InDesign Easter Eggs

Did everyone get their fill of Easter Eggs this past weekend? Well if not I’ve got a couple more for you designers to check out.

Special Indesign Lights stroke

A virtual easter egg, for those of you who don’t know, is an intentional hidden message, inside joke or feature in an object such as a movie, book, CD, DVD, computer program, web page or video game. They are usually in the form of messages, videos, graphics, sound effects, or an unusual change in program behavior that sometimes occur in a software program in response to some undocumented set of commands, mouse clicks, or keystrokes  as a joke or to display program credits.

So if you are a designer (or even if you’re not, but someone who still gets stuck with all the design responsibility), here’s a fun holiday easter egg element to add to your designs:

1. First choose “Stroke Styles” from the Stroke palette
2. Select “New”
3. Choose “Dash” as the line type
4. Name the stripe “Lights”  ( case sensitive so capitalize the “L”)
5. Hit “OK”

Ta-daa!! You now have Christmas  lights stroke (not to be confused with the Christmas lights stroke caused by untangling and decorating with your real Christmas lights). Perfect for decorating Christmas cards, envelopes, calendars or whatever your holiday filled heart desires.

Here’s a few more easter eggs for you play around with. Let us know if you find any of these useful or if you use any in a design. ( We could even print them for you!!)

You can try the same method as used above to create the lights but try naming them “Woof” “Happy” or “Feet”. You can also choose a stripe line-style and try naming it “Rainbow” or new to Indesign CS4, try naming it “Rasta” and give your border a little flare ‘mon!

And last but certainly not least, the most fun of all…. pinning the butterflies. Yes,  if you hit a creative roadblock and you need a little time to relax, but don’t have a field of butterflies in your backyard, you can go to the HELP dropdown menu and select “about InDesign”. When the Adobe Indesign logo and information appears, type “butterfly”, (no spaces, no return) and watch that info box magically turn into a field of butterflies right before your eyes. You can pin them to the wall with the left mouse button and knock them down with alt+left mouse button ( for you mac users CMD+ALT Click). But if you pin too many, a happy little alien comes by and cleans them all up. Yes, I’m serious, you can’t make this stuff up.

PS. Some other Indesign easter eggs which  may  have a little less appeal, but you may find a use for:

1. Would you like your CS4 palette titles to be proper rather than all caps, just like the older versions? Try adding a new folder named “noallcaps” into your Indesign directory. This is case sensitive of course.

2. Same as you did with the butterflies, click on “about InDesign” under the help menu. But this time hold ctrl when you click. This will display the Adobe InDesign Component Information.

With Adobe CS5 now less then a week away, maybe we’ll get some new easter eggs to play with.  We’ll let you know if we find any