You can control the opacity of each individual color of a gradient inside of Adobe Illustrator. This is fantastic for flexibility with colors. Simply click on the color swatch of the gradient, and there is an opacity setting on the gradient panel. You can also double click on the swatch to bring up a new dialog box, where the opacity is available there as well. You can do this for every single color in a gradient, no matter how many colors are there.

You can easily control the opacity of colors in Illustrator. You can Control the opacity of the stroke and the fill individually by using the appearance panel. Directly under each stroke and fill layer in the appearance panel, there is an opacity section, where you can set the opacity for one element, and you could leave it alone, or make it less or more for another. This means that you could have a 100% black stroke, with a 50% fill.

In Indesign, in the top menu bar, you can change the corner style from the traditional squared corners, to round, inset, etc. The problem is, if you want one or all of the corners to be different, there isn’t a way to do it from here.

If you go to Object > Corner Options, a dialog box comes up where you can edit the corner styles. By default, it is set to change all 4 corners at once, and to the same style. Simply uncheck the chain link in the center, and now you can change each corner shape individually. For example, you could have 3 squared corners and one round, or if you wanted a tab-style box, you could make 2 corners round and the other two square. The other neat thing about this menu is that you can change … Read More »

You can set up a good grid from the start of a new document in Indesign. When the New Document pops up, you can set the number of columns in your document. I tend to use either 3 or 5 columns. You can use as many as you want. I tend to try to keep it simple and to the point. This is a great base for setting up your document to be clean and well organized.

You can have an image take up 2 columns, while you could have 2 columns of text under it. Then, the other 3 columns could have objects aligned to them, or to fit those constraints. The grid will help you to align your different elements and keep the document clean and structured. The example shown uses the default margins, … Read More »