No, this isn't the white space you learned about in design school. Rather, this episode takes an in-depth look at all eight (yes, eight!) different types of white spaces available within InDesign. What are they, where are they, and how do you use them? Find out in this latest episode...and also find out about the very first InDesigner contest, to celebrate the upcoming one-year anniversary of the show.

InDesign boasts a robust and powerful Find/Change feature that incorporates its even more powerful Paragraph and Character Style features, allowing you to limit searches to specifically-formatted text, apply styles as text is replaced, and much more. In this extra-long episode, I take an in-depth look at the power of Find/Change...starting with the basics, revealing the hidden extras, and building up to completely formating a three-page layout using only Find/Change operations.

The first InDesigner episode as an official member of the InDesignSecrets team, this installment is all about building photographic compositions on your InDesign page instead of relying on doing it in Photoshop like we've all become used to. Photoshop is great, but under the right circumstances, InDesign can be faster and more flexible. Using three examples, I showcase InDesign's ability to build layered, seamless compositions that rival the accepted Photoshop approach.

Picking up right where Part 1 left off, this episode concludes my InDesign Inventory of features put to work in the design of a 256-page magazine. In two more examples, I cover working with Master Pages and Document Pages simultaneously, and deconstruct how a timeline was created using hidden Tables, master Object Styles, and Anchored Objects.

When you complete 4 full-page ads, 19 charts and graphs, and 123 page layouts in 24 working days, you really see how InDesign's features make a big project much more manageable. Having just completed a 256-page magazine, I decided that this episode would take inventory of some of the ways that InDesign streamlined the process, allowing me to complete a huge volume of work without sacrificing creativity and quality.

Control and update dozens of styles by changing only one or two. This episode demonstrates my method for creating master paragraph and character styles that allow for layout-wide changes quickly and easily.

If you're using tracking to control the look of your type at the paragraph level -- like I will confess to doing in the past -- you're missing out on features that give you far greater control of your type and make for much better-looking paragraphs. This episode covers Justification, Hyphenation, Glyph Scaling, Optical Margin Alignment, and typographic color.

I usually stick to things that can be done automatically within InDesign, but every now and then, you can't avoid the fact that some things just haven't made it into the product yet. In this episode, I demonstrate two methods for getting a solid-to-transparent gradient into your layout. It should be a lot more simple than this (Adobe, are you listening?), but where there's a will...there's a workaround.

In response to a subscriber who was concerned about using Transparency without causing output problems, this episode provides guidelines for best practices in documents that contain transparent objects. From layers to flattening to exporting, I lay out my four simple rules for avoiding the pitfalls of outputting transparency.

Collect your custom characters into an easy-to-use set by using the Glyphs palette. Whether you need quick access to dingbats, accented characters, fractions or any other special glyphs, you can keep them available in a palette rather than scrolling through font menus and remembering obscure keystrokes.

When you actually read the InDesign User Guide cover-to-cover -- which I did to study for my recent Adobe certification exam -- you actually find a lot of things you didn't know InDesign could do. In this episode, I take a look at Automated Jump Lines -- a feature that was new to me and that I immediately started using at work every day. It's not one of InDesign's sexier features, but it's one of those smart and useful touches that are always such a treat to discover.

Add bells and whistles to your rows and columns in the conclusion of the three-part Tables series. Examples of real-world design projects that feature tables are used to demonstrate placing graphics and shapes into tables as Anchored Objects, how transparency is treated in tables, using tables in combination with other InDesign features, and nesting a table inside another table.

The second installment of the Tables series gets down to the smallest details. This "intermediate" episode covers the settings you can apply in the Table Options and Cell Options dialog boxes, how InDesign differentiates between Header, Footer and Body rows, how to automate Alternating Fills and Strokes, threading a table across multiple frames and pages, and just what the difference is between the "Exactly" and "At Least" options.

If you haven't already discovered InDesign's robust table-creation feature, you're going to be quite impressed by what it can do. If you're familiar with tables, but haven't used them that much, you're going to find that the level of design control you have over tables -- and the ways in which you can use them -- is FAR BEYOND what you might have expected. This episode is the first of a two-part series where we explore how good tables can improve your design and good design can improve your...

As designers, we have a lot of stuff we need to have at our disposal quickly. But finding a place for that stuff and knowing what stuff you need is a challenge. This episode covers a great place in InDesign for your stuff: Libraries. What are they? What are they for? How do you use them? Learn how having a place for your stuff can help you get more stuff done.

There's nothing wrong with your monitor. This is NOT a video episode. This week, there's more to talk about than to see as I discuss re-creating old layouts -- specifically QuarkXPress layouts -- in InDesign, and I talk you through my method for creating and using a "tracing" of your old file to help speed up the process.

Add depth and interest to an InDesign layout using the "cheap tricks" demonstrated in this episode, which uses a magazine feature to demonstrate what I called "Poor Man's Lighting Effects" in Episode 4. In the process of building this example, I put a lot of other features to use including dropshadows, transparency, layers, step-and-repeat, object styles, gradient swatches and more.

There are no simple questions when it comes to InDesign. I prove that in this week's episode in which answering a listener's simple question about how to align an object to the page leads me to demonstrate three possible ways to do it and introduces the concepts of math operations InDesign can perform for you, using the proxy image and reference points in the control palette, and even installing and running scripts.

At last, the thrilling conclusion of the Style Sheets Trilogy. The final installment on this topic demonstrates some additional flexibility you can build into your style sheets to account for the unexpected. Also, for good measure, you'll find out what a right-align tab is, and learn how to refer to it (and other special characters InDesign recognizes) in your nested style settings.

Picking up right where Part 1 left off, this second installment on Nested Style Sheets shows how you can build in additional instructions to your paragraph styles, allowing you to apply multiple style sheets to multiple paragraphs in a specific order with a single click.

At long last, the video podcast that was "a week away" (according to my optimistic first episode) is finally here. This first-ever video episode is the start of a two-part (maybe even three-part) tutorial covering what, to me, is the hands-down, deal-breaking, no-brainer, single most compelling reason to make the switch from QuarkXPress to InDesign -- Nested Style Sheets.

How does a person go about learning InDesign? What's the best way? What resources are available? Where do you you start? Do you take a class? Buy a book? Hire a training consultant? There are a number of different approaches, none of which is any more or less valid than any other. But certainly some of them are more or less expensive than others. This episode discusses different, inexpensive ways start building your InDesign knowledge.

One of the most long-awaited featues for a page layout program has been transparency support -- and InDesign's got it. But making the transparency you see on the screen translate to the printed page requires a process called Flattening. This episode discusses Transparency and Flattening in InDesign and the steps you should take to prevent unwanted flattening results from causing problems with the printing of your work.

It's a very unique time of year for me. I'm in the middle of massive annual project that I'm doing for the first time entirely in InDesign. It's always a battle to meet this deadline, so this episode of the podcast consists of war stories about how I've used InDesign to fight the most unrelenting enemy of all: a huge deadline.

Inspired by a question from a listener, this week's episode takes a detailed look at InDesign CS2's Data Merge function, which allows a level of automated, data-driven publishing and page creation options that can prove to be a powerful tool and a genuine time-saver. It's not perfect -- and I talk about that, too -- but it works and works well.