Rulers, Guides, Charts, & Tools

Just as travel in another country is easier if you learn their language, learning the language of desktop publishing -- including measurement systems -- can make your design and publishing work easier. The tools here make that even easier by instantly providing equivalent measures or giving you the numbers you need to do your own calculations.

Attach your business card without staples, glues, or paperclips. This little gadget cuts nice diagonal slits in brochures, fliers, file folders, and more. Just slip the corners of your business card into the slits. Personalize generic materials with your card and Card-it. From the ideastore. $30.00US

Free with any purchase from the ideabook store, or obtain some free for distribution to groups of 50 or more. 9" rulers with inch/pica measurements, fraction/decimal conversions, a list of often confused characters (hyphen, en & em dash, etc.), hairline to 8 pt. rules, and on the back - Chuck's checklist for desktop publishing success. Free w/purchase

From French Designer, Dominique Trapp through Ideabook.com, a special color palette/swatch book where the colors are organized by the mood they evoke. Find the color combinations that work well together to deliver your message. The CMYK codes included for each. $38.00US

Crane's Blue Book of Stationery and Crane's Wedding Blue Book provide tips and notes on the style and etiquette of note-writing, invitations, and announcements -- useful for both the correspondent and the designer of invitations and similar correspondence. $19.50/$12.00US

CMYK color picker with values, CMYK color wheel for finding color combinations, Type-on-Tint chart so you can find tints that make type easy to read and a Color Directory, with colors listed by their "client" name such as "Corporate Blue." From Galaxy Gauge. $6.95US Guide Review

This ruler has picas/points, inches, centimeters, screen densities, leading, precision millimeters, rule sizes, bullets, conversions, and much more packed onto a flexible 17-inch ruler. From Galaxy Gauge. $7.95US Guide Review

A pair of 18" non-reflective, transparent rulers that include inches, picas, metrics, type sizes, leading, rules, bullets, tints and screens, proofreader's marks and fraction/decimal equivalents. Everything the desktop publisher needs to measure up. $39.95US

300 professionally designed templates for Adobe PageMaker come with a comprehensive guide, tons of tips, and ideas for using these design jumpstarters. From Chuck Green. $99US

For the business side of Web design, a suite of tools for contracts (US, Canadian, English law), estimates, sales, and development for Web designers. Win/Mac. $197.00US

All the forms you'll need for managing the business of Web site development for small and medium sized businesses. Word, Appleworks, HTML, Excel, TIFF, Visio, and ConceptDraw formatted forms, spreadsheets, graphics, and storyboard layouts. Win/Mac. $97.00US