|
******************************
*** DesignGeek ***
******************************
Tips and techniques for the digital designer
In this issue:
-- Pimp my CS3
-- Faster Searching in Big PDFs
-- See Me, Hear Me
Issue 62, 4/25/07
Written by Anne-Marie "HerGeekness" Concepcion
... for her clients, colleagues, random contacts and interested subscribers
(c) 2007 Seneca Design & Training, Inc.
==========================
Pimp My CS3
==========================
Like a number of other Adobe CS3 users, I was initially aghast at the suite's new icons when they first showed them to the world late last year.
Adobe Systems -- the company with the legacy of some of the most creative icons in the history of interface design, from renditions of Venus de Milo to color-enhanced X-Ray photography of starfish and butterflies -- this same company was *seriously* considering icons that were colored squares and two-letter program name mnemonics? Were they kidding?
No, they weren't. Since I can't include a screen shot, here's one of my favorite depictions of Adobe's new icons, arranged in a rotatiing "carousel" (center the cursor to slow it down):
http://theflashblog.com/icons.html
And, like a number of initially-horrified designers, now that I've installed CS3 on a few machines in the studio, I'm appreciating their simplicity. It's refreshing. And they look pretty, like candy chiclets, arranged side-by-side in my Mac's Dock or in the QuickStart area of my Windows Task Bar.
More to the point, they're easier to identify now: The chiclet that says ID is InDesign. PS is Photoshop. IL is Illustrator -- not! I guess the Illustrator team didn't like the connotations (we're not sick NOR from the midwest), instead going with "Ai" for their abbreviation. (Team Photoshop, in contrast, is not so thin-skinned. Or they have a sense of humor. Or both.)
I'm still puzzling over why some of the second letters are small caps and others are lowercase, though.
-----
Variations on a Theme
-----
There's no way designers could leave those icons alone, of course. Here are some of my favorite replacement sets for the stock CS3 icons:
Adam Betts
http://www.artofadambetts.com/weblog/
An almost-complete CS3 set of application *and* document icons based on the look of Adobe's CS3 packaging, which is quite beautiful. These are Mac-only, but Israel-based designer Eli has ported them over to Windows with Adam's permission: http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/53728408/
Hedi Regaya
http://mac-design.blogspot.com/2007/04/very-cool-cs-3-replacement-icons.html
Hedi subtly introduces the CS2 icons into their CS3 counterparts in this set, available as .icns and .png files.
Jorge Mancheno
http://www.koregraphik.com/downloads/adobe-cs3/
The same icons but with rounded corners, beveled edges, and different lighting. All effects are exquisitely subtle.
Louie Mantia
http://louiemantia.com/icon/creativesuite.html
Professional icon designer Louie Mantia spent a lot of time on these illustrative icons that take the CS2 look into CS3-era. Only four icons are previewed at the URL, but all the apps' icons are in the downloads (Mac/Windows).
Nuclear Potato (can't find his real name!)
http://macthemesforums.net/viewtopic.php?t=16779584
Mystery designer "Nuclear Potato" posted beautiful CS3 icons free for the downloading at this forum, though I think they'd be hard for me to tell apart in the Dock. (Or maybe I'm already spoiled by the abbreviations).
Dirceu Veiga
http://www.fasticon.com/comic_adobe_cs3.html
Twenty CS3 icons in a comic style ... c'mon, lighten up your attitude and try these on for size.
If you need help installing the icons, read the comments in these links for tips and utilities.
I'm looking forward to seeing even more takes on the CS3 icons on April 30, 2007, when Pariah Burke announces the winner and runners-up to his "Design Your Own Creative Suite 3 Icons Competition:"
http://quarkvsindesign.com/sc/contests/2007/cs3iconred/
-----
What Makes a Good Icon?
-----
Let's bring the topic to a higher level with some thoughts about icon design itself. Have you ever been in charge of creating a set? I have, and it was probably one of the most difficult jobs I've ever done! (Client said: "We need icons for Print and Help with the 'Windows XP look" but we don't want Microsoft to sue us." Sigh.)
I learned a lot by reading the transcripts of a Fireside Chat on the topic of Icon Design. (A Fireside Chat is a live chat/filesharing meeting via 37Signal's Campfire: http://www.campfirenow.com/).
All the participants were professional icon designers: Dave Brasgalla and Corey Marion (Icon Factory); Brian Brasher and Josh Williams (Firewheel Design); Jon Hicks (Hicks Design -- he did the Firefox icon); and Michael Schmidt (Cuban Council).
In Part 1 of 3, they share their favorite icons and their opinions of the Adobe CS3 chiclets:
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/368-fireside-chat-icon-designers-part-1-of-3
Part 2 of 3 (how they actually create their icons) is here:
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/370-fireside-chat-icon-designers-part-2-of-3
Part 3 of 3 hasn't been posted yet as of this writing.
After reading these, I'll never take an icon for granted again!
|| top ||
==========================
Faster Searching in Big PDFs
==========================
Does this sound familiar: You open a huge PDF and need to quickly find the page containing the topic you're interested in. (We'll assume this PDF has no bookmarks or a linked TOC that will suffice.)
Our Google-ized instincts immediately reach for the Find (Command/Control-F) field to enter the word or phrase we're looking for. Acrobat (or Reader, doesn't matter) finds the first couple of instances in a reasonable amount of time, but soon it slows to a crawl as we click Find Next one too many times and it hits a dry patch.
The little read-out says, "Searching 342 of 575 ... 343 of 575 ... 344 ....345 ...346 ... " Two minutes later and we're still staring at the page progression, hypnotized, waiting for a hit: "517 of 575 ... 518 ...519...520..."
Agh! Snap out of it, man!
By choosing one little command in Acrobat Pro v8, you can put an end to this misery for yourself and for anyone else who wants instant finding or searching, even in the most massive of PDFs.
-----
Embed an Index
-----
Using Acrobat Pro, you can create a full-text index of the contents of a single PDF, similar to how Google indexes all the text in the pages of a web site, and (new to v8) embed it into the PDF. Then when you Find or Search, Acrobat or Reader searches the *index,* not the PDF. Since the index file is much smaller, operations are lightning-quick. And, since the index knows which page numbers its words appear on, the end result is the same.
We've been able to create indexes in Acrobat Pro for many versions now, always using the Catalog command. PDF content providers typically index a folder full of PDFs so that a single Search (Command/Control-Shift-F) can hunt down the search text in a whole collection of PDFs. And I suppose you could use Catalog to create an index of a single PDF too, though I never bothered.
All that is still possible in Acrobat Pro 8, and the old ways of associating an index with a particular PDF still work.
But as I mentioned, Acrobat Pro 8 added a new twist: Indexes are embeddable in a PDF. Once they're embedded, you no longer have to keep track of the separate .pdx and .idx files generated for each PDF's index, making sure they always travel with the file. End users don't have to figure out how to tell Reader to use the index during Finds and Searches, since Reader 8 and Acrobat 8 automatically use it if it's embedded. (Earlier versions of Reader and Acrobat ignore the embedded index.)
Cool, huh? Best of all, it's dead-simple to do.
1. Open the PDF in Acrobat Pro 8 and choose Advanced > Document Processing > Manage Embedded Index.
2. The resulting dialog box will tell you that the "the document does not contain an embedded index." Ignore that and click the Embed Index button.
3. An alert pops up, saying that Acrobat is about to 1) Save and close the document; 2) Build a search index for it; 3) Embed the index; and 4) Reopen the document. Click the OK button if you want to proceed ... yes indeedy, you do, so click!
The PDF closes, and after a few seconds of watching a progress bar create the index, it opens right back up again.
-----
Before and After
-----
For my guinea pig test file, I downloaded the InDesign CS3 "full documentation" PDF from Adobe's web site:
http://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/indesign_incopy/
This puppy tips the scales at 46.35 MB and 762 pages. Whoa, mama!
Before I indexed it, I ran a search (Edit > Search) for the term "blend" and timed it. On my late-model Compaq, Acrobat Pro 8 took 24 seconds to display the 153 matches in its Results window.
After embedding the index (which added 2.8 MB to the filesize), and purging the Search cache (see below) to keep things fair; I ran the same search. This time, Acrobat took about, oh, a nanosecond to display the same 153 matches. I had the same blink-of-an-eye results in Reader 8, on both platforms.
You can bet that from now on, I'll be routinely embedding indexes in all of the larger PDFs on my hard drive, especially all those software documentation ones I keep needing to find things in.
If you post large PDFs for your customers to download, like catalogues or periodicals, you might want to do the same.
-----
About that Search Cache
-----
Both Acrobat and Reader already do something similar when you're repeatedly hunting for terms in the same PDF. They cache the text and save it in a file so that subsequent Finds and Searches are fast. You can adjust the size of the cache, or purge it, in Preferences > Search.
But embedding an index in a PDF ensures that Finds and Searches are always fast in Reader 8 or Acrobat 8, regardless of the state of the user's cache, even if it's the first time they need to find something quickly.
|| top ||
==========================
See Me, Hear Me
==========================
Back in November, Adobe asked me if I'd be interested in recording a bunch of video tutorials on InDesign CS3. Well, not Adobe itself; but a nice woman who *worked* for Adobe asked me.
She explained that the videos would be included in a free "CS3 Video Tutorials" DVD that'd ship with every CS3 product package. Flattered and petrified at the same time (hmmm this meant I had to actually *learn* the beta instead of playing with it), of course I said yes. I had to fly down to a recording studio in early December for the recording sessions, but that was no problem since I'm from Chicago and the studio was in southern California. Did I mention it was December.
Fast forward to April 16th when Adobe started shipping CS3. I wondered how many users would bother fishing out the DVD from the box to see the videos -- I know I hardly ever do that. But I just learned last week that not only am I "inbox" as they say; I'm also online. Adobe has posted all the 40+ presenters' video tutorials covering almost every CS3 product on their web site, and anyone can view them.
CS3 Video Workshop
http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/video_workshop/
Look for my fifteen or so videos in the InDesign section! They run the gamut from the most basic ("How to Make a Selection") to advanced new features ("Working with Variables"). My partner in crime at InDesignSecrets.com, David Blatner, also has some excellent InDesign video tutorials there.
-----
Upcoming Conferences
-----
Next week I'm doing a session on Adobe Bridge CS2/CS3 for Designers at the Vector and Pixel Conferences here in Chicago, during the one day they overlap (Wed., May 2):
http://vectorconference.com
http://pixelconference.com
And in early June -- June 4 through 8 -- I'll be in New York City doing a bunch of sessions at the 2007 InDesign Conference. Check the schedule to see what I'm presenting:
http://idconference.com
Haven't registered yet? Enter the coupon code [provided to DG subscribers only] for $100 off the registration fee for any of these three conferences.
I'd love to see you there ... be sure and introduce yourself as a DesignGeek reader if you get a chance!
|| top ||
*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^**^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*
MASTER THE LATEST DESIGN APPS WITH HERGEEKNESS!
Do you like what you read in DesignGeek? Find anything useful? Bring me or any of my hand-picked Associate Geeks in for a session or two of hands-on training for your workgroup; here in Chicago or any other city near an airport, and you can have this level of expertise all to yourself. All training comes with three years of 24/7 follow-up support for each student by phone or e-mail.
To learn more, or hear what other clients have to say, contact us or fill out the no-obligation "Request a Training Quote' form on Seneca's site:
http://www.senecadesign.com/training/request.html
Recent training clients in Chicago and throughout the U.S. and Canada include the MacArthur Foundation (InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator); Advanstar Media (InDesign, InCopy); Marquette University (InCopy); Perfection Learning Corp. (InCopy); St. Mary's Press (InCopy, Bridge); Questex Media Group (InDesign, Bridge, Acrobat); Tyndale House Publishers (InCopy); University of Iowa (Illustrator); and World Book Publishing (Dreamweaver).
*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^**^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*
|| top ||
--------------------------------
DesignGeek is a free monthly publication written by Anne-Marie "HerGeekness" Concepcion, a cross-media designer and authorized Adobe and Quark training provider. She owns Seneca Design & Training, Inc. in Chicago, Illinois (http://www.senecadesign.com/).
To subscribe to DesignGeek or read archived issues, go to its home on Seneca's site:
http://www.senecadesign.com/designgeek/
To unsubscribe, follow the link at the bottom of this page.
Contact Seneca by phone at 312-946-1100 or e-mail at info@senecadesign.com
Copyright 2007 by Seneca Design & Training, Inc.
Please forward without cutting. Please contact Seneca for reprint permissions. We don't guarantee accuracy of articles. Company or product names mentioned in DesignGeek may be registered trademarks, we use the names in an editorial fashion with no intention of infringement.
--------------------------------
If you had received this by e-mail instead of reading it on my web site, your unsubscribe link would appear right here.
|
