Do spam bots use mice?
Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010
The typical solution to avoiding spam bots from abusing your online forms is to use a CAPTCHA test. You know – the hard to read, wavy text that you must type in correctly to prove to the web page that you are human and capable of making sense out of the non-sense. Well, spammers have used OCR (optical character recognition) algorithms to have their bots read the messy text and complete the test. Since then, there have been lots of alternatives to the text CAPTCHA test. Some involve selecting an image from a list given its name or description, or answering simple math problems. However, I didn’t find one that I really liked. So we started to build our own on the assumption that spam bots don’t use mice.
(more…)
Kayak Explore
Monday, June 14th, 2010
Ready to plan your next vacation? This clever tool from Kayak is just the tool to assist with seeing how far your travel dollars can take you. Open up http://www.kayak.com/explore/ to take a look. The web site will pick up your current location, and pinpoint a local airport (based on IP address). You can, of course, enter a different starting location in the top toolbar. Then, use the slider at the top to choose how much is in your budget to spend on a round-trip flight. As you move the slider upwards, you’ll see more locations opening up around the world; listing the current bottom-out round-trip airline ticket price (per seat) you would have to pay for travel. Click on any of the price tags to see details on the flight, including total flight time and number of stops. Some locations will even tie in hotel deals and ratings. To further trim down results, you can select the time of year you plan to travel, as the default is “any time”.
The map is powered using Google Maps, and takes advantage of all the wonderful features built-in to their interface. Kayak partners with dozens of airlines, hotels, rental cars, and other online travel companies to bring this information to you. Their model is no-pay advertising, so the use of their site remains free to the consumer via ad space and affiliates.
Quick Tip: Will you be my plus one?
Friday, June 11th, 2010
I learned a little InDesign trick recently that has really decreased my level of frustration when working with documents with multiple sections. Maybe it is just me, but every time I want to print or create a PDF of a portion of a multi-section InDesign document I run into trouble. I have the hardest time entering the section names/page numbers that correspond to the pages I would like to print into the Range box in the Print Dialogue box.
One way to help figure this out is to click on each of the pages you want to print in InDesign and check the page number box in the bottom left side of the screen. This will show you exactly how to enter each page number (eg Sec2:4). Then you will just need to type these pages into the Range box in EXACTLY the same format.
However, my new favorite way to avoid all of this nonsense is to use the magic plus sign! Simply put a “+” in front of the page number and it will tell InDesign to use absolute page numbering. So “+1″ always refers to the first page in your document, regardless of what section it is in. I love that!
Quick Tips: Importing text from Word into InDesign
Thursday, June 3rd, 2010
I don’t know about you, but I hate it when I bring copy into InDesign from Word and it brings with it a bunch of formatting or paragraph and character styles that I don’t want or need. Luckily there is a super simple remedy.
1. When placing text into InDesign choose File > Place.
2. Navigate to and click (but don’t double click) the Word document you’d like to place.
3. With the document selected click the “Show Import Options” check box and click Open.
4. This will bring up an import options dialogue box. Choose “Remove Styles and Formatting from Text and Tables” and click OK.
Viola! No more pesky styles and unwanted formatting. Note that you can also use this same process when bringing text in from Excel. The Import Options dialogue box also includes some other options that you can turn off and on to control how your text is imported. Oh so simple, but yet so helpful!
Basic MODx Template Tutorial
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010
We here at Zoom Creates love giving people the option to maintain their own websites once we are done building them. One of our favorite CMS platforms is MODx. It’s based on PHP, is open source, and is extremely flexible. Today I’m going to talk to you about the basics of building a HTML based template.
Like magic!
Thursday, March 25th, 2010
Adobe just announced it will launch Creative Suite 5 on April 12, 2010. I’ve been checking out some of the new features for Photoshop that Adobe has released via sneak peek videos. I’m definitely excited to check out the new content aware fills, the videos posted by Adobe make the tool look like magic. I’ll be interested to see how it works in the real world. The new improved warp tool and the changes to the selection tool for better edge detection are really exciting as well. I also noticed what seems like a minor change to the preferences in one of the Just Do It Days videos that I’m really looking forward to. It allows you to check a box that will set the “save as” default location as the location where the file is currently saved. I have always wondered why this wasn’t an option.
Here are some videos to check out the new features:
Content-Aware Spot Healing Sneak Peek
Selections and Masking Sneak Peek
A Lorem Ipsum For Images
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010When I first started working in a true creative industry, it took a little time to understand the value of good copy writing. Along the way, I found out about something called “Lorem Ipsum” text, or placeholder copy, mostly used in creative design, publishing and development to show what blocks of text would look like when placed on the web page or print item until proper copy could be produced. This fake copy looks like the real thing, and gives a sense of the overall visual layout for the finished creative. It looks kind of like Latin, but it is not. When a web page needs this kind of treatment, I usually find this Lorem Ipsum Generator to do the trick quite nicely. (more…)
