I know that lots of use work with Graphic Designers. We can’t all be design experts. Or you may have inherited InDesign documents from a previous staff member, etc.

And lets just say that the way the did things doesn’t quite mess with your style. One of those migh, just might, be the use of guides. I’ve opened up some documents where the author had gone whole hog with the guides. I mean they were everywhere! I could hardly see the content on the page through the forest of guides.

Now if this has ever happened to you, let me share a little trick that the folks over at GraphicMac posted to their blog. A way to delete all the guides at once, without having to select them individually. If you use the keyboard shortcut Command + Option + G then Delete if on a Mac or Control + Alt + G then Delete if on Windows. This selects all the guides on the page and deletes them.

Pretty slick! Besure to check out their post as it also gives you the keyboard shortcut to unlock the guides if they’re locked.

Well this week seems to be my week for follow-up posts. Recently I commented on working with a graphic designer and who owns what. Well today I came across a post that dealt with the same issue but from a web site perspective. It apply to print too and the author makes some fantastic points.

You can check it out at http://blog.pixelita.com/23/who-owns-your-web-site/

A while back I posted a link to Adobe’s website that listed hidden characters that InDesign can show you for spaces, tabs, etc. Well the folks over at InDesign Secrets went one step further (and better). They created a great PDF of these characters. What makes it better is it’s LARGE, so you can actually see the characters easily. And it shows them in context.

Check it out!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the layoffs happening all over the world, brought about by a combination of the economic crisis and the ensuing environment of fear. I don’t have a great list, but a quick web search tells me that:

• Bank of America announced plans to cut up to 35,000
• WaMu: Most!
• Dell: 8.800
• Citigroup: 50,000

The list goes on and on. But nowhere am I seeing the rest of the story. For instance – what services are being cut to accommodate these layoffs? If there aren’t any service cuts, then I’m left with the impression:

• These agencies were obese – fat with people performing work that wasn’t needed
• These agencies are going to provide fewer services
• If these agencies don’t trim services – their product offering/customer service will drop

Maybe I’m wrong about all of these things. I’m keenly aware of step costs – you know – I can fit 10 people at the dinner table and feed them with a single turkey – but when I invite that 11th person – I need another turkey and another table – and I won’t utilize much of that second turkey or table. So – maybe it’s just that at that size – you can trim that number of people, go down a step, and be at business as usual, but with less business.

For years (and years and years) the nonprofit sector has been told that we need to behave more like businesses. And I think there is some truth to that – we should gather data and analyze it, we should evaluate our work, we should ensure that our overhead remains as low as possible and so on. Solid budgets, strong business acumen, salaries that are based on work product – the list goes on. In my career at nonprofits –I’ve found that most agencies are doing those things already. Maybe we can do them more effectively – but they aren’t absent.

So – how come I’m not hearing about nonprofits reducing their staff by huge margins? Is it because we aren’t fat? Is it because we’ve managed our growth well? Is it because we aren’t newsworthy? I know that some nonprofits are closing their doors, and still others are trimming entire programs. But I can understand both of those things – because a reduction in staff ought to mean a reduction in services provided. That means nonprofits are focusing on what they do best. But huge reductions in staff without an accompanying reduction in service? I’m mystified!

InDesign Secrets has an interesting post on their website where they answer a graphic designers question about stripping out styles & master pages from a document that one of their clients requested. For me this isn’t of any value at all. I don’t think most people really need to know how to do this in the first place.

However, it does bring up a good point to keep in mind if your nonprofit is working with a graphic designer. For some reason, there are designers out their that feel that they “own” the pieces they created. Even though your organization may have paid them to create it for you, they feel it’s their work and you shouldn’t have it.

Do I agree with this? Absolutely not! If you’re paying them to create it, you own it. The point here is not who’s right or wrong, it’s that you need to be clear who owns what. That means get it in writing. I have no problem with a designer “owning” the work they create. I’m just not going to pay them the same amount that I would if I owned it. That’s the cost of their ownership.

Plus in my experience, the only reason a designer would want to “own” a piece is to prevent you from taking your business elsewhere. And if they need to resort to those methods to prevent that, that in itself tells me they’re not a designer that I want to work with.

I just finished running the Seattle Half Marathon. It’s my third half marathon, and my 10th overall –and for grins, I thought I’d review my running log to see if different training patterns impact my speed.

Turns out –they do – by a LOT!

In both 1996, and 1998 I ran my speediest times.

And in 2006 and 2007 – a pair of my slowest.

I took a look at my total mileage for each of those years – and – no real surprise – here’s what I found:

• In 1996, I ran 1,487 miles.
• In 1998, I ran 1,215 miles
• In 2006, I ran 708 miles
• And in 2007, I ran 558 miles

Sure – I’m older – but I also trained at about half as much – and half of the effort resulted in a slower time.

So – what does this have to do with websites and databases? I think it means that you need to apply your effort to your outcomes. Here are some questions you might ask yourself:

• How much time have you devoted to fresh content on your website?
• How many new contacts have you entered in your database?
• Have you asked those new contacts to support your work?
• Have you reviewed your website traffic to see if you are attracting new visitors?

And – after each question – ask yourself how your results have turned out. I bet (just like my running) – if you didn’t add contacts, fresh content and so on – you didn’t do as well as you hoped.

In 2009, with a tightening economy – I think the smartest thing each of us can do is to tie concrete efforts to the results we want to achieve:

• If you are a fundraising professional – write more grants and ask more individuals for gifts. (Actually – ask for those individual gifts FIRST – studies show that corporate and grant funding is harder to get in a recession)
• If you manage communications or messaging or outreach at your agency – ensure that your website has fresh content, that you link to relevant sites (and ask them to do the same) and regularly review your site traffic to figure out how to do better. In short – write and publish great content more often!

We’re hosting a brown bag event where you can find out more about Salesforce.com.

This is a great “first look” event for anyone who:

• Has heard about Salesforce but wants to know more
• Wants to have a tool that isn’t only about donors
• Wants to gather enough information to take an educated next step

Join us on December 12th – you can register for the Salesforce brown bag event here – and hurry – space is limited!

Oh. It’s free. That’s right – come and find out. Free!

Now this is nothing new really, you’ve been able to do this for years. But this doesn’t always give us the kind of PDF that most of us might want. Huh? you might ask, what do you mean by that?

When you “scan” a document to PDF the default is to turn it into an image. So if I were scanning a printed document (mostly words), each page is turned into a graphic image. This means if I’m looking for a certain word or term, I’m out of luck. As far as Acrobat is concerned there are no words in my new PDF.

The way around this is to use Acrobats Optical Character Recognition feature, or OCR. It will try to convert the text to editable text and the graphics to graphics. So each page doesn’t get turned into 1 big image. Now if you need to do this often you might want to set up a batch process for this. The folks over at the Adobe Blog’s have a great post on just how to do that.

If you’ve taken our InDesign classes then you should know that one of my favorite parts of the training is when we get to the drawing tools & adding color. I personally love using the Polygon Shape tool. It’s the most versatile of the drawing tools. You can create triangles, octagon, even squares is you wanted too (but of course you’d just use the rectangle tool for that).

The folks over at InDesign Secrets pointed out a cool trick that I hadn’t been aware of. If you hit the arrow keys while drawing your “polygon” then you can change the number of sides & the star inset field. Cool huh?