Fantastic free tool for creating Illustrator patterns

Warning: This is so much fun you could waste hours or weeks playing with it!

Check out MadPattern, a set of free downloadable templates for Illustrator CS4/CS5 for "rapidly prototyping patterns". Watch the short video demo, download the templates, open one of the templates and follow the instructions on the pasteboard. Very easy and addicting!

See the MadPattern Gallery for some great examples of patterns created with the templates.

This Wikipedia entry explains the type of patterns that can be created with the MadPattern templates.

The emphasis in MadPattern is on exporting the finished patterns as bitmaps for Web use. But of course, the patterns being generated in Illustrator are vector, and with some ingenuity they could be used as elements in Illustrator vector projects.

Magazine publishing on the iPad

I've been heavily involved in the upcoming Adobe Digital Publishing Suite as a beta tester. I'm working directly with a couple of clients to help them repurpose their magazine content for iPad versions. One of the best ways to learn what is possible and what works well (and not so well) in this exciting new content channel is to look at lots and lots of examples of what others are doing.

The following is a compilation of the titles that I've found to be particularly interesting examples of iPad magazines and rich-content books. As you preview these be sure to view them in both landscape and portrait mode, as different content and layouts are often displayed depending on the rotation of the iPad.

These titles were all created with prerelease versions of the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite:

Wander Magazine: German hiking magazine, free
Credit Suisse Bulletin: Customer magazine from Credit Suisse, free
Wired Magazine: from Conde Nast Digital, $3.99/issue
Sabado Bicentenario: Chilean Saturday Magazine, free
Future Magazine: Customer magazine from Semcon, free
The New Yorker Magazine: from Conde Nast Digital, $4.99/issue
InDesign Magazine: A sampler issue of InDesign Magazine, free
DI Magazine: A PS & LR mag., Issue 1 free, subsequent issues $5.99
The World Without Photoshop: an interactive Photoshop book, free
Early Jamestown: an interactive textbook example, free
JFK - 50 Days: An interactive companion to the book of the same name, $6.99
You can find a list of more publications created with the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite here.

These titles were created with WoodWing's Digital Magazine Tools:

Time Magazine: from Time Inc., $4.99/issue
Sports Illustrated: from Time Inc., $4.99/issue
Project: from Virgin Digital Publishing, $2.99/issue
The Sunday Times: iPad version of the UK Sunday Times, free preview issue
You can find a list of more publications created with the WoodWing solution here.

These titles were created with other tools and systems:

Marines Magazine: The official US Marine Corps magazine, free
Audi Magazine: free
Design & Architecture: free
The Atlantic: created with RareWire, $4.99/issue
Design New England, created with Texterity, free
National Geographic Magazine, created with Zinio

ePub best practices: Capitalization

The ePub format has a number of formatting restrictions. When designing documents that may one day be repurposed for ePub output, it's in your best interest to follow some InDesign page layout "best practices".

One such "best practice" is in how capitalization is handled. It's not uncommon for manuscripts to be supplied with all kinds of goofy capitalization of head, subheads and body text. For example, an author may type a heading in a manuscript in any of these forms:

1. The Boy Who Died From Eating All His Vegetables

2. The boy who died from eating all his vegetables

3. THE BOY WHO DIED FROM EATING ALL HIS VEGETABLES

4. THE BOY who died from EATiig aLL HiS veGeTables

This is often "fixed" in the InDesign layout by using the All Caps attribute [command-shift-k (Mac) or ctrl-shift-k (Windows)]. This will cause all the selected text to appear in all caps, but in reality, the underlying text is still the original capitalization, as it was originally typed.

BEST PRACTICE: If text is typed in a goofy combination of mixed upper and lower case, don't just fix it with the All Caps attribute. Instead, use the Type > Change Case command to make the text appear in Title Case or Sentence case, as you want it to appear in the ePub output, and then use the All Caps attribute if you want it to appear in all caps in your print document.

Remember, if you have a lot of capitalization fixing to do, you can add a keyboard shortcut (Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts) to any of the Change Case commands to make them easier to access quickly.

Possible fix for the InDesign CS4 Package problem?

Since InDesign CS4 was release, various users have complained about the File > Package command failing to collect all the linked images properly. It appears that the problem, for many people, is related to using colons or slashes in filenames, which makes the Package command choke. See this post on the Adobe Forums for one discussion about this. Upgrading to 6.0.4 seems to fix the issue for some people, but for others the problem persists. I haven't personally experienced this, thank goodness. However, a client asked me about this yesterday, and I suggested using the Utilities > Copy Links To command found in the Links panel menu as an alternative method to gather all the linked files. I told her that perhaps this would work where the Package command fails.

I just received an email back saying:

Thank you, that solution worked! It is a little mysterious, because I can't tell that it's actually gathering anything but it works in the end very well. All the images were collected and accounted for. Thank you for the help!

So it appears that at least in this case, the Copy Links To command worked where the Package command failed. At any rate, the Copy Links To command is good to know about. It is sometimes a quicker, more direct way to gather up all your linked images into one spot that using the Package command.

Drag and drop is OK!

Did you know that you can drag and drop content (images, logos, text files, Word documents) from Adobe Bridge, the Macintosh Finder or Windows Explorer into Adobe InDesign or Illustrator? You can even drag and drop multiple files at once onto your pages this way.

What prompted this blog post is that I keep getting asked: "I know I can drag and drop content into InDesign, but I don't trust it...where does it put my files?"

It's perfectly OK to bring content into InDesign and Illustrator this way. If you look closely at the Links panel in InDesign, you'll see that a link to the graphics that have been dragged and dropped has been created, exactly as if you had done File > Place. There is absolutely no difference in the end result between File > Place and the drag and drop method.

In the case of Illustrator, dragging and dropping a graphic will result in a linked graphic, and adding the shift key during drag and drop will result in an embedded graphic.