Ideally, you want only the text below an object to wrap. If you have an Adobe InDesign object with text wrap set on it and a text box on top of it keeps wrapping, you simply need to adjust your preferences.

If you keep your InDesign Character and Paragraph panels open on your screen at all times, you’re wasting a lot of space. The Control Bar across the top of the window displays virtually everything you see in the dedicated panels in a much more concise space while still keeping it all easily accessible to you when you need it. The trick is making it convenient to switch between the two if you have a smaller monitor.

For designers just getting started or still in school, or those in need of a refresher course, this article on working with color in Adobe InDesign covers a variety of topics.

In a back & fourth discussion with a friend over the features in Adobe InDesign CS5, the topic of multiple page sizes came up.

My friend couldn’t for the the life of him figure out why you would want or need the feature in a page layout application.

Forgetting the fact that I prefer to think of InDesign as more than a “page layout” application, I offered him the first suggestion that appeared in my mental rolodex of uses for the feature. Expecting the standard “magazine foldouts” reason, my rather un-sexy answer surprised him. Having multiple page sizes in a single InDesign document is a great file management tool.

Knowing shortcuts in your applications can greatly improve your productivity. Thankfully, Adobe provides a plethora of them in all their applications, including InDesign. One frequently used shortcut in my work day is adding a new page in a document; and it just kills me to see people making a trip up to the Layout>Pages menu to do it.

I was extremely happy to find out that one of the few scripts I used extensively in Adobe InDesign CS4 still works perfectly in the latest CS5 upgrade – making calendar creation dead simple.

Often times I look at an InDesign file someone else built and something just doesn’t look right about an image. Sure enough, I check the image scaling and find out that the horizontal and vertical scaling doesn’t match. Here’s an easy way to check and adjust the scaling.

Adobe has packed a lot of nice features into the Creative Suite 5 apps. One of my most-used applications is InDesign, so I was quite pleased to see so many of the “little things” I’ve wanted to see for years, be addressed with this latest upgrade. I’ll be covering some of these new features in future posts, but one new feature that I’ll be using daily in my job is the new object Corner Options feature on rectangles.

When I installed Adobe Creative Suite 5 Master Collection this past week, the very first thing I noticed was that the installer has been greatly improved over the disasterous installers used in previous Creative Suite versions. Now let me qualify that by saying they still aren’t perfect, but I think most users will agree that they’re well on their way to being what they should have been all along. Simple.