This session is sponsored by Adobe.

Join members of the Adobe InDesign product team for a fast-paced look at the newest features, workflow improvements, and future direction of InDesign. Bring your questions. The team wants to hear from you.

InDesign is more than a layout tool—it’s a powerful problem-solving engine hiding in plain sight. This session explores unexpected ways to use InDesign’s native features, turning familiar tools into clever workflow solutions. From repurposing the Table of Contents for nontraditional lists to using Data Merge to build dynamic storyboards, you’ll see how to push InDesign well beyond standard page layout.

Through practical examples, this session encourages designers, marketers, and content creators to rethink everyday challenges and replace manual work with smarter, automated solutions.

Key takeaways:

• Discover unconventional ways to use InDesign features beyond their original intent
• See real examples of native tools repurposed to solve nontraditional layout and workflow challenges
• Replace manual, repetitive work with smarter, automated solutions
• Approach everyday design challenges with a more experimental, problem-solving mindset

The choices you make when you start building an InDesign layout will determine how smoothly the rest of the project goes. In this session, Laurie Ruhlin focuses on the foundational layout decisions that make InDesign documents easier to design, revise, and maintain over time.

You’ll learn how thoughtful structure reduces rework, prevents layout breakdowns, and makes everyday tasks far less stressful. This session shows how to set up layouts so they naturally support real-world production needs.

Topics include:

• Setting things up right from the start so your layout elements align naturally and don’t need constant fixing later
• Choosing single or facing pages. Learn how each option changes layout, margins, and page management—and why switching later can be messy
• Using parent pages to build structure, not clutter with consistent headers, footers, guides, and repeating elements
• Demystifying the Primary Text Frame: What it does, when to use it, and how it makes adding, flowing, and reordering pages effortless
• Rearranging pages without breaking your layout: Shuffle, insert, and delete pages while keeping text, images, and page structure intact

Sneak Peek:
Set Up Your InDesign Documents Like a Pro

Styles are often treated as basic text formatting—fonts, sizes, spacing, alignment—but they can do far more. Built into styles are powerful design features like borders, shading, rules, and corner effects that let you create callouts, highlights, dividers, and branded design elements directly inside your layouts.

This session shows how to design with styles to create layouts that are both consistent and visually strong. You’ll see how paragraph shading can create instant callouts, how borders and rules add structure and emphasis, how styles work together, and how table styles carry brand identity into complex layouts. The result is cleaner files, fewer formatting errors, faster updates, and more creative control—without extra work.

You will learn how to:

• Make styles part of your design system, not just a formatting step
• Reduce production risk when collaborating or handing files to other designers
• Reduce manual formatting and errors in long or complex documents
• Ideal for designers who work in InDesign regularly and want cleaner, smarter, more flexible layouts