Reflecting on my time at Ranch, placements really are an invaluable experience to any aspiring designer, you’ve got to start somewhere right? Luckily for me I started at an excellent studio in London, many thanks to Paul and Ben for taking me in I really appreciate it.

Here are a few of the technical time savers I picked up while on placement. I suppose a better word for them would be shortcuts. Most of these are for indesign which I did the bulk of the design work in. Some may be obvious others not so, you be the judge.

Show hidden characters ( alt + cmd + I ) for those pesky tabs and paragraphs

Text frame options ( cmd + B ) you’ll be needing this

Inserting auto page numbering ( insert special character > auto page numbering ) easy peezy

Scale in proportion ( tab + cmd ) everyone should know this one

Aligning tabbed paragraphs ( cmd + \ ) useful

Tab menu ( shift + cmd + T ) just like in word

Paragraph rules ( alt + cmd + J ) serious time saver

Soft returns ( shift + return ) override paragraph rules

Override all master page options ( shift + alt + cmd + L ) you’ll thank me for this one

Copying images while keeping alignment ( shift + alt ) mind blowing, I know

Search and replace ( cmd + F )  finding those double spacings just became a whole lot easier

Paste in place ( shift + alt + cmd + V ) the most useful shortcut for indesign you will ever learn, luckily I was shown this one while I was an under grad.

Words of wisdom

When designing brochures “let fours rule your life” you always have spreads of at least four when printing front to back, it sounds obvious and that’s because it is.

When designing for print CMYK good RGB bad, this isn’t a quote just a fact.

Never scale an image much above 100% it will look real bad. Always ask clients to re-supply images if they have them, everyone knows this right?

Tiff formats are better for print than jpeg as they are less compressed. I was using jpegs for nearly everything.

I hope sharing some of the things I picked up at Ranch has been useful, if not you’ve read it you can’t un-read it.