Long Hours of Design

Hazel, by NoodleSoft, is a great tool for organizing and automatically  sorting files — and a great solution for sometimes forgetful employees.

At my office, we regularly purchase stock from both photos.com and istockphoto.com.

We’ve got one log-in which everyone uses, and individuals are free to download stock as they need. Of course, theses downloads land on someone’s local hard drive.

The problem with this convenience is a problem of organization.

We have a central image folder on one of our servers, and — theoretically — all the stock we download is supposed to get copied there.

Of course, this doesn’t happen.

I myself am quite guilty of this sin — and there’s plenty of stock on my local hard drive that never found it’s way to our server.

Enter Hazel, by NoodleSoft. Hazel is like OS X folder actions on steroids — except easier to deploy and without the AppleScipting.

Sorting downloaded images with Hazel

Sorting downloaded images with Hazel

Here, I’ve created  a rule that sorts images downloaded from Photos.com (based on it’s origin URL). The rule sorts the image into a “Stock” folder I have, and then copies it into the main image library (it won’t copy it it it’s a duplicate.)

Hazel Sort Options

Hazel Sort Options

With everyone in the department running these rules, all stock we download will always wind up in the central library — no effort involved.

It’s a hard-won lesson that you should never, ever, under any circumstances, ever, append “Final” to a file name.

It is an intrinsic law of the universe that the instant you put “Final” on one of your files, there WILL be a change.

After making a change, you’ll end up with “Final v2” — and that’s just all sorts of wrong.

It’s better practice to just keep version numbers, and append “PRESS” or “PRINT” or something similar.

That way, when you have changes (and you know you will), you can have “v5 PRESS” and then “v6 PRESS” and so on.

This is useful metadata and just indicates that the file is “ready to go.”

It’ll save you the cost of an aspirin.

Sort of like asking “For an Army, why is a tank better than a stick?” — but an interesting thread on Adobe.com about reasons to upgrade.

Hm, what’s wrong with this picture (from istockphoto.com)? Hint: how many times has this sucker been downloaded?

Isn’t it Ironic?

Isn't it Ironic?

In addition to experiencing it myself, I’ve seen numerous reports on the web of people having trouble pasting text from Word 2008 (Mac) to various Adobe applicaitons.

When copying text from Word, the resulting paste in, say, InDesign is a graphic, not text. ^{[ 1 ]}

While I can’t vouch for every Adobe application, the general rule seems to be:

You have to paste the text at an insertion point; ie, you have to have a blinking cursor in order to paste as text.

So, in InDesign, you would either have to drag out a new text frame, make sure you’ve got an insertion point, and then paste. Or, ensure you’ve got an insertion point blinking in an existing text frame, and then paste.

That should solve it.

Now and again, in every designers life, a little PDF form must fall.

At some point, we’ve probably all tackled creating a PDF form.

And, much like Hurcules must have done after being assigned his twelve labours, we uttered a lament of utter despair — “Oooohhhh, man! Do I have to?” ^{[ 1 ]}

That said, here’s a simple tip relating to calculations in forms and zero sums.

Zero Sums

Lets say you want someone to click several options (“Item 1”, “Item 2”, “Item 3”) and you set Acrobat to automatically sum the total.

Acrobat will display “0” in the results field when nothing is clicked. Sometimes, you just don’t want the “0” to display.

To hide this “0” until you’ve got an actual value:

1. Enter your “Calculate” properties as you normally would
2. Enter this javascript into the “Run Custom Validation Script” field, under the “Validate” portion of the properties box.

if (event.value == 0) event.value = ""; 

Violá! The zero is hidden.

One of the tremendous things about working as a Creative is—well, the creativity.

Over my years working as a graphic designer, I’ve had the opportunity to work on projects for all kinds of clients—from political direct mail, to non-profits, to very large corporations. Variety is the “spice of life” and so it is for a designer.

And I’ve also gained the ability to be completely flexible, showing my muscle in InDesign one moment, and jumping into CSS the next.

While most of my formal training comes from the school of hard knocks, time and again I’ve proven myself as a competent, creative, hard working, and ever patient designer.

I consistently receive rave reviews from peers, managers, and clients; and I constantly work to improve and learn, and to satisfy an unquenchable thirst to be the best designer I can be.

Never a round peg in square whole, I lend myself to malleability and will never back down from tackling projects I’ve never tackled before.

All this is creativity in it’s purest form—molding yourself and your projects to make something out of nothing.

You know you’ve had waaaay too much time working when you start seeing faces in abstract paper paterns.

I’m going to the gym.

Phenomenal, gigantic projects! Itty bitty versioning system. ^{[ 1 ]}

Of course, when we think of a version control system (usually intended for source code), we think of Subversion, CVS, Adobe Version Cue, and their ilk, and generally regard such systems as multi-user entities.

However, even the solo-designer needs some kind of versioning system — even as simple as a “Version 1”, “Version 2” etc naming convention. Many design groups I’ve worked with use such a convention.

This system works fine for the solo designer and the normal design group for a few reasons:

1. The learning curve for other systems (Version Cue, etc.) is relatively high and can be a lot of time to invest.
2. While there might be multiple people working on similar projects (in a print arena), generally there is only one person working on a single file at a time.
3. Source code versioning tools such as “diff and merge” are useless for print design projects; thus, any extra overhead involved in CVS, etc is unnecessary.

So, if we are going to use some kind of simple versioning system, it should at least be A. consistent — versions are updated the same throughout the system. And should be B. relatively easy to implement and use.

I decided to solve this problem with a simple AppleScript ^{[ 2 ]}

Open this script in Script Editor

or

Download this Script

Select a file (or files) in the Finder and then run this script. This script duplicates that file(s) and adds “v2”  to the new file. Run the script on that file, and it duplicates and names “v3”. It also asks you for version comments, which are added to the file.

Easy and consistent.

Et violå! An “itty-bitty” versioning system.

GREP: Add Periods to End of Paragraph

GREP: Add Periods to End of Paragraph

Find What: ((?<!.)(w|[!?)])(?!.)$)|((?<!.)( )$)

Change to: $1.

What: This GREP query finds paragraphs which don’t end in a period. The “Change to” adds a period at the end of the paragraph.

Why: Often, I get text from a Word document with missing periods. It’s rare that these occur MID paragraphs; they are often left off before line breaks.

Or, fragments (like bullet points or cell contents) get turned into full sentances, and periods need to be added.

I wouldn’t recommend running this query as a “change all” on your whole document, but run it one to the next.

Doing this by hand isn’t always all that tedious, but using the “Find / Change” panel, especially for discontinuous paragraphs, is substantially faster.

How:

1. “Negative Look-behind” — “This text only when is is NOT preceded by…”

1A. A period. ^{[ 1 ]}’

Sometimes you have a whitespace character after a period. So we ignore those.

2. Any word character

2A. - or -

2B. Either ! or ? or )

The paragraph is either going to end with a letter (a “word character”) an exclamation mark, a question mark, or a close parens. So we’re searching for one of those.

3A. “Negative Look-Ahead” — “ONLY if this is NOT followed by…”

3B. A period

We don’t want to find characters followed by a period — those don’t need to be fixed. So we find ones without.

4. Search for this at the END of a paragraph

OR ( | )

5. “Negative Look-behind” — “This text only when is is NOT preceded by…”

5A. A period.

Sometimes we find the end of a paragaph, with a hanging whitespace and no period. So, we want to search for this. It’s easier to look for it as an “or” statement. In addiiton, when we place a period in, we don’t want to keep that extra space. Doing it this way allows us to do that.

6. A space

7. Search for this at the END of a paragraph