Planet Quark

Elusive Icons

Jeff Gamet — Fri, 17 May 2013 12:00:46 +0000

Elusive Icons are 271 vector icons specifically developed for Bootstrap, but since they’re collected into a Web font, they will work with custom projects as well. These clean, simple icons cover a wide variety of needs for Web and mobile apps. Use them freely, from http://aristeides.com/elusive-iconfont/

Select Though Stacked Objects

Jay Nelson — Thu, 16 May 2013 12:00:04 +0000

To select an object that is beneath another object in a stack of objects, do this:

In InDesign: Command-click the stack. Each Command-click will select the next item down.

In QuarkXPress: use Command-Option-Shift instead.

100 Top Tools for Graphic Designers

Jeff Gamet — Wed, 15 May 2013 12:00:01 +0000

GraphicDesignClasses.net published their list of 100 top tools for graphic designers at http://graphicdesignclasses.net/design-tools/. Have a look!

Use QuarkXPress Layouts for Revisions

Jay Nelson — Tue, 14 May 2013 14:00:17 +0000

One powerful use of the Layout feature in QuarkXPress is to save previous revisions of a document. For example, when you want to revise a Project that contains just one Layout (as most Projects do), rather than duplicating the entire Project, just duplicate the Layout. That way, the original version of your Layout is kept alongside the new version of your Layout in the same Project file (rather than as a separate document on your hard drive).

To do that choose Layout> Duplicate…

Simple!

How to encode videos for the Retina iPad or Samsung Galaxy

Matthias Guenther — Tue, 14 May 2013 13:14:31 +0000

When creating mobile web sites or apps and using video footage, it can be hard to find the best setting for video conversion. Often choosing the wrong format for encoding or conversion, the audio track or the whole video will not show or play incorrectly.

There are many great video encoding tools and converters, but most I find overkill or settings hard to remember. So about a year ago I was searching for a simple yet reliable tool for video conversion for tablets and smartphones and choose Miro Video Converter as my tool of choice and shared it here: http://forums.quark.com/t/26892.aspx

When I was just recently attending a Digital Publishing conference I was surprised to hear that many designers face the same issue, having the harddisk full of powerful tools but still not satisfied and not yet having found the one-click solution.

So allow me to recommend Miro Video Converter: http://www.mirovideoconverter.com/

I have used it in several app projects and so far never had a problem of a video not playing correctly. So I can highly recommend it.

What I like about it are the one click preset for the following devices that have never failed me. Presets are available for:

iPod (Classic / Nano)
iPod Touch
iPod Touch 4+
iPhone 4+
iPhone 5
iPad
iPad 3
Apple Universal
Apple TV

Samsung Galaxy Y
Samsung Galaxy Mini
Samsung Galaxy Ace
Samsung Admire
Samsung Droid Charge
Samsung Galaxy S / SII / S Plus
Samsung Galaxy SIII
Samsung Galaxy Nexus
Samsung Galaxy Tab
Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1
Samsung Galaxy Note
Samsung Galaxy Note II
Samsung Infuse 4G
Samsung Epic Touch 4G
HTC Wildfire
HTC Desire
HTC Droid Incredible
HTC Thunderbolt
HTC Evo 4G
HTC Sensation
HTC Rezound
HTC One X
Motorola Droid X
Motorola Droid X2
Motorola RAZR
Motorola XOOM
Sanyo Zio

PSP
Kindle Fire

Best of all, it’s available for Mac OS X and Windows and donationware.

Let me know your experience please.

Find Any Character

Jay Nelson — Tue, 14 May 2013 12:00:11 +0000

PopChar is our favorite character-finding utility, but newcomer Characters ($3) is worth a look. It puts a systemwide menu-bar icon on your Mac, which when clicked shows a scrolling list of available special characters, in sections such as Arrows, Bullets, Currencies, Dingbats, Geometric Shapes, Parentheses, Punctuation and Symbols. You can also type in a character’s name (such as Euro or Trade) to see symbols. You can the copy the selected character or its code as HTML, decimal, or hex. Get it at www.getcharacters.com.

No More Adobe Fireworks

Jay Nelson — Mon, 13 May 2013 16:02:33 +0000

Along with Adobe’s Creative Cloud announcements, they also announced that Fireworks, possibly the most efficient and useful tool in the old Creative Suite, will no longer be developed.

Adobe Kills Creative Suite: Replaced by Creative Cloud

Jeff Gamet — Mon, 13 May 2013 16:01:17 +0000

Adobe has discontinued their Creative Suite products, replacing them with a subscription-only system now named CC (for Creative Cloud). Individual apps are available for $20 per month, or you can get the entire collection of Adobe’s professional apps and services for $50 per month. There are upgrade options if you currently own CS3–CS6 (see here), and Adobe will continue to sell the CS6 versions for now (which will be updated with bug fixes, but no new features).

For more on the Creative Cloud, we recommend Jackie Dove’s story at Macworld here.

Also, Lesa Snider is presenting a free full day workshop on Creative Cloud on June 24 at CreativeLIVE.com. to tune in, or to buy the class to watch later, see http://lesa.in/clvideos

App Studio 20% Discount

Jay Nelson — Fri, 10 May 2013 14:00:04 +0000

If you’re thinking of publishing a multi-issue publication app, here’s a bargain you’ll want to take advantage of — before the end of May! Details are below:

————————

App Studio Discount: 20 Percent Savings on Multi-Issue Plans

May 10, 2013 – Following the success of the Think Beyond Ink Tour, a worldwide series of events that attracted thousands of designers, App Studio^TM is offering a limited-time discount on two of its most popular plans.

From now until May 31, 2013, anyone who purchases a pre-paid Multi-Issue Pro or Multi-Issue Premium plan will receive a 20 percent discount.

The savings is significant. Users who publish an app for iOS devices with the Multi-Issue Pro plan will save over $225. Users who publish apps for iPad, iPhone, Kindle Fire, Android tablet and Android smartphone devices with the Multi-Issue Premium plan will save nearly $1,140.

Now is the time to publish App Studio apps that have been designed and tested. If new to App Studio, designers can sign up for the free trial to create and test apps before publishing. http://www.appstudio.net/Platform/Trial.aspx

For more information about the special offer, please visit: www.AppStudio.net.

About App Studio

App Studio (www.AppStudio.net) is the next generation digital publishing solution that uses HTML5 to push the bounds of user experience without the high cost and effort associated with custom app development. App Studio is the only digital publishing solution that allows users to create branded content apps using QuarkXPress, InDesign, HTML5, and XML. Through a managed cloud environment, designers, authors, and extended teams are able to collaborate to create rich, interactive content that can be delivered across multiple platforms and devices.

Word Break and Indent Tips for InDesign & QuarkXPress

Jay Nelson — Fri, 10 May 2013 12:00:48 +0000

Sometimes, a word won’t hyphenate at the end of a line where YOU would like it to break. Rather than typing in a hyphen, which will flow along with the word if the line re-wraps, use a “discretionary hyphen”: an invisible character that tells your program to break and hyphenate a word at the end of a line when necessary — but to remove the hyphen if the word wraps to the next line.

To add a discretionary hyphen to a word in QuarkXPress, press Command-Hyphen where you want it to hyphenate. In InDesign, press Shift-Command-Hyphen where you want it to hyphenate.

To prevent a word from hyphenating at all, use the same keyboard shortcut, but use it just before the word: in QuarkXPress, press Command-Hyphen before the word; in InDesign, press Shift-Command-Hyphen before the word.

To break a word or sentence at the end of a line, without using a hyphen, press Shift-Return in either program.

To create a quick hanging indent in either program, go to the first line of the paragraph and press Command-backslash where you’d like the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc., lines to indent. This is known as the “indent here” character.

All these invisible characters can be removed later by backspacing over them.