Sessions

Three Minutes Max: InDesign

This crowd favorite is back! Don’t miss this fun-filled, action-packed, highly educational, and mind-blowing session: Three Minutes Max!

Each of our instructors will have no more than three minutes to share their favorite InDesign tip—then you get to vote for your favorite!

In past years, some of the best tips have been held for this session… so you don’t want to miss it!

Next Steps in Interactive Documents for Sales and Marketing

Creating interactive content with InDesign is only the first half of the job: You also need to distribute it! In this session you’ll learn about “Sales Enablement Platforms” and how they are ideal for InDesign-generated content. These apps enable you to easily distribute interactive sales and marketing materials to your sales team, ensuring that they have easy access to all the latest content for customer-facing presentations.

You will learn how to:

  • Manage your content and ensure it is used by the right people
  • Guarantee that the latest, up-to-date content is always available on every device used by the sales team, even when they are offline
  • Distribute interactive “leave behind” and follow-up content to customers that they can view in a web browser
  • Measure results: Which piece of content is used most often? Which results in more customer engagement?

Putting It All Together: Styles, Scripts, GREP, and More

If you’ve ever received a messy Microsoft Word file and needed to format it quickly in InDesign, then this session is for you. We’ll take some messy text and show how to automate the clean-up process, format the content, and make it look great in InDesign.

Topics include:

  • Using pre-saved Find/Change queries to make changes to data and text
  • Setting up Next Styles and Nested Styles to format text quickly and accurately
  • Taking advantage of GREP and scripts to work even faster (It’s not as hard as it seems!)
  • Creating custom shortcuts for tasks you never even thought you could assign a keystroke to
  • Using object styles to maximize your efficiency

Adding Interactive Elements to Your InDesign Docs

If you’re curious how InDesign can create engaging interactive documents, this is the session for you! InDesign has a rich toolset for adding buttons and animation. But to really use these features well, you sometimes need to think outside the box. In this session, we’ll look at the “trickery” involved in producing a series of interactive effects, using some obvious and not-so-obvious techniques. If you’ve tried InDesign’s interactive features and found them frustrating, this session will make you want to take a second look.

We’ll cover techniques for creating:

  • Pop-ups: We’ll make a map with icons to click for more info, in four different ways, using animation, buttons, and lines
  • Animated bar charts that make data presentation “cool”
  • Hamburger menus for page navigation, both an animated menu and simple Next and Previous page buttons

InDesign Scripts You Need Now

If you’re not using scripts with InDesign, you’re not being nearly as efficient as you could be. And scripts are really easy to use! In fact, a bunch of useful scripts come with InDesign—you just need to know where to find them and how to use them.

Join us in this fast-paced session to learn:

  • Where to find must-have scripts
  • The fastest and easiest way to install a script and run it
  • Free scripts for managing your layouts, building calendars, and more
  • Amazing scripts to help with graphics, special characters, and frames

Interactive Documents: Which Format is Right For You?

Are you interested in creating rich, interactive documents, but your background is primarily in print? It’s likely that your print design skills are more useful than you realize. This session will present an overview of your options, including interactive PDF, HTML, fixed-layout EPUB, Publish Online, and more!

We’ll explore:

  • What can and cannot be done with interactive PDFs
  • The strengths and weaknesses of fixed-layout EPUB and Publish Online
  • Free and commercial scripts for creating interactive HTML output
  • Delivering rich media presentations to sales teams
  • Reusing content from print projects

An InDesign User’s Guide to GREP

GREP is one of the most powerful features in InDesign, but sadly it’s one of the least used! In this introductory session, we’ll get you up to speed with this amazing tool for finding, changing, and formatting text patterns.

We’ll look at some design samples and learn essential GREP techniques such as:

  • The basics of creating an expression to easily find and format text
  • Finding a range of characters
  • Automatically formatting specific text within a paragraph style, such as fractions, keywords, or a company name

Best of InDesignSecrets, CreativePro, and Design Geek

Anne-Marie Concepción and David Blatner have spent almost two decades publishing tips and tutorials about their favorite page-layout app in thousands of blog posts, podcasts, magazine articles, and videos. Watch as they battle to find the best of InDesignSecrets, CreativePro, and InDesign Tips for Design Geeks.

Topics include:

  • Obscure InDesign features that you really should be using
  • Tricks that could literally change your life (or at least your workflow)
  • Shortcuts for improving your productivity
  • Using common features together in uncommon ways for maximum benefit

Power Up Your Production with Styles

Every InDesign user knows that styles are essential for efficiently formatting text because they allow us to quickly format content and easily make changes later on. Using styles is also a requirement if you want to take advantage of InDesign’s powerful automation features. But why do some of us continue to resist?

In this session, you’ll learn how to use styles the right way and why they’re so worth it!

Topics include:

  • The fastest way to create and redefine styles
  • Thinking creatively with styles
  • Leveraging Nested Styles to apply text formatting automatically
  • Style mapping from Word

Get Productive with InDesign Forms and e-Signatures

This session will teach you everything you need to know about designing beautiful PDF forms and web forms with InDesign. And while aesthetics are important, we’ll mainly focus on what you can do with InDesign’s form fields and how to take your forms to the next level, using unique text-tags from Acrobat Sign (included in Creative Cloud).

Topics include:

  • Designing InDesign forms by creating text fields, radio buttons, pull-down menus, and many other field types
  • Adding calculations to existing fields, setting conditions, or masking field information
  • Sending and monitoring forms using Acrobat Sign for information gathering, approvals, and e-signatures
  • The differences between Acrobat Sign forms and PDF forms, and how they relate to web forms
  • Next steps