How Designers Can Utilize Mac OS X Accessibility Features

This article is for any of those designers who have ever had issues which make it difficult to be productive at a traditional workstation. Here are a few examples: one hand doesn't cooperate, you have difficulty typing, or can't sit upright in your everyday office chair. As a designer, my job is relatively easy on my body. I'm worked a number of physical-labor jobs in my life and I am so grateful that my daily work does not leave my entire body exhausted (like those plant nursery-worker and home improvement warehouse jobs I had many years ago). But still, there are sometimes when bodies just don't cooperate with our deadlines, and eventually, we'll probably all need to find creative ways to get our work done when certain body parts are working against the deadline. I've compiled some ideas that I hope will help some of my fellow designers still get work done on physically rough days.

Working One Handed

Let's say one of your hands doesn't work: maybe you broke your arm, or had hand surgery or something along those lines. For whatever reason, one hand is non functional.

One solution:  Change hands. If you're right handed, try working left handed. Move the mouse over to the other side. At first I tried just moving the mouse to the left of my keyboard. But even though I was working left handed, my left hand still knew that "left click" was supposed to be done with my index finger, and "right click"  was supposed to be done with my middle finger. So I had to also change primary button as well. It was a little slow at first, but I got used to it for the most part. To change the primary mouse button, go to System Preferences > Mouse.

Use speech recognition: This doesn't necessarily have to do with working one handed. But it can come in handy if typing is really difficult and you've got long emails to put together. Did you know that the Mac has built-in speech recognition? After a little digging around in System Preferences, I found Dictation. If you've ever used Siri on the iPhone, you'll find that Dictation works exactly the same, complete with autocorrect (or auto Incorrect, depending upon how it interprets your speaking). After using Dictation, I usually have to do a little clean up work. But Dictation can take a lot of the trouble out of typing complex emails. Unfortunately dictation does not work in InDesign (I wish I knew why). But it works great when writing emails.

Can't Sit Upright

Let's say you can't sit at your desk: maybe you have headaches, or you are in a full body cast, or you have to keep your feet elevated above your head. For whatever reason you are flat on your back but you still have to get your work done. One might think that the solution would be to take your laptop and just lay down on the sofa. But if you've ever tried working like this, you'll quickly discover that it doesn't work. Especially on a 13" laptop when designing oversized newsletters. So try this for a more productive workday:

Step 1: Chaise Lounge: Position a chaise lounge on the floor in front of your desk. Because the head and feet can be raised independently, you can put both at the correct angle for whatever your body needs.

Step 2: Move the monitor close to the edge of the desk and tilt it downward. 

Step 3: Get a lap desk and move your keyboard and mouse down there. In this case, a small wireless keyboard (without a 10 key) would work much better than a large wired keyboard.

Step 4: Zoom in. Now, we all know how to zoom in our favorite Adobe programs using the marquee zoom, but do you know how to zoom in on everything? When sitting upright at a desk, those Adobe panel menus are a perfectly reasonable size. But when you're several feet away from the screen, those panel menus suddenly seem ridiculously small. I used to think that the only way to increase the size of the panel menus was to decrease the resolution of my monitor, but the problem with that is that you lose way too much screen real estate once. I found a much better solution. Zooming in on the OS level! Watch the short video below for a quick demo.

This feature would also be really useful if you're screen-sharing from a small screen onto a larger screen.

Step 5: Giant Cursor: If your cursor is just too dang small and you keep losing it, go to System Preferences > Accessibility > Display. Change the cursor size from Normal To Large. The cursor will then display about ten times larger than normal. (I wanted to take a screen shot demonstrating how giant the cursor becomes, but whenever I tried, the cursor is either not included in the screenshot, or shown at its regular miniature size.) I also find Giant Cursor useful when doing training. The people watching may not be as familiar with the software as I am, so having a giant cursor makes easier for them to follow along.

I hope you find these tips useful. If you use any of these tips, I love to hear about it. Please leave a note in the comments. And if you know why Dictation doesn't work in InDesign, do tell!

Help! Where Did the Cross References Panel Go?

You may have heard the buzz recently about InDesign’s and improved hyperlinks panel. Rufus Deuchler made a great video about it here. Hyperlinks are now simpler to make and easier to edit. But I want to point out that what’s been a bit glossed over is how the Hyperlinks panel has changed: specifically, what has been removed from the Hyperlinks panel.

Read the entire article at InDesign Secrets.

I'll be Speaking at PePcon 2014!

For the last four years, I have attended the Print and ePublishing Conference. This conference has taken me to Seattle, Arlington, San Francisco, and Austin. The 2014 conference is in Chicago. Each year at the conference, I've presented at Ignite InDesign. The Ignite sessions are basically like on open mic night. Where, for anyone brave enough to speak in front of a few hundred strangers, they'll hand you the microphone and let you do a 5 minute presentation on your InDesign-related topic of choice. I have done this each and every four years I have attended the conference. Each year my presentations have become a bit easier and a bit better.

For the last two years, the producers of the conference (David and Anne-Marie) have allowed potential Speakers to submit their ideas for topics they'd like to speak on. The result is that there was an influx of new speakers into the conference. Last year, we got to hear presentations from a variety of innovative people who are not necessarily professional trainers, but who are working hard every day in the trenches of print and publishing. These folks have come up with interesting and unique solutions to challenging publishing problems.

Although I wasn't chosen as a speaker last year, I filled out the form again this year and crossed my fingers, hoping to be chosen. Well good news: after four years of doing Ignite presentations, I was chosen to be a speaker on the Big Stage! I'll be doing a 20 minute session on PDF commenting. I'll also have a session or two at the Meet the Speaker table.

Here are some great PepCon resources:

• My experiences with the Print and ePublishing Conference
• My favorite reasons to attend the conference
• List of speakers at the conference

I hope to see you in Chicago! Use the discount code below for $50 off.

Knitted Branding: Interpreting a 2D Vector Design with Double Knitting

Last year, my niece and her husband took over a coffee shop in a small northwest town. They named their new venture "Arrow Coffee," and had plan to rebrand it as a northwest themed coffee shop. As the family graphic designer, I am often called on to help with designs. Around that time, an illustrative designer, Von Glitschka, started a satirical logo design service called 5ive Minute Logo. He draws the logos on his iPad, as a creative exercise. Not being a logo designer myself, I thought it would be fun to see what Von could come up with. Surely his 5 minute logo would be more creative than anything I could design. If my niece didn't end up using the logo, who cared? Because it only cost $5!

Besides the $5 fee, Von only asks for three things:

• Name of Business
• Type of Business
• Valid Email Address (so he can email the logo back to you)

So I paid the five dollars and waited in anticipation for what he would come up with. A week or so later, I got my completed logo. In only 5 minutes of drawing, Von came up with this.

His name is Chief Piping Hot

Though my niece didn't end up using the logo, I liked it so much that I decided to make a knitted version of the happy coffee cup. I thought it would be a fun challenge to convert a 2D design into a 3 dimensional knitted sculpture, devising the pattern as I went along.

Around that same time, my mom gave me a classic knitting book as a Christmas gift: Notes on Double Knitting by Beverly Royce. Double knitting allows you to knit seamless tubes on a pair of straight knitting needles, without the use of double pointed or circular knitting needles. I thought it would be fun to tackle this double knitting technique, creating a 3D knitted version of the Arrow Coffee logo.

With the exception of the face, I made the entire project using double knitting, including the feathers and the arrow. When I started the black hat (coffee cup lid), I didn't have the illustration handy and I couldn't remember what color it was supposed to be. For some reason, black seemed like the logical choice. Later on, when I realized the original illustration had a brown hat/lid, I was a bit disappointed that I had gotten the color wrong. However, it turns out that in real life, brown coffee cup lids are a special order product, and that's why we never see them. Black and white lids are the only standard lid color choices.

But back to the knitting: The only part of the sculpture/toy that was not double knit was the smile and the eyes, because those didn't need to be tubes. I knit the smile flat, and then stitched it on. For the eyes, I crocheted some small black circles and some small white yarn buttons for the eyes, and sewed them on like I would regular buttons.

To make the cup more able to stand upright, I stitched in some white plastic canvas into the base of the body and some black plastic canvas onto the underside of the lid. I was able to find plastic canvas in different sized circles, and just trimmed them down to the size I needed.

I had a bit of a hard time figuring out how to stuff the body. Regular poly fiberfill just made the piece lumpy. And also, the white body was knit a little too loosely (that was the first piece I made, so I didn't know what size needles I should use to get the gauge that I wanted), so the fiberfill started poking through the stitches. As a side note, double knitting has the effect of loosening your gauge, so use needles at least two sizes smaller than you normally would.

Another challenge was figuring out how to get the arrow to be straight across the coffee cup. Because if it was simply attached on either side of the cup, there was a tendency for the arrow to sag. So the arrow needed to be in a single piece, physically going through the pillow.

It seemed that I needed a custom pillow form made, so I began the hunt to find someone who did sewing. You might think it would be easy to find a custom sewing service (not a tailor shop), but it's actually quite difficult. Neither quilt shops, craft shops, nor sewing machine centers offer custom sewing services. After a few months of asking around, I found a local lady that did sewing and asked her to see what she could come up with. I dropped off my knitting with an explanation, a shrug of my shoulders, and a hearty "good luck." A month or so later, she found a solution and was ready for me to come and pick up the pillow.

For the body, she ended up rolling up a cushion from a piece of lawn furniture and using that as the pillow form. It had the softness of a pillow, but offered the smooth, lump-free texture that I couldn't get with the fiberfill. For the arrows, she ended up using my original idea, which was bamboo shish kabob skewers, inserted three-at-at-time,into white plastic drinking straws, which were them inserted straight through the body of the cup.

In order to make the feathers stand upright, I stitched them together, then wove a black twist-tie into the edge of the red feather. Then I stitched the end of the twist tie onto the top of the lid. That gave me a way to bend the twist tie into the correct angle so that it would hold the red feather upright.

Normally, I only knit afghans, so this sculptural project was a fun change. It will probably be a few years before I decide to knit another pillow/toy/sculpture, but when I do, it will be helpful to have double knitting in my bag of tricks.

Creative Cloud a la Carte

I'd like to offer Adobe a perspective on a pricing model that may help convert more people to using Adobe Creative Cloud. In my discussion with various people about Creative Cloud, many times they say "I can't justify the price," or "It's too expensive to upgrade my entire team." Sometimes this comes from professional designers, sometimes from educators, sometimes from printing companies.

But Adobe says: the price is so affordable! You get ALL the apps for around $50. What a deal! Which is true is you're going to use them all, or at least a few of them. But as great as it is to have access to all the apps, I don't use them all. Nor will I ever you use them all. Nor will ANYONE ever use them all. Not even the best trainers in the world whose mission it is to know and teach all they can about Adobe software will ever use all the apps.

Why? Here's why. There are apps designed for various workflows. No one person will ever use all of these tools in a workflow.

Adobe has broken down these tools into several large categories. I've highlighted in red the tools that I used every day. I've highlighted in Blue the tools that I use once in a while, maybe a couple of times per year. Everything else in Creative Cloud I'm really not that interested in. Are they great and useful and loved by thousands of people around the globe? Yes. And I'm sure there are plenty of people just as passionate about their tools as I am about InDesign and Acrobat. But in my workflow, I only need a handful of tools.

But again they say, "What a deal! You get it ALL!" I liken that approach to going to a buffet. A buffet might serve 100 different items, and by paying a set price, I can eat all of the items, as much as I want. The price is all inclusive. How amazing! So I start eating my favorite foods, and then I go back for seconds, and then I start slowing down... Then I've eaten so much that I physically can't eat any more. Does that lessen the beauty of the all inclusive price? Well, it doesn't matter how great of a deal it is if at the end of the day, I  can't humanly take advantage of all the offerings to me. I'd rather just go to my favorite local restaurant, choose my favorite dish from a dozen or so offerings, and not feel guilty by not taking advantage of all the is available to me.

So I propose that Adobe adopt a similar approach to a restaurant, specifically a taco shop. Taco shops are interesting because they present their menu is such a way that it offers endless configurability at a reasonable price.

Each combination is composed of two or three main items, plus you choice of sides.

Prior to Creative Cloud, Adobe had grouped its software into a few major categories. They had:

• a package for Print Designers
• a package for Web Designers
• a package for video editors
• and a package that included everything.

 I propose that they do the same thing with Creative Cloud.

As I mentioned earlier, there are a handful of programs that I use every day. And another handful of programs that I use once every few months. And still another one or two programs that I will never use, but someone else in my office will. As it stands right now, if my husband needs to use After Effects (which I never use, but he needs to use every once in a while), we have two choices:

• We can buy him a $50/month subscrition for a whole bunch of software that he'll never use, or
• We can deactivate the license on my laptop for the duration of his project (so we have Creative Cloud installed on two computers owned by the same person, as the license allows for). When he's done with After Effects, he just needs to remember to deactivate the license so I can use the programs on my laptop again.

But should we really have to jump through those hoops? What I'd prefer is to order a Combo Meal: I choose the package that contains the main dish (the applications that I use every day). And then I choose a few items I'd like as side orders so that someone else on my team can use them (After Effects and team file sharing). 

I think by offering people choices that cost less than $50 per month, many more people would be likely to buy the package that best suits their needs. I won't spend $50 a month so that every once in a while my team member can use AfterEffects. But I will spend $5-10 month for a couple of add-on programs for him.

This problem gets compounded when a large team is involved. Years ago, I worked in the production art department of marketing/printing company. We were on old software, and anxiously awaited the day when we could get modern tools. I think we were perpetually three or four versions behind because the cost to upgrade a team of 30 designers was really high. We had the software installed on more computers than we had licenses for. Sometimes, I'd be working in Photoshop and get a call from the Art Department saying, "Can you please close Photoshop?"

Why? Because I had to share a copy with one of the designers upstairs. The price to upgrade the entire team to the latest software was so high that the management found it cheaper to have us jump through hoops to share a single license. (Never mind the legal aspects of that).

I'll take a guess and say that that printing company could upgrade one seat to Creative Suite Design Standard for $600.  Multiply that by 30 designers, and it costs around $18K to upgrade. But they only upgraded about once every five years or so, so they could amortize that expense over that timeframe. So the expense of upgrading software worked out to about $3600 per year.

Now, let's consider moving the entire team to Creative Cloud. $79/month x 30 designers x 12 months x 5 years: $142,200. Will many companies make the move? Probably not.

But let's go back to the restaurant menu analogy for a moment. Let's say I'm ordering Mexican food with my husband. He orders a burrito. It comes with 2 sides:  rice and beans. But he doesn't like spanish rice, so he asks for something else as a substitute. No problem! 

But as an alternative, to substituting another side item, he also has the option of giving the rice to me, because I will eat it. Of course, he could say "no rice in the burrito" and then I could order an extra side of rice. But if the cashier is thoughtful, they'll likely ring it up like this:

#1 BURRITO: $7.00

-No rice inside

-ON THE SIDE

   - Rice

Why do they do this? Because it is the same food packaged differently, and saves the customer money. The customers recognize that thoughtfulness and are more loyal.

Now what if the restaurant only offered side dishes when served alongside an entire entree? The order would look like this.

#1 BURRITO: $7.00

-No rice inside

#2 BURRITO: $7.00

- No burrito

- ON THE SIDE

   -Rice

Customers would throw a fit! We would be paying for 2 burritos while only getting the contents of one burrito. Likewise, I think it would be good move for Adobe customers to have the ability to mix and match products so they only pay for what they want.  I need:

• InDesign
• Photoshop
• Illustrator
• Acrobat
• Bridge

As an add on, every once in a while, I'd like to pay for a single month of After Effects. What if there was a package that included just the five programs I need, and then for a small fee (let's say $10 for a month long subscription), I can choose from one of the other programs in Creative Cloud. And for an extra $15 per month I can choose 2 additional programs. But here's the important part: I need those two programs to be used by someone else, with their own Adobe ID. The price point has dropped from $79 for the entire Creative Cloud to $15 for just what they need. Do you think more people would be willing to take advantage of that? I sure do. It offers a affordable entry point for those who cannot afford or are unsure about making the leap. This low entry point allows them to test-drive cloud services for a team, and see how easy it is to update software and share files.

Hover Scrolling in InDesign CC: It’s a Feature Not a Bug

Apparently in InDesign CC there is a new feature that lets you interact with the dropdown menus without ever having to click on them. Sounds cool, right? It can wreak havoc on your document without you ever knowing what happened until it's too late.

I started out with a text frame filled with Minion Pro. Then I started Hover Scrolling and in short order, I had created this beauty. Let the fun begin!

Read the entire article at InDesign Secrets: http://indesignsecrets.com/hover-scrolling-indesign-cc-feature-bug.php.

Please leave a note in the comments there sharing your thoughts (pro or con) on Hover Scrolling.

Beware of the Fire of Crisis

For many people, moving from one crisis to the next is a life pattern. Living in crisis mode allows them to feel like super heros, rushing in to save the day, putting out fires just in the nick of time. The thing that crisis-minded folks don't understand is that the difference between them and mythical super heros is that the fires that they are putting out are largely ones that could have prevented in advance.

Some people thrive in the crisis environment. I've spent a great deal of time around people who, in a crisis vacuum, will go to great lengths to create a crisis. It allows them to boldly step, in take control, and tell people what to do. Narcissists are often like this. But this blog is not for narcissists. This blog is for creatives. So as one who makes my living in the creative field, I want to caution you, my fellow creatives, against living your life in crisis mode.

I've found that where crises exists, creativity is stifled. When we are in crisis mode, we're often in search of the most expedient solution to get us out of whatever trouble we find ourselves in. But the quickest and easiest solution is rarely, if ever the best solution.

My husband and I are both creative professionals. I am a designer and writer; he is a musician. But often, we find ourselves spending the bulk of our time doing non-creative tasks. So how does that happen? The better question is, how does that not happen?

Life is busy and messy, and it's so easy to get wrapped up in seemingly important tasks. Answering emails, running errands, attending meetings, dealing with clients, fixing broken equipment, searching for files, sitting idly by while an old slow computer churns away... And meanwhile, at the end of a 40 (or 50 or 60) hour work week, we look back and realize that we've only spent 5 hours on creative endeavors. For me, my creative endeavor is document automation. For others, it's software development. Still others make music, or videos, or fine art. Whatever creative itch you have to scratch, once you make that creative outlet become your career, the business-end of things will undoubtedly creep in and try to take over.

So how to deal with this?

How can you deal with a boss who thinks meetings are more important than creating stuff? If you're self employed, how to deal with the reality of being your own IT person, marketing department, accounting department and purchasing department, in addition to being in responsible for product development and production? How to produce creative work when you're being pulled in a dozen different directions with kids, pets, and needy clients?

I don't have a great answer for this. When I became self employed, I kept my day job for five months. I worked at my day job 40 hours per week and then an additional 30 hours per week on my business. At the end of five months, I was a wreck. I hadn't exercised for months, I was sleep deprived and was living on sugar and coffee. I was burned out and I had just started my own business. So I obviously don't have all the answers, but I can share with you a few tips that will help you have more time for your creative endeavors.

If you're self employed in a creative field and want to stay that way long term, it's especially important to plan ahead to avoid the pitfalls of falling into crisis mode.

Be organized

Let's say as a designer you edit 100 different files per day. That's about 35,000 files per year. If you stay in business for 10 years, that's roughly 350,000 files. You'll need to come up with a good file management system so that you can quickly locate the files you need and get back to your creative work.

Set up automatic backup

If your computer crashes, will you have your files backed up somewhere else? A few years ago, I was excited to have CrashPlan backing up my files. I thought I was safe. But apparently, I had the bandwidth set at the default rate of transfer and after 4 months, my initial backup was not done. And then my hard drive died. I lost hundreds of files. So check in on your backup from time to time and make sure it is backing up at the right speed. You may even want to contact your backup company and have them walk you through some of the more advanced settings so that your backups will be done in a timely manner.

Exercise

Don't wait until that stiff back and sedentary lifestyle have caused you enough pain that you can't do your job. Get out from behind the desk. Get out and get moving before your body forgets how to and is locked in the typing-on-the-keyboard position.

Spend time with other Creatives

When I started the Raleigh InDesign User Group a couple of years ago, I thought I would be doing people a service by sharing with them my InDesign knowledge. But to be honest, I'm fairly confident that I've learned more from my fellow IDUG members than they have from me. They have introduced me to new features, plugins, and tools. They've shown me new ways of working that speed up my workflow and allow me to spend more time on the fun stuff. Your fellow creatives can offer insight and encouragement and keep you from making rash, career-impacting decisions after an exceptionally hard day.

Dream big

If you're still reading this blog, chances are good that you aspire to more than typesetting business cards for the local accounting firm. So write down your big ideas about what you'd like your future to look like. Share your big ideas with a friend. Set a measurable goal, and then work toward it methodically. This is important because when you're working toward a big goal, it puts into perspective all the petty annoyances that you may have to deal with on a daily basis. I remember back in college when I had to take dumb courses like macroeconomics and astronomy. I managed to get through those classes because I knew that I was working toward a larger goal: earning a college degree. If I hadn't been working toward a defined goal, I likely would have dropped out of those waste-of-my-time classes in the first week.

I speculate that one of the reasons that people experience mid-life crises is because their lives have been in a state of crisis for years, and over time, they have lost themselves in the sea of crises, waking up one morning thinking that suddenly, everything needs changing. Of course, I'm a mid-thirty-something, so I have a lot to learn.

But I do know that crises will get in the way of, and eventually burn out a creative career, reducing your flexibility and limiting your choices. And so with that in mind, I aim to prevent crises before they happen. Don't let the fire of crisis burn out your creativity, your health, or your career.

Introducing “Magneto Paths”

The great folks over at Rorohiko have developed an amazing plugin called Magneto Paths. This plugin makes objects stick together while they are being drawn, resized, and reshaped. This means you can effectively apply more than one stroke or fill to (what appears to be) a single object.

Read the entire article at InDesign Secrets.

The Beauty of Stacked Strokes

Have you ever yearned to apply multiple strokes to on object in InDesign? Have you wanted more flexibility with your strokes than just a stroke and a gap color? For years now, I have wanted InDesign to be able to have the equivalent of the Illustrator’s Appearance panel, where I can apply multiple strokes and fills to a single object.

Read the entire article at InDesign Secrets.

Why Do All My PDFs from Microsoft Office Print Fuzzy?

PDFs can "print fuzzy" when the black text is actually composed of all four colors of ink: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. This is a common problem from PDFs created from Microsoft Office documents. Before I send PDFs such as this to a commercial printer, I like to fix the blacks so that the document will print properly.

Let's take a look at a PDF with these incorrect blacks. In Acrobat, go to the Print Production pane > Output Preview.

I moused over the large black portion and the ink values are shown below. Notice how the black is actually composed of all four colors of ink.

When I turn off the black plate, the other three colors remain.

So how do we fix this? A quick search on google and even acrobatusers.com yields no quick results. I'm not a professional prepress technician, and I only need to convert the blacks in an PDF every once in awhile, so I tend to forget how, because I do it so infrequently. When I need to convert RGB blacks, I need to be able to do it without spending an hour or more searching on forums trying to figure it out. So for my own benefit, as well as any others who need to convert RGB PDFs from Office, here's the quick, super simplified explanation of how to do this.

1. Go to Print Production pane > Convert Colors.

That will bring up this dialog box. For our purposes, there are only two things to be concerned with in this dialog box. The first is the Conversion Profile. You can choose from a variety of CMYK conversion profiles, but SWOP is a good bet. And fortunately, it is the default here in the United States. Be sure to use a profile appropriate for your country.

The second thing to be concerned with (and this is the most important part), is the "Preserve Black" checkbox. According to the Adobe website, "Preserve Black preserves any black objects drawn in CMYK, RGB, or grayscale during conversion. This option prevents text in RGB black from being converted to rich black when converted to CMYK."

Click ok, and you are done. Now when you open the Output Preview dialog box and mouse over the back area, notice how the blacks are corrected.

And when you turn off the black plate, all the blacks disappear, as they should. Now the document will print properly.

I hope this tutorial will help you more quickly convert the RGB blacks in your Microsoft Office PDFs.