Missed a story or two of Gurus Unleashed’s 24/7 coverage? Catch up with these important events and stories that happened in the world of InDesign.

News

The Printing Industries of America Announced the 11th Annual Color Management Conference, which will be held at the Hilton Tapatio Cliffs Resort in Phoenix, Arizona December 6-8, 2009.

The Obama Time Capsule, Produced with InDesign CS4 Server

The Obama Time Capsule project is a personalized, illustratoed coffee table book that will be produced as a print-on-demand publication using Adobe InDesign Server CS4. Order and personalize your copy of the OBAMA TIME CAPSULE: World History in the Making with your name and your photos.

New books this month include Deke McClelland’s InDesign CS4 One-on-One (Deke Press, 2009; review here, purchase here) and Michael Murphy’s Adobe InDesign CS4 Styles: How to Create Better, Faster Text and Layouts (Adobe Press, 2009).

Sandee Cohen's new book From Design Into Print

Not to be outdone by relative newcomers Deke and Michael, Sandee Cohen debuted a new blog, podcast, and book all at the same time! All three are entitled From Design Into Print, and are phenominal resources resulting from the Sandee’s two plus decades in print design and production. Visit From Design Into Print, the Website and podcast, and pick up a copy of the book, From Design Into Print: Preparing Graphics and Text for Professional Printing (Peachpit Press, 2009).

While my good friend Sandee was launching her site, yours truly launched another Website and project to inform, connect, and empower creative professionals: the Creatives Are Community and Toolbar (www.CreativesAre.com). The Creatives Are Community Toolbar is a browser toolbar add-on for Firefox / Flock / Camino and Internet Explorer / Maxthon–and later this month for Safari 4 as well. It was built to empower, inform, and connect creative professionals like you. The Toolbar puts–and keeps–the most important design-related information and resources at the fingertips of graphic designers, Web designers, illustrators, and other creative professionals. Read the complete list of features.

Speaking of Creatives Are Community, if you’re looking for the most up to date uber list of graphic, Web, logo, and other designers to follow on Twitter, don’t miss the constantly updated post, “Creatives on Twitter – the Uber Lists.”

You might also want to check out the list of graphics gurus on Twitter, published right here on Gurus Unleashed. The list includes Photoshop gurus Scott Kelby and Deke McClelland, Illustrator gurus Sandee “Vectorbabe” Cohen and Mordy Golding, InDesign gurus David Blatner and Chuck Green, and many, many more.

Following these graphic gurus via a Twitter app on your iPhone will ensure you’re never at a loss for great tips and tricks, but the iPhone is good for much more than just tweeting and retweeting. This month the Brushes app enabled an artist to draw the cover illustration for New Yorker magazine–on his iPhone! Jennifer Apple has the story at PhotoshopSupport.com.

As for freebies, the Flemish Innovation Center for Graphic Communication released 13 standard preflight profiles for InDesign (story here, download here), while Mike Witherell’s Tools and their Modifier Keys PDF cheat sheet debuted. Download free scripts to make perfect stars and other shapes from Olav Martin Kvern and David Blatner. Bob Bringhurst also posted a list of free online excerpts from InDesign books authored by InDesign gurus such as David Blatner, Pariah S. Burke, Sandee Cohen, Olav Martin Kvern, and others.

Also in the news this month: Macworld Magazine gave InCopy CS4 4 mice. Bob Levine asked Adobe to catch up to Quark by offering crossplatform licensing. The 2009 Creative Suite Developer Summit happened this month, with focus on InDesign Server and related technologies (view recordings from the summit). Anne-Marie Concepcion asked for your help in beta testing her new InCopy and InDesign plug-in, InVersion. Adobe released the InDesign 6.02 update to address numerous bugs. Anne-Marie Concepcion published the ebook InCopy CS4 Hands-On Guide. Over on Designorati, Jeremy Schultz took a look at the return on investment of using Creative Suite 4 in his piece: “Adobe CS4 and ROI: Is Productivity the New Killer Feature?” And, foldFactory lowered pricing on FOLDRite Template Master plug-in for InDesign. Visit the FoldFactory site or read about the plug-in at Claudia McCue’s site.

Tutorials

Just like March, GREP continues to be a hot how-to topic through April and May. If you’re just beginning with GREP, start out with this 1-hour video from Lynda.com, “10 Things to Know About GREP,” and then move on to use GREP to replace faux ordinals faked with superscript with real OpenType ordinals.

Building Page Transitions in InDesign

Creating PDFs from InDesign is another trending topic with a video by Gabriel Powell and another by Michael Murphy as well as an article from Steve Werner on using InDesign page transitions for PDF presentations.

“Working Smart with Object Styles,” a video tutorial from Neil Oliver.

Object Styles allow you to capture object specific attributes such as fill, stroke, corner options, paragraph styles (my fave), text frame options, baseline options, story options, text wrap, anchored objects and frame fitting options. You can also capture transparency attributes and effects.

Adobe has been busy this month updating the interactive online InDesign help document with topics on creating calendars and business cards from templates, determining story word count, editing hyperlinks imported from Word, page transitions for PDFs, Flash exporter issues, creating interactive SWF and XFL Flash documents, using arrowheads on rules, creating button hot spots and rollovers, and inserting straight quotation marks. Read this post by Bob Bringhurst, lead writer for InDesign and InCopy, for direct links to the new and updated subjects.

On the airwaves this month in InDesign videos and podcasts are: “Using Camera Raw with InDesign” by Dave Cross, “Working with Indents, Tabs, and Text Wrap” by Terry White, AJ Wood with a show on step repeat, Deke and Colleen McClelland reveal the mysteries of the clipping function in InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator in their Martini Hour podcast, and two YouTube vidoes explain how to move InDesign pages and use an InDesign library.

Also in tutorials this month:

• Unmerging table cells by Cari Jansen
• Vertical justification and end of story marker
• Working with a Mixed CS3 and CS4 Workflow in InCopy
• Copy or move pages between InDesign documents efficiently
• 3 Often Overlooked Features in InCopy
• InDesign Eye Candy, parts 1, “In Gravity’s Shadow,” 2, “Shine On,” and 3, “Punch-Outs, Stickers, and Rips” by Mike Rankin.
• Make a font “Contact Sheet” in InDesign by David Blatner
• “Power Zoom and Rotate Spread View” at InDesignSecrets.com
• “5 InDesign Typing Rules“
• David Blatner explains a technique to split text color from black to white in the middle of a frame
• Jump Stories Between InDesign Files
• Use corner effects
• Keeping parargraph rules within text frames
• creating custom underlines
• working with snippets
• Using Macbook multitouch with InDesign
• Jump to a master page
• Indent to Here
• Duplicate pages
• Use the Hand Tool within a Text Frame

Troubleshooting

This month brought not only new InDesign bugs and quirky behaviors, but new methods for dealing with them. Bob Levine found out that “PDFs Placed into CS4 Documents May Drop Characters When Exported to PDF. Meanwhile Bob Bringhurst offered advice for Fixing incorrect last name sorts in index. Strange InDesign pauses plague some users, while InCopy popped up a strange “Editing and Out of Date” status, and several users discovered that all of Creative Suite 4 suddenly unlicensed itself. Anne-Marie Concepcion offered help to fix link to missing stories in InCopy and InDesign, while David Blatner answered a reader with a guide to the alerts and question marks on various panels, and Michael Murphy chanced upon a new style mapping presets bug.

Design Inspiration

Colorful Wallpapers

Stuck for ideas? Take a break and see what your fellows are up to. There are “30 Magnificient, Simply Stunning Futuristic City Matte Painting Artworks,” “22 Highly Creative, Ultra-Stylish Advert Designs for Apple iPhone,” “30 Absolutely Breathtaking, Beyond Awesome Digital Portrait Artworks,” “100 Obscure and Remarkable CD Covers,” “10 incredible wallpapers from Desktopography,” and “45 Stunningly Colorful Wallpapers.” Get inspired with PSD Vault’s 30 Mind-Blowing HDR Images collected from DeviatArt.com. Oh, and don’t forget self-promotion that is better than a business card.