InDesign Conference, Day 1

I’m in Chicago attend­ing the InDesign Conference, which start­ed on Monday, May 15 and will last through Thursday, May 18. I’m here only on Tuesday and Wednesday though, so I will miss some of the spe­cial­ized train­ing for InDesign, InCopy and Creative Suite 2 but these two days are going to be stuffed with great tips and techniques!

For those who haven’t heard the news about the InDesign Conference (and I don’t see how you could­n’t, it’s been adver­tised on Designorati so the expo­sure it’s had is tremen­dous) vis­it www​.bar​rycon​.com for infor­ma­tion on the InDesign Conference, the Creative Suite Conference and oth­er conferences.

Watching some of the great train­ers in action has been a real treat, and it’s one of the things I enjoy most at these con­fer­ences. These are the top pow­er users, so watch­ing how they approach their work and hear­ing the tips they use to be pro­duc­tive is very valu­able. David Blatner, for exam­ple, swears by key­board short­cuts and taught us to “take time now, to save time later“—as in, spend time now cre­at­ing good key­board short­cuts to save our­selves from mou­s­ing around in the future. I agree with him on this one, and I learned the Keyboard Shortcuts dia­log box in InDesign is very robust: key­board short­cuts can not only be set, but set up to respond in cer­tain sit­u­a­tions such as with text, graph­ics, alerts and more. I don’t think this is a fea­ture in Photoshop, but if it’s not it should be.

I caught Robin Williams, author of the “The Mac Is Not A Typewriter” book series, in one of her two ses­sions. I missed the typog­ra­phy ses­sion but caught her ses­sion on long doc­u­ments; she’s writ­ten fifty books or so, so she’s good at it. Learning more about tables of con­tents, the InDesign Book file for­mat and sec­tions was a great expe­ri­ence, and one that’s per­ti­nent for a few projects I’m work­ing on right now.

Claudia McCue men­tioned this when I was talk­ing with her, but I think the atten­dees are more savvy nowa­days about InDesign in par­tic­u­lar and the Adobe appli­ca­tions in gen­er­al than they used to be. It seemed a lot of tricks and tips elicit­ed oohs and ahhs back a few years ago, but nowa­days not only is there less of that but there are more ques­tions geared toward very spe­cif­ic real-work sit­u­a­tions that call for obscure tech­niques that some­times stump the speak­ers. I caught Robin Williams off-guard with my expe­ri­ence when work­ing with tables of con­tents: I’m work­ing on a table of con­tents that spans mul­ti­ple text frames, but I can’t update the table unless I delete all frames except the first one. After I update I must of course reflow the table into new frames. It’s very weird, and it’s either a bug of some kind or I’m doing some­thing wrong. If I find a solu­tion I’ll be sure to post it here.

The high­light of the evening was InDesign Survivor Island, a triv­ia con­test between nine mem­bers of the audi­ence includ­ing me. I’m afraid I had a poor show­ing, get­ting stumped on the first ques­tion about the def­i­n­i­tion of a slug. My path to print and web pro­fes­sion­al was a bit unortho­dox and my knowl­edge of print ter­mi­nol­o­gy is real­ly screwy: there’s a lot of things I don’t know, and I some­times know things by dif­fer­ent names. But that gave me a chance to enjoy the rest of the con­test and take some pho­tos of the con­tes­tants, and I think every­one had fun or at least learned some­thing new about InDesign (and slugs).

Be sure to check out my follow-up arti­cle on Day 2 of the InDesign Conference, which should pub­lish Thursday morn­ing. Also check out my Top 25 InDesign Tips arti­cle, with all tips pulled direct­ly from the ses­sions here at the InDesign Conference.

Figure 1: The con­fer­ence attendees.

Figure 2: David Blatner & Sandee Cohen.

Figure 3: Robin Williams.

Figure 4: Pariah Burke (pub­lish­er of this web­site and Designorati​.com.

Figure 5: David Blatner.

Figure 6: Claudia McCue.

Figure 7: The atten­dees’ reception.

Figure 8: Noha Edell, a train­er for Adobe Systems.

Figure 9: Sandee Cohen ques­tions a con­tes­tant dur­ing InDesign Survivor.

Figure 10: David Blatner ques­tions the even­tu­al win­ner of InDesign Survivor.

Figure 11: Noha Edell, Branislav Milic, Brian Cupp and Pamela Pfiffner.

Figure 12: The final two!