Professional web designers do a lot of translating. Not language translating, but translating a "look and feel" Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign web page design into something a web browser would understand.

So they do a lot of measuring with pixel rulers -- how many pixels wide is this sidebar? how many pixels between the bottom of the headline and the top of the body copy? and so on -- and then include those measures in the CSS, the style sheets that do the web page formatting.

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On a beautiful spring evening a couple years ago, when I was (of course) sitting at my home computer instead of enjoying the night air, I received an e-mail that really freaked me out. I've only told a couple colleagues about the incident, but it's such a perfect intro to this story I had to write it up for you all.

I'll copy and paste the e-mail's relevant content here, protecting the sender's identity:

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If I take a screenshot of your program or your web site and include it in a DesignGeek story (assuming I get around to doing an HTML version of this thing), without getting your permission first, can you sue me for copyright infringement?

Why, yes you can. People can sue for anything. But would you win, is the real question.

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Ever since I waved goodbye to my beloved XPress-to-HTML converter tool, BeyondPress XT (Extensis dropped it after QuarkXPress v5 was released) I've been searching for the equivalent plug-in or feature for Adobe InDesign. I needed a way to quickly export the text and images from my InDesign files to HTML, and I was constantly asked by my clients how to do the same.

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Last week during the InDesign Conference: Master Class in Seattle, one of the seminars I presented was called "Repurposing: Print to Web." If there ever was an exercise in frustration, it was trying to come up with content for this seminar. I spent weeks fretting about it, scouring the web for an answer that wasn't there.

How do you get content that's sitting in a regular InDesign layout file out onto a web site? Other than making a downloadable PDF? Or copying and pasting text from frames to text editors?

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According to San Francisco graphic designer W. Lynn Garrett, Saint Pixela, the patron saint of "Retouching and Comfy Chairs," spent her twilight years living in peaceful solitude near the Lake of Saint Vector.

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I personally never opt to receive a company's e-mailed communications as HTML -- I always choose the "Plain/Don't Know" option. It's not because I have a slow connection or I'm a Luddite, it's because my e-mail program, Eudora, completely sucks at interpreting HTML. It's a fantastic program in just about every other regard, so I continue to use it. I think of it as a wonderful husband who has one large, annoying flaw, like being an ex-felon, or even a White Sox fan.

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English speakers: When you arrive at a web page that's in a language you don't understand, try this:

1. Copy the URL of the web page from the browser address area to the Clipboard (Edit > Copy).

2. Click inside your browser's Google Search field (or go to Google.com and click in the Search field there)

3. Paste the URL (Edit > Paste) into there and hit Return/Enter.

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Not a tip, really, just something of interest to all you logo designers out there.

How can you tell if a company is a cutting-edge, cover-of-Wired-magazine, Web 2.0ish, acquisition-ripe company? If their logotype uses a soft, rounded typeface and is colored lime green, blue or orange, of course.

Think Friendster, Flickr, LiveJournal, BaseCamp, LinkedIn, Skype, MySpace, Bloglines, Technorati ... like that.

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Yes, ladies and gentlemen, once again it's time to clean out some of the backlog of sites I've bookmarked as fodder for DesignGeek articles. If you're a relatively new subscriber, you might have missed the first time I did this:

The First Occasional Bookmarks Issue (#32, 11/24/04):
http://designgeek.com/designgeek32.php

The basic idea is that instead of spending a lot of time developing a DesignGeek article on one or two of these sites, I'm just going to list a bunch of them with a few notes explaining why I thought it was bookmark-worthy. Then I can delete it from my bookmarks utility and move on.

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