Atlanta InDesign User Group

Meeting Notes Archive

Thursday, August 15, 2002
On August 15, the Atlanta InDesign® user group held its inaugural meeting, at the Atlanta Art Institute.

My thanks to all of you who spent the warm evening of August 5th with us, celebrating the wonderfulness of Adobe InDesign! I was gratified that attendance was more than we’d expected; we’d like to think that the word is spreading about the power and flexibility of InDesign. I’d like to recap the evening for attendees who had to leave early, and those who were unable to attend.

Art Institute professor Ellyn Lytle’s efforts provided us a lovely venue and a splendid buffet of fruit, cheeses and miniature eclairs. In the setting of the Art Institute's Gallery, attendees munched, mingled and got acquainted between 6:00 and 7:00PM. A few minutes before 7:00PM, everyone began filing in to find seats in Room 100. It was then that we realized that we needed extra chairs!

Noha Edell, Business Development for Adobe, based in New York, has been an invaluable inspiration in the birth of this User Group: she has been responsible for beginning the very successful InDesign user group in New York, and we were honored to have her present for Atlanta’s “maiden voyage.” Noha’s warm and engaging humor put the attendees at ease as, one by one, they introduced themselves. Many were curious about Adobe’s flagship page-layout application; some were QuarkXPress users searching for an alternative. Some were students about to begin learning InDesign. The first attendees standing to introduce themselves might have been a bit self-conscious, but by the time everyone had taken a turn, the group was loosened up and laughing. Noha, the “self-introduction” approach was a great idea!

Claudia McCue, a long-time prepress production person who's become an application trainer, gave a demonstration showcasing InDesign’s ease of use, design strengths and typographic controls. There were many “ooohs” and “aaahs” in response to transparency, gradients in type, tables and optical kerning. Design devices such as ghosted boxes behind type and drop shadows — which once required Photoshop work — are easily accomplished directly in InDesign, allowing designers to create effects as they think of them, without time-consuming trips to other applications. Attendees asked lots of questions: “can you convert that text to outlines and manipulate it as vector art?” Yes, and then you can put images in the letters, if you want! “Can you put a gradient in that text?” Not only that, you can put a different one in each letter, and it’s still editable text!

Phil Gomez, art director at Media 3 Publications, showed Real World InDesign projects. A long-time QuarkXPress user, Phil has successfully (and happily!) made the switch to InDesign. He pointed out design elements that InDesign made easy — or possible — and facilitated meeting clients’ deadlines. While demos are fun to watch, it’s the *real* stuff that’s truly inspiring, proving that InDesign is easy to implement, and that it is an accessible and flexible tool for designers.

Finally, there was the much-awaited raffle drawing for a copy of Adobe Acrobat, a copy of Adobe InDesign, and several posters featuring Adobe co-founder John Warnock rendered in letters from the OpenType font named after him. Perhaps still caught up in the fun, a good number of folks stayed around well after the official 9:00PM end of the event, trading business cards and asking questions.

I think we’d all agree that this is an auspicious start for the InDesign community. My hope is that, as we grow, everyone will contribute their thoughts, questions and suggestions in the animated and generous manner we witnessed on August 5th. It's the *Users* in “Users Group" that’s most important: we all have different skill levels and different endeavors and approaches; and sharing and trading our knowledge will increase all our strengths.

Best regards,
Claudia McCue
Atlanta InDesign Users Group

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