Super Styling: Automatic formatting with Nested, Line, and GREP Styles

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Chad Chelius

Super Styling:
Automatic formatting with Nested, Line, and GREP Styles

Tuesday, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

Styles are the foundation of effective and powerful text formatting in Adobe InDesign. Not only do they save time and allow us to work faster and more efficiently, but they’re also the foundation for many other features in Adobe InDesign. In this session, learn how to make InDesign to the heavy lifting by automating text formatting in the documents that you create. Learn how to…

  • Automate text formatting using Nested Styles
  • Isolate and format text using GREP Styles
  • Ensure that text is formatting consistently any time it appears in your document
  • Understand the order of operation when using automated and manually applied styles

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Feeding InDesign with Photoshop and Illustrator

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Mark Heaps

Feeding InDesign with Photoshop and Illustrator

Tuesday, 11:00 am – 11:45 am

We think of them as “the big three”: Photoshop + InDesign + Illustrator. For many of us, this triad of tools serves most of our design and production needs. In this session we’ll explore ways to improve workflow with Photoshop and Illustrator so you’re working happy not harder.

Most importantly, we’ll break down the ingredients from some of our most recent real world projects to learn how and why Photoshop and Illustrator are the perfect partners for feeding great assets to InDesign.

  • Use the CC Libraries to better connect “the big three”
  • Find uncommon editors to speed up your workflow in Photoshop
  • Learn new file generator techniques in Illustrator
  • Turbo charged tricks for working with Stock assets in PS, AI, and ID
  • Shave time and friction with Adobe Bridge, Scripts, and Actions

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20 Essential Image Techniques

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Mike Rankin

20 Essential Image Techniques

Tuesday, 10:15 am – 10:45 am

How you handle images can make or break your design (and your workflow). Fortunately, there are tons and tons of useful tips and tricks for working with images in InDesign! And in this fun and fast-paced session, Mike Rankin will share as many cool image-related tips as humanly possible in the span of 45 minutes. You’ll see:

  • tips for placing and sizing
  • tips for relinking and exporting
  • tips for working with color and resolution
  • tips for enhancing images with custom frames and special transparency effects
  • tips for leveraging the awesome power of object styles
  • and much, much more!

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Hub and Spokes: Leveraging InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Bridge

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Bart Van de Wiele

Hub and Spokes:
Leveraging InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Bridge

Thursday, 9:00 am – 12:00 pm

Join us for a special half-day session that covers InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator… and most importantly: How they work together to form a one-two-three knockout punch. If you use Creative Cloud (CC) or the Creative Suite, it’s a day you won’t want to miss!


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Power Production with GREP and Find/Change

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Erica Gamet

Erica Gamet

Power Production with GREP and Find/Change

Monday, 9:00 am – 12:00 pm

In this 3-hour workshop we will learn how InDesign’s Find/Change can become our secret weapon when importing, formatting, and cleaning up text. Using the different sections of this underused powerhouse, we will find and format text, objects, and unleash the power of GREP!

Whether you need to apply styles to poorly-formatted text you’ve imported, or make sweeping changes only to items styled a particular way, we will take a step-by-step approach to the Find/Change dialog box and investigate its many, often overlooked features. And — since no one likes to repeat the same action over and over — we’ll cover saving all of our options for future searches.

We will spend part of the class learning GREP and how it should be a vital part of any text cleanup situation. If the idea of GREP has always made you a little nervous, be nervous no more! After seeing what it can do for your text-based workflow, you’ll walk away wondering how you lived without using it for so long. It’s not as scary as it sounds and we will even play some GREP games to make it fun to use!

  • Clean up text quickly, whether it’s your own or imported into your document.
  • Learn how GREP gives you the power to locate and format text based on patterns, rather than specific text.
  • Find and change objects based on their attributes.
  • Use the existing built-in queries for common searches.
  • Learn how to save and share custom queries for easy re-use.
  • Learn tricks to auto-formatting poorly styled text you’ve imported into your document.

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Accessibility: Future-Proofing Your Documents

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Chad Chelius

Accessibility: Future-Proofing Your Documents

Monday, 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm

“Access to information is a fundamental human right”

—George Kerscher, DAISY Consortium

Ensuring that the PDF files you produce are accessible to all is not only a good idea, it’s the right thing to do! In this session, learn about what accessibility means and how you can ensure that the PDF documents that you create from Adobe InDesign are accessible to everyone! In this session, you’ll learn:

  • What is Section 508, and how can you get compliant?
  • How to build an InDesign document the right way
  • Optimizing your documents so that accessibility can be accomplished more easily
  • Controlling content order
  • Using features that already exist in InDesign
  • Best resources to rely on

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Become an InDesign Superhero!

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Erica Gamet

Erica Gamet

Become an InDesign Superhero!

Tuesday, 9:00 am – 10:00 am

Do you sometimes feel like InDesign is your arch-nemesis and not the champion you need it to be? Does working with its features feel like a constant battle between good and evil?

Join Erica as we launch The InDesign Conference and begin our journey to becoming an InDesign superhero! In this ZAP!POW!BOOM! session we will discover the secrets to harnessing the power of InDesign and using that power for good. But remember, “With great power, comes great responsibility.”

After this session, your superpowers will include:

  • Forcing InDesign’s preferences to bend to your will!
  • Flying through documents with ease!
  • Unmasking InDesign’s secret tools!
  • Forging best practices to rule the world*!

*or at least your tiny corner of it


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Welcome Reception

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Welcome Reception

Monday, 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm

Join us for drinks, nibbles, and a fun opportunity to meet the speakers and fellow attendees! Plus don’t miss this opportunity to fill out your bingo card and win.


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CreativeWow! Sneak Peeks by Creative Developers

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CreativeWow!

Thursday, 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm

Come see and/or share amazing software demos from around the world! CreativeWow is an informal and fun evening event where designers and developers can connect and find ways to make magic.*

Designers: Do you enjoy finding ways to become more efficient and productive? Do you like seeing amazing technology? Grab some dessert and see what cool things the devs have been up to!

Developers: Do you have a software challenge that you’ve been working on in your spare time? Or some feature, tool, or service that you’ve developed that is just so cool you have to share it? Come show it at the CreativeWow! reception, Thursday night. The rules are simple: You have 5 minutes to fire up and demo your stuff in front of an audience of your peers. To sign up, contact David.

*Author and futurist Arthur C. Clark once wrote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”


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New Orleans: Walk, Shoot, and Publish

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Mike Rankin



Nigel French

New Orleans: Walk, Shoot, and Publish

Friday, 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm

Close out the conference with this fun tutorial, where we spend half the time photographing beautiful New Orleans and the other half editing our photos in Lightroom or Adobe Camera RAW, and then building our photo essay using InDesign. We’ll look at options for publishing a hard copy photo book, as well as a fixed-layout EPUB and Publish Online.


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