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CHAPTER 1 Customizing
The Adobe UI is growing ever more efficient in its use of screen real estate and ever more
user customizable to facilitate your personal productivity within InDesign and the other
Creative Suite applications. Panels can be free-floating, tabbed, stacked, grouped together into
vertical panel bars à la the old Macromedia applications, and condensed into narrow icon and
title tiles. Given the fact that InDesign CS5 has an unprecedented 56 panels, you’ll likely employ
several panel arrangement forms concurrently.
Hands down, the most efficient way to organize the InDesign workspace is across dual
(or triple) monitors—preferably monitors of the same size and resolution. Although the vast
majority of users don’t need all 56 panels opened at once, many panels—such as Layers, Pages,
Swatches, Index, Hyperlinks, Scripts, Links, and the five styles panels—tend to grow in utility
and convenience according to their heights. The more space you give such panels, the less scroll-
ing you’ll have to do, which means the faster you can access the layer, page, swatch, style, or
whatever it is you need.
Using Multiple Monitors
On my primary production computer, I use six monitors, with the first containing the InDesign
application itself and the Control and Tools panels, the second completely filled with my most-
often-used 28 panels, and several other panels, those I use once in a while, taking up about half of
the third monitor in their collapsed button states. The remaining two and a half monitors I use for
whatever other application I need open concurrently with a particular InDesign project. Often that’s
InCopy, but just as often it’s a digital asset manager like Bridge or ThumbsPlus, and sometimes
Illustrator, Photoshop, or multiple windows of Microsoft Word or Acrobat.
Another interesting multiple-monitor InDesign scenario I’ve seen is two 32-inch Apple Cinema
displays stacked vertically, rather than the more common setup of side-by-side monitors. The
stacked monitors are used by a newspaper workflow for which I consulted in InCopy and InDesign.
With the monitors stacked, the layout editor can proof two complete spreads (four pages) of the
paper—one spread per monitor—simultaneously while keeping them large enough on screen to
actually read most text.
Ultimately, like RAM, designers can never have too much screen real estate when dealing with
panel-based creative pro applications.
The point is, Adobe knows that InDesign is a forest of panels. The vast majority of the appli-
cation’s functions are contained on panels, which is a far more efficient way of doing it than
in dialog boxes. Dialog boxes, while open, prohibit accessing the document; to do something
to two objects individually via a dialog box requires more steps than doing it through panels,
which are always onscreen. The downside to panels is, of course, that they’re always onscreen,
always taking up space.
Next, we’ll go through the various methods Adobe has built into InDesign to enable you to
organize panels. I’ll also offer some advice on which ones you can safely keep off your screen.
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