Based in Cornelius, NC, The Moore Creative Company opened its doors in August of 1997 as a graphic design shop owned by Ran Moore and his wife, Jennifer. When the company was born, it was 100-percent devoted to graphic design for print intentions — an eclectic mix of jobs, from brochures and letterhead, to billboards and vehicle graphics. The company primarily targeted the local commercial and residential real-estate industries.

As the years unfurled behind it, the company evolved and grew beyond the geographical boundaries of North Carolina and its initially narrow Clientele focus. Today, The Moore Creative Company employs a staff of three designers, four developers, and a search engine marketer. Its clients represent a diverse roster of companies that vary in size, as well as industry. And what was once a print-centric workflow now is unevenly split, with 20 percent representing print output, and the 80-percent balance devoted to electronic and online media.

"We transitioned to more Web-site design and interactive Flash [and] animation work online, and later, to more e-mail marketing design," Ryan Moore recalls "We probably hit the 50-50 split between print and online around 2001 or so, and now we do more jobs that start with electronic items, and that we're suggesting print items to support or complement them — versus the other way around."

It was a few years ago when The Moore Creative Company underwent a transition of another kind; it switched layout platforms, from QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign. Moore says the revamp of the workflow went quite smoothly, overall, and the design team appreciated the synergies between Adobe InDesign and the rest of the Adobe Creative Suite — Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. — they'd already been using.

The only "glitch" in the workflow was so minor it may not even be properly categorized as a "glitch," and that was how to handle legacy content that needed to be reused or creative content submitted by clients that came in the form of native-application QuarkXPress files. Moore began a quest for a tool that would allow his creative team to reincarnate QuarkXPress files in Adobe InDesign, without having to essentially rebuild the layout, element by element.

Nothing ticks me off like receiving an InDesign document where the fonts have been outlined. What a waste. There's really no reason to do it. Not only does it kill the quality of the text, often times making it appear bolder than the original font actually is, but you loose many features such as underlines, strikethroughs and more.

Just embed the fonts in your PDF file. If your printer tells you that they need them outlined, tell them to bugger-off and start your search for a new printer - because the one you have sucks!

If you simply must "outline" your fonts, you can "flatten" them instead and get much better results. David Blatner over at InDesignSecrets shows you how to convert text to outlines the right way.

For most all users of Adobe InDesign CS3 since updating to OSX Leopard, using the "Hide" feature, either via the InDesign menu item, Command + H, or Option + clicking on the desktop or other application window, results in the inability to get InDesign back as the foreground application. This leaves you with no other alternative but to force quit InDesign. Thankfully there is a fix available that works on every Mac I've tried it on.

1. Go into your User/Library/Caches/Adobe InDesign folder and move the contents to your desktop. For most, this will be a single folder called "Version 5.0" which contains several files.
2. Relaunch InDesign and the Hide option should work.
3. Once you've tested the Hide option via one of the methods above, and are satisfied that all is working normal with InDesign, delete the original "Version 5.0" folder from your desktop.

None of your InDesign preferences should have changed, so you should be good to go at this point.

If you work for a large publication, or even a large design firm, you may be familiar with Adobe InCopy as part of your InDesign workflow. If that is the case, you've probably noticed the lack of coverage in the mainstream blogs & sites around the Web.

Thankfully, the publishers of InDesignSecrets have launched a new site called InCopySecrets and it's loaded with tips, tricks, tutorials and more for users of Adobe InCopy. There's also a few general InDesign tips tossed in there, so it's worth checking out even if you don't use InCopy.

Every InDesign power user knows the best way to be really efficient in this program is to use keyboard shortcuts. But finding and changing shortcuts can be frustrating. No longer!

The Keyboard Shortcuts plug-in was designed by David Blatner and DTP Tools to help you find and assign shortcuts quickly and easily. It is free of charge and works with InDesign and InCopy CS3. Note that both Mac OS and Windows versions are available.

Tired of setting your text wrap with each new object you create in Adobe InDesign? Much like setting colors or character styles globally, you can also set InDesign to always use your preferred text wrap method with new documents.

To do so, close all your InDesign documents and open the text wrap panel. Set your preferred text wrap method by clicking on one of the wrap icons. Now, whenever you create a new document, the default text wrap you chose will be used for all objects.

To restate the obvious, the new settings will only take effect in NEW InDesign documents.

Tim Cole's InDesign BackChannel has a great explanation of Adobe InDesign's overlooked and underused Align First Line Only to Grid feature.

While aligning text to document grids sounds techy, overrated and downright boring, trust me when I tell you that this feature can save you a lot of time when you're designing books, training manuals and magazines. I love tips like this, but they do take a while to burn them into your memory for frequent use in your day-to-day work.

In response to a reader question, David Blatner over at InDesign Secrets has offered some helpful tips and explanations regarding InDesign and getting accurate color proofs.

On of my favorite tips from the article is to completely turn off Color Management in the print driver for your particular printer. Once you've done all the color management in Photoshop and InDesign, a printer driver can mess it all up. Turn that sucker off and you'll save yourself a lot of time and headache.

You’re working on a layout… you have some text and graphics, but you want someone else to work on them to save time. Now with LayoutZone, you can select those objects, choose Edit > Layout Zone > Objects to InDesign Document to convert them into an INDD file which replaces the original objects. At this point, you can give the new InDesign (.indd) file to another designer to work on while you continue to work in the original file.

When they’re done, you can just click Update in the Links panel (to update the InDesign document). Or you can choose Edit > Layout Zone > Linked InDesign Page to Objects, to convert that person’s design back into editable pieces in InDesign.

This is so much easier than InDesign's built-in capability to "place" another InDesign file, because you can actually turn the placed file back into editable objects again.

Read through the linked article, the download link is near the bottom.

PageControl 2.0 has been released for Adobe InDesign CS, CS 2 and CS3. The plug-in lets you create different page sizes and both vertical and horizontal spreads inside one InDesign document. One page could be Letter and another page could be Tabloid, and next one could be the size of a business card. Inserts, foldout and even spines can now be part of the same document file.

I love this plugin!

"I have an issue with drop shadows and spot colors in Adobe InDesign. When I use a drop shadow in front of a spot color background it looks fine in InDesign, and prints properly as spot color separations. But a white box shows up around the image in Acrobat when I make a PDF to show the client. Is there a way around this problem?"

An excellent question, and one that comes up a lot for designers working with spot color. There are several ways to make sure your spot color jobs preview properly in Adobe Acrobat.

My friends over at CreativeTechs have the scoop on avoiding the white box around shadows in Adobe InDesign.

InDesign offers a number of ways to wrap text around objects. You can wrap around an entire object container, around the edges of your placed object, or even select an alpha channel (transparency) of a placed Photoshop file. It's quite handy not having to draw another shape and fill it with "none" just to wrap text.

However, Anne-Marie Concepcion at InDesign Secrets points out something you must watch-out for when using the transparency of a placed object to wrap your text, and how to quickly fix it, in this article titled Making dynamic text wraper permanent.

When you have a lot of text selected which you have kerned and/or tracked out and you simply want to reset all of it to zero, you can either go to the tracking and kerning input boxes in the Control Bar and do it manually, or you can do it the easy way.

With all your text selected, simply hit Command (Apple) + Option + Q. All your kerning will return to normal. Don't you just love keyboard shortcuts! This works in Adobe CS2 and CS3.

Many InDesign users know you can set the default colors displayed in the Color panel by setting them without a document open. I've recently realized that you can do the same thing with Character Styles.

Open InDesign, but don't open a document (that part is important). Now go to your Character or Paragraph Styles panel and set all your preferred styles like font choice, point size, kerning settings, indents & spacing and a keyboard shortcut. Now just hit OK to commit the settings to InDesign's memory. From now on, whenever you start up InDesign and/or create a new document, those Character styles will already be set up and available.

By accident I just found out that InDesign has a feature called Snippets which allows you to drag virtually anything, like a group of objects, off the page and onto the desktop and it gets saved as a .inds file (a Snippet). This file can then be dragged back into, or placed via the Command + D shortcut, any other InDesign document as though it were an image or text file with all the formatting in place (text is still editable). Pretty cool!