Auckland InDesign User Group

Meeting Summary: Adobe CS is getting better and better and …

Thu, Apr 28th, 2011 at 6:30 PM

Media Design School – NEW VENUE

If you were present at the Thursday 28 April 2011 meeting of the Auckland InDesign User Group, you are a part of history.

We had around 60+ people gather at new Media Design School venue in Albert Street for a truly insightful, informative, enlightening evening; not to mention entertaining as always.

Our esteemed guest Mike McHugh from Adobe Australia gave us a great rundown on what is new in the Adobe CS5.5 point products and how smoothly it all works from InDesign to ePublish. He also highly recommended that anyone who is getting into or already is involved in ePublishing would most definitely benefit from this upgrade.

The second presentation was from our infamous Marcus Radich of Digital Arena. He gave us an overview (minus the code for the visual ones) on what InDesign Server actually is and what the difference between our regular InDesign and the Server edition. Very jolly clever I must say -- automation at its utmost. Hopefully we will get to see a demo of this action in the future from Marcus?!

The third presentation brought Mike back, and wowed the audience with his illustrative skills using three different applications available on the iPad for illustrating and transferring to Photoshop. I think it was unanimous that we should all have an iPad now and that chooks rule (yeah, it's an in-joke, you had to be there)!

The final presentation came from Heather Rennie with a run-through of what you can actually find on the InDesign User Group website – remember, lots of member benefits, discounts (don't forget to check out your discount to subscribe to InDesign Mag, it's a must-have), and stuff, plus these meeting summaries. This was topped off with a couple of very handy tips – how to add new colour swatches when you setting up paragraph styles and how to get those logos/images out of that Word docx (that was a real goodie).

The meeting was wrapped up with a thank-you to the sponsors, especially Media Design School for allowing us to use the venue when they had only moved in three days prior, and an introduction to new sponsor Firebrand Talent. Then we ate lots of pizza and drank pop, while the lucky draw was held.

Some very lucky attendees walked away with two $150 Visa Debit Cards, a 1-year subscription to InDesign Magazine, a pass to attend Pariah Burke's online webinar for ePublishing and bonus of some beautifully designed limited edition tea towels by one of our members (Angela, we want details how to get more).

Thank you

So thanks to all our sponsors and supporters – Adobe, Digital Arena, Media Design School, Firebrand Talent, Lynda.com, InDesign Magazine, Wendy Katz at IDUG support (she's awesome), and everyone else who helps out behind the scenes. Thanks must also go to all our attendees for turning up and contributing to this awesome event.

Next Meeting

With the Adobe CS5.5 Roadshow on 26 May, we will be scheduling the next meeting for July. So if you have any great ideas to put forward as topics, tips, guest presenters, or anything, email us at auckland@indesignusergroup.com or put something on the forum!