Sessions

Favorite Tips from InDesignSecrets

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Anne-Marie Concepcion, Mike Rankin, and David Blatner have spent over a decade publishing tips and tutorials about our favorite page-layout app: literally thousands of blog posts, podcasts, magazine articles, videos… Watch as they battle to find the best of InDesign Secrets.

Topics include:

  • Little-used InDesign features that you really should be using
  • Obscure tricks that could literally change your life (or at least your workflow)
  • Keyboard and other shortcuts for improving your productivity
  • Using common features together in uncommon ways for maximum benefit

Turning Data into Design in InDesign

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If you think about it, all publishing is “data publishing,” but when you need to design and lay out text and graphics from a database or spreadsheet, the process can get quite tricky!

Follow along as we learn about the different tools that focus on publishing catalogs and directories, as well as those that serve variable data, personalization, and targeted market publishing. This workshop isn’t just for those publishing information from rows and columns, either. It will also give insights into automated long document and multi-channel publishing platforms.

InDesign’s Data Merge is a powerful but super simple starting point on the data publishing spectrum. Find out which tools will help you:

  • Build a 500-page directory in minutes
  • Cut your catalog page production time in half or less AND be more accurate in the process
  • Revolutionize how you produce books, reports, and other long documents
  • Incorporate personalized images AND video into your direct market, personalization, and targeted market campaigns
  • Streamline multiple language publishing

Making GREP Work for You in InDesign

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In Part 1 of this three-part tutorial, we learned the fundamentals of working with GREP in InDesign. Now, it’s time for some in-depth GREP expressions to put into your toolkit. When it comes to automating text in your InDesign documents, using GREP can give you that boost you need to improve your accuracy, consistency, and productivity.

  • Learn how to master the “lookaround”
  • Finding complex patterns, such as email addresses or phone numbers
  • Rearranging text

Jump to Part 3.

New InDesign Features You Should Be Using Now

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You’ve been using InDesign for a long time, but why are you still using it the way you did 5 or 10 years ago?! Adobe has released a ton of new features, but most InDesign users don’t take advantage of them. Take this opportunity to get up to speed again and learn what you’ve been missing!

How to Let Other People Edit Your InDesign Docs (even if they don’t have InDesign)

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You’re an InDesign user but you’re surrounded by people who aren’t: editors, bosses, clients, stakeholders… Life would be so much easier if everyone had InDesign, but that’s not realistic. So what can you do? What tools, services, techniques, and workflows can you take advantage of to ensure that the right people can edit the right stuff at the right time—and no one screws up your layout.

Introduction to GREP

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GREP is one of the most important features in InDesign, and sadly it’s one of the least used! In Part 1 of this three-session series, we’ll get you up to speed (from zero to 60!) with this amazing tool for finding, changing, and formatting text patterns.

We’ll look at some design samples and learn—among other things—how to:

  • Find a range of characters
  • Find all of specific category, such as currency
  • Automatically style fractions, figures, and recurring product names

Jump to Part 2.

RGB vs CMYK: Let’s Put This Argument to Rest Right Now

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It’s the 21st century… are you really still converting images to CMYK in Photoshop? Are you picking the right CMYK at the right time? What the heck is InDesign’s “transparency blend mode” and should you choose RGB or CMYK? This is the session that every InDesign user needs to watch—at least the ones who care about quality and productivity!

This session includes:

  • How to create a PDF that works for both onscreen viewing and printing on a desktop printer
  • Why converting images should be called “targeting” them
  • Why using the default settings will just get you boring color

Wow: Type Projects

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You can’t help but love everything typographic! If the word fonts gets you excited and hearing about special ligatures and swashes makes your mouth water, then this session is perfect for you.

In this fun, fact-filled, and educational hour, we won’t just look at type — we’ll explain it as we pull the designs apart and learn what makes them tick.

Interactive PDF and Forms: Opportunities and Limits

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Fillable PDF forms let your readers enter information on desktop and mobile devices, regardless of whether they have an internet connection. In this session, you’ll learn how to use InDesign to build PDF forms and then how to refine those forms in Adobe Acrobat Pro DC.

In this session, you’ll learn:

  • Best practices for adding form fields in InDesign
  • Tricks for adding form fields in Adobe InDesign
  • Tasks you’ll need to perform in Adobe Acrobat
  • Tips & tricks to help you build flexible and robust forms
  • Dealing with changes to forms

Photoshop + Illustrator + InDesign: How Three Apps Work as One

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It’s the ultimate Adobe power-trio: InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator! But you’ll never be efficient with any one of them if you don’t understand how they work with the others!

Topics include:

  • How to properly set up Photoshop and Illustrator files for InDesign
  • Choosing between layers and artboards
  • CC Libraries: the secret back door conduit
  • Best practices for managing vectors and pixels