Even if your work is boring, your documents shouldn’t be. The latest version of Microsoft Office makes it easier than ever to create attractive documents, thanks to some cool new tools for covering up text, displaying images, and embedding video.

You don’t have to be a graphics professional to take benefit of these features, and the suite Live Preview and Undo commands persuade trialing by letting you painlessly ditch looks you don’t like. Try these nine simple features to add a little eye-candy to any document you create.

Create your own calligraphy (Word, Publisher): Want to give a document a complex copperplate handwriting look? Click the lower right corner of the Font group to launch the Font dialog box, and then click the advanced tab to access settings for custom kerning, ligatures, and stylistic sets, which create the extensive swirls that give some fonts a calligraphic look.

By evasion, 20 stylistic sets are listed; but not all Open Type fonts have that many different styles, and some fonts change very little in retort to the style set you use. You’ll have to research to figure out which ones work best. Microsoft recommends trying out style sets with a new font, Gabriola, or with Calibri, Cambria, Constantia, or Corbel four fonts that were also included in earlier versions of Word.

WordPress is the fastest growing CMS platforms in today’s web design trade. Much of the action in the WordPress society is principally driven by the market for WordPress themes.

The vast selection of free and commercial themes is what makes WordPress so attractive. But the theme is often only a initial point for further customizations. Web developers and DIY website owners like to start with a great theme and tweak it to perfectly suit their needs.

Many themes, mainly commercial themes, come packaged with a robust theme options page, which lets you to organize many aspects of it.

The Top 10 Ways to Jerk WordPress Theme are:

1. Edit Your Theme’s CSS
2. Display Post Excerpts or Full Content
3. Create a Custom Page Template
4. Crafting the Loop: Excluding/Including a Category
5. Crafting Your Page Navigation the Easy Way
6. Enabling Menu Management in WordPress 3.0
7. Create a Simple Conditional Statement
8. Add Post Thumbnails
9. Add Something (Anything) to the End of Every Blog Post
10. Add Google Analytics Tracking Code

The Safari 5’s apparently harmless new Reader feature, which isolates the text on a webpage making it easier to read, has sparked a amazing amount of outrage from web publishers who think Apple is trying to mash online advertisements and attack their livelihood.

Similar tools have been around for eons, starting with the Print this page link of the last century, all the way up to tools like Readability, whose code Apple borrowed for its browser. But the advent of Safari Reader seems to have galvanized a point of view that’s been brewing for a while WebPages are too chaotic and difficult to read.

So publishers, listen up. Your readers, the people you depend on to reach your bottom line, have something to say. It’s a pretty simple message: Your web pages are aggressive to reading. It’s time to start paying much closer attention to the design of your pages not just to reduce clutter and make everything easier to read, but to make sure your text maintains that readability across the broad range of screen sizes, devices and browser configurations people are using today.

A few days ago our book-design blog got a comment that made us think about the concept of inspiration I am designing a outline for books and need lots of inspiration. It’s hard to find it on Google.

They would start forgetting about looking for “inspiration” on Google or from other book designs. Why? Because nothing you find created specifically for that particular book. They wouldn’t have been hired if the design was out there. Neither should you stay for something magical coming from beyond. Work toward verdict something that strikes you from the manuscript.

As designers, we must find the top graphical way to present a book. Each book carries within it a unique space, color and contrast that provide a pace. Like music. Designers must remember that the best book design is invisible. It should guide the reader naturally through the book. That can happen only when the design emerges from the manuscript.

• Is it a manual? Determine how to elucidate where instructions begin and finish. Explore font weight variations or different typefaces. Think about what kind of indicators could help the users when troubleshooting.

• Is it a non-fiction narrative? Help people understand the perception by designing a layout that aids the reading of the text. Think of spacing, letter size, white space, clarity, etc.