Alien Easter Egg in InDesign

For those of you designers who are long in the tooth, you may remember the great Easter Egg in Quark Xpress. If you had a tough day and needed to add some humor to your workflow, you could select an object or text box that you wanted to delete. You pressed the keyboard shortcut Command + Shift + Option + k, (k for “kill”) and out marched a little Martian who would zap your selected item with his ray gun. Poof! Away went the offending text box or object and all was well! Unfortunately, the Martian is no longer with us. The killjoys at Quark XPress took him out. Come to think of it, Quark XPress is almost no longer with us! Coincidence? Who knows. 

Most of us use InDesign these days. Fortunately, the folks at Adobe realize that most of us do miss the alien so they added one to InDesign. That’s the good news. The bad news is that he is friendly and doesn’t zap anything into oblivion. Oh, well. Guess they wanted to avoid a lawsuit.

So, where does this Easter Egg reside and how do we conjure him up from the depths of outer space? This one requires a little work. You can find our alien friend inside the Print dialog box. When the dialog box appears, click on the Save Preset… button. It really doesn’t matter what the presets are but you will need to name the preset “Friendly Alien” (without the quote marks). Now, as long as Friendly Alien is selected as the Print Preset, all you need to do is click once in the lower left corner where the page graphic is located. Voilà! A friendly alien flies into view and waves a friendly hello!

Let’s give the software engineers at Adobe a hand for including an Easter Egg into the InDesign application. Did you like learning about this particular Easter Egg? Want to learn more? Then you should subscribe to the Lynda.com Online Training Library! This little gem came from InDesign Secrets, by David Blattner and Anne-Marie Concepcion. Hats off to Anne-Marie for this secret.