InDesign Shortcuts

Alright, we didn't really come up with this, but thanks to our resources on the world wide web, we are happy to share with you some InDesign shortcuts that may come in handy for you. So without much ado, here's everything you need to speed up your InDesign projects:


Courtesy of Business Stationery

The Anatomy of a Brochure: The Magic of Folds

For the 2011 How/Dieline Convention, Pixology Designs went a little further than the conventional tri-fold brochures that are easy to design and produce. We decided to create a new brochure standard using simple folds. Since we are a package design company, it made sense to create a brochure that resembled some of the packages that we design. But when it came to building a 3-D package/brochure, the subject of cost and effectiveness must first be addressed.

10 Great jQuery Plugins to Use in Forms

Basic forms are a part of internet life.  If you need to login, submit information, or write a comment, it is through a form.  Everybody has them.  So why keep them basic? Here are 10 jQuery Plugins to help your form look and function outside of the norm.

10 Exceptionally Designed Websites (in no particular order)

In the Internet of today, one can no longer make a website that only works well and expect visitors. It's all about design; typography, texture, layout, and innovation. A website cannot simply function, it has to function with pizzaz. So, without further ado Talk Pix presents: 10 Exceptionally Designed Websites (in no particular order).

The Annoying Dotted Line

Ever noticed the obnoxious perforated outlines that wrap around your links after you click them, especially on Firefox? Well, here's a way you can get rid of them by just adding an extra line on your CSS stylesheet. While there are many other ways of eliminating the annoying perforated lines, we prefer this simpler alternative. All you need to do is to add the line below in your stylesheet:

outline: none;

Here's how it will look like on your stylesheet:

.top_navigation a:link {

outline: none;

}

We hope this simple and short tip helps. Have fun coding!

How to Make a:hover Work

The a:hover is an extremely useful element to use when it comes to styling your navigational links without using any image or script. But setting a:hover usually means you will also need to set the rest of the a selectors as well.

Depending on your browser, after you set a text as a hyperlink, the browser's default hyperlink setting will immediately take over. This means, even if you were to set the text to orange, for example, once it is a hyperlink, it may change to blue with an underscore. You will need to style your a element (or hyperlink) in your CSS stylesheet to override the browser's default setting. Here's how to style the a element with different selectors:

1. a:link (this specifies your unvisited link)
2. a:visited (this specifies your hyperlink once visited)
3. a:hover (this specifies your hyperlink when you mouse over it)
4. a:active (this styles the link when clicked)

Using the a element and its selectors to style your hyperlinks is a wise way to build your navigational links. This minimizes loading time and permits the web crawler to crawl your page more efficiently. Remember, browsers do not read images; instead, they read image tags and texts. In other words, the more text you place the better. Of course, we must do everything in moderation and good taste. You don't want to bombard your page with too much text either.

Resetting CSS Files

What does resetting CSS really mean? Well, in a nutshell, it's basically to zero out all default formatting that comes with the browser. For example, most browsers automatically place a certain amount of line space before a paragraph under <p>, and as designers we can either let each browser determine for us the amount of space before <p>, or we can make it more consistent and set it ourselves. That way, we take control of how we want each tag to present itself on a page. We reset our CSS files before we start to code the style sheet.