Meeting Notes Archive

Monday, September 13, 2004

Over 60 Atlanta InDesign® user group members came out to be inspired by award-winning Atlanta designer Jim Stringer, of XO Create. Jim showed some of the great work he’s been doing with Adobe InDesign. He demonstrated the use of mixed inks to create a breathtaking piece, all in InDesign. Jim drew a “robot poster” using InDesign’s drawing tools, created a mixed ink group with two spot colors, and produced the final poster as a two-color job. Jim also shared some of his favorite tips for working smarter, faster — and cooler — in InDesign.

The Robot Poster
Download a copy of Jim’s robot poster.
Download PDF file 296 Kb download

XO Create
Visit the XO Create website.
http://www.xocreate.com

Jim was joined by one of our favorite Adobe emissaries, Noha Edell, who always delights the audience with her sense of humor and her infectious high energy.

We’re so glad to see the attendance increasing. I think the “Driven By Design” tour spread the word to InDesign users in town who didn’t know about our group as a resource. And, of course, as InDesign’s acceptance widens, there just *are* more of us. Now…go out and convert two other people and bring them to the next meeting!

I’d like to share some observations from Phil Gomez, who has been with this group since *before* the beginning. Phil has been a tremendous supporter of our group, and is a passionate user of InDesign. So I’ll paraphrase Phil’s remarks below.

It seems the transition from people using QuarkXPress to InDesign in our group is pretty much complete. We asked for a show of hands, and I’d say 95% are currently using InDesign, while the other 5% are just switching and have questions. I don’t think we need to do any more convincing, unless we find a stubborn one in the bunch.

There are still some frustrations with performance issues among the group from people wanting to use old fonts or older computer systems. While it’s expensive to upgrade an older system, all software is becoming larger: Perhaps the lowered cost of RAM and storage has made coding less, ah, economical. But old crusty fonts are a definite problem: InDesign has a weak stomach when it comes to fossilized fonts. If you have favorite old fonts, see if the vendor has an updated version. Better yet, check out the OpenType® fonts that came bundled with your copy of InDesign or the Creative Suite. They’re nice and fresh and can do things PostScript® fonts can’t do.

Everyone is always excited about seeing Noha. That’s a no-brainer; she is such a joy. There was a surprise interest in GoLive®, and the group would like to see Lynn Grillo come back. Maybe we can invite other Adobe “evangelists” from each of the individual Creative Suite applications to come and share how their particular application works and integrates with InDesign.

Finally, the evening came to a close with the customary raffle. Among the prizes given away that were T-shirts, books from Adobe Press (thanks to Jeff Warnock), and copies of Adobe software (thanks to Adobe).

Photos From This Meeting
Photos are available from this user group meeting.
See the photos.

Meeting Notes Archive
View notes from past meetings of the InDesign user group.
• Read notes from other meetings!

Meeting Topics Archive
With user group chapters across the United States, Europe, and Australia, we have gathered quite a bit of information from presenters, Adobe representatives, attendees, and industry experts during the past four years.
• Read all of the notes