As a designer, you know that when you get all the necessary elements onto your page, you can make something great, but getting those elements on that page was a pretty inflexible process back in the Quark XPress days. The fifth episode of the podcast runs down the many options for getting text, tables, images and more onto the page quickly, easily, cleanly and with the flexibility you always wanted.

In the second installment of "Get Out of Photoshop Free", I cover the good, bad and ugly about drop shadows -- how easy they are to create and how to make yours more effective -- within InDesign. Also, how to avoid creating clipping paths whenever possible by taking advantage of transparency and text wrap options, and I reveal my own technique for creating what I call "poor man's lighting effects" within InDesign.

I love Photoshop as much as anyone, but I don't love jumping back and forth between my page layout application and my image editing application. In this first installment of a two-part podcast, I discuss how to avoid going back to Photoshop as much as possible by taking advantage of transparency, feathering and Object Layer Options within InDesign.

Since it's a four-day Thanksgiving weekend, I thought I would spend some time covering four things in InDesign that I'm thankful for. In this podcast, I cover (1) text formatting without having any text selected, (2) InDesign does math, (3) better bolds and italics, and (4) keyboard navigation through dialog boxes. They're not too sexy, but they save a lot of time and I use them just about every day.

This audio-only podcast outlines what the goal of this whole endeavor is; a little bit about my background, mostly related to working with InDesign; a few (justifiable) jabs at QuarkXPress; and a quick tip about how taking advantage of Presets in InDesign can save you lots of time.