As co-hosts of InDesignSecrets.com, David Blatner and I talk about InDesign keyboard shortcuts a lot. A LOT. They just save so much time, and there's so many of them. Sometimes, though, they're hard to find in the menus; and most irritating (but understandable) is that there are dozens of useful commands with shortcuts that don't appear in the menus at all, because there's just not enough room. You have to dig though Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts to find them.

Last month, he and I spent way too much time unearthing these and merging them with the ones from the menus, organizing the whole mess of them by function or product area, and laying them out in a poster-sized document in a way that makes sense to us, and we hope, other InDesign users.

In the seasonal spirit of giving, I thought it would be fun to share a selection of my favorite freebies on the Internet. Some of these are rare finds that I've guarded as my own aces in the hole; grudgingly e-mailing their URLs only to trusted friends or desperate clients. Others are pretty well known, I thought, but have come to learn they're still mysteries to the general hard-working designer and so are in need of more publicity.

In my debut list, you won't find free clip art or stock photography sources, free font libraries or template sites. Of course these exist, but there's a bazillion of them, and most designers know of at least one or two. Maybe a future issue will be devoted to these "free content" web sites.

Instead, the freebies below are immensely useful *services* ... the kind where you think, there HAS to be a catch ... how could they offer this for free?