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18^th Septem­ber 2008: Gary Sped­ding has an update for later ver­sions of InDes­ign: http://spedsblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/floating-frames-effect-in-indesign.html

I arrived home today and my cable modem con­nec­tion to the inter­net was down. Thanks Big­pond! Bum­mer. Hmm, may this is a good time to noodle around with com­pound paths in Illus­trator 10 and InDes­ign 2.

Making/releasing com­pound paths is a fea­ture that has been in InDes­ign since the first ver­sion, but its some­thing that I use and see rarely used. Its under Objects>Compound Path>Make or Release.

In my nood­ling, I found an inter­est­ing trait of InDes­ign 2.0 that might make for a cool design effect. I call it “paint­ing picket fence pictures”

Step 1: Cre­ate the Picket fence Illus­trator. This is a simple rect­angle in the back­ground, and 5 equal-sized rect­angles placed over the top. The under­ly­ing rect­angle has been col­oured Cyan for easier viewing.

Step 2: Group top 5 rect­angles. By group­ing the top objects, this ensures that the top object is treated as one shape, and when we use the Pathfinder palette, they will “cookie cut­ter” through the rect­angle underneath.

Step 3: Pathfinder, Exclude Over­lap­ping. Using the Window>Pathfinder palette, cre­ate a com­pound path with see through pan­els. The grouped object above cuts through the rect­angle shape underneath.

Step 4: Object>Expand Appear­ance. To enable a suc­cess­ful copy and paste from Illus­trator to InDes­ign, we need to expand the appear­ance into a com­plex vec­tor shape.

Step 5: Ensure AICB Clip­board format. The most appro­pri­ate format to copy this ele­ment from Illus­trator to InDes­ign is Adobe Illus­trator Clip­board. Also ensure the paths are pre­served. Select the ele­ment (best place is the Windows>Layers palette using the meat­ball on the right) and Edit>Copy

Step 6: Paste into InDes­ign. Here we see the res­ult of the paste into InDes­ign. Now for some fun!

Step 7: Place image Into. File>Place, select your image (or PDF, EPS) and ensure it goes into the new shape. The “loaded cursor” will change have brack­ets around the place gun, indic­at­ing it is pla­cing into the frame. Below you see the res­ult of “patient user mode” — this occurs when mov­ing the image inside the picket-fence shape. The second image below illus­trates how the image is “cut out” by the com­pound shape.

Step 8: Object>Compound Path>Release. This is where the fun starts. When you release a com­pound path in InDes­ign where there is an image place, it cre­ates mul­tiple shapes with the same image placed into each shape, each with its own rel­at­ive pos­i­tion­ing. It still looks like one com­pound image, but appear­ances can be deceiving!

Step 9: Move top objects for a sur­prise! In the example below, the rect­angle at the bot­tom I have applied 50% Nor­mal blend mode. The pos­i­tion of the top frames have been adjus­ted, and a drop shadow applied to lift them from the back­ground. Obvi­ously, you would adjust this to taste and stricter design con­straints — but I think the pro­cess is illus­trated here. Good luck and happy painting!

Thanks to: Cari Jansen for the inspir­a­tion to revisit com­pound paths, and Big­pond for 6+ hours of pro­ductiv­ity sans-Internet. Not.