Chicago InDesign User Group

Meeting Notes Archive

July 11, 2006

Hosted by Digital Bootcamp, Chicago, thanks to Mike Carruth, Commander in Chief.

Topic: Designer Showcase
Presenters:

Joe Grossmann
Owner of Jell Creative, a cross-media design firm, Chicago
www.jellcreative.com/
Jim Maivald
Owner of Desktop Design, a graphic design and training company, Chicago
www.desktopdesign.com/
LN Vaillancourt
Graphic designer for Association Management Center, Glenview, IL
www.connect2amc.com/
Robin Brown
Marketing Communications Specialist for Biomet Inc., Warsaw, IN
www.biomet.com/
Biomet, Inc. designs and manufactures products for hip replacement, knee replacement, shoulder replacement, elbow replacement and other small joint replacement.

The meeting got off to a bang with a superb design presentation by Joe Grossmann, owner of Jell Creative and longtime designer and techie. Joe began with a disclaimer—when it comes to the topic of “Designer Showcase,” he admitted that he squirms when he has to sit through other people’s design presentations. So being on the other side, now the presenter, he makes no claims except to say that he “offers [himself] as a sacrificial lamb.” Now there’s justice! But in fact, I could not detect a single squirm in the room as Joe talked and showed his wonderful designs.

Joe’s company was founded in 1993 and now includes 6.5 people. (We asked what the half-person looked like!) When he started, they did lots of catalogs and books, then gravitated to corporate identity, mostly for small startups and not-for-profit. At a certain point, he decided that he would only accept jobs that either involved “everything or nothing.” Meaning, he isn’t interested in just doing a business card, but wants to handle an entire identity for a company—letterhead/envelope, labels, note card and a preliminary home page design. By handling all of these, he can achieve a total image, a much more effective approach to identity. Logos are certainly core to corporate ID and another of Joe’s specialties. He showed a sampling of 12 logos he had developed for a variety of clients—law firm, politician, video firm, a logo for an online legacy site and logos for packaging among others.

The past couple of years, Joe has been doing magazines for many years, starting with MacChicago, a venerable publication started by Jennifer Dees, that eventually became DigitalChicago. Joe was involved at many levels, including writing and management, but he also did the design makeover for DigitalChicago and its cousin DigitalNewYork. It was a terrific magazine and resource but sadly the magazine folded not long after. Chicago Wilderness magazine is a mainstay of the firm. Originally designed by Carol Friedman, Jell redesigned the magazine in Spring 2004. It is produced quarterly by Joe’s firm and the stunning layouts he showed of the magazine were rich with verdant color.

Over the years, there’s been less and less print work in the house, but Joe has also been involved with the web for many years and does a fair amount of cross-media work. Websites like his recent work on http://videodailies.tv/ and www.owmyeye.com/, are both database-driven sites, and the latter serves up both long-format Flash 8 video and iPod downloads. Check out www.jellcreative.com/web/ for a complete listing of the prolific web-based work he and his firm have been producing.

Now for Joe’s tips and tricks, from his long years in the industry. Joe raves about stochastic printing and says that more and more print work is going that way. In conventional printing, halftone dots lie on a fixed grid, where each dot varies in size depending on the density of the color. When the CMYK dot screens are overlaid and rotated, moiré patterns can result, a classic nightmare for any printer. But in stochastic printing there is no dot grid. When the color density is high, there are lots of tiny dots all the same size clustered together, then fewer dots scattered when density is low. Moiré problem solved because there’s no overprinting. Other classic printing problems are also a thing of the past. And the results are eye-popping. Joe says you do have to use a high quality paper and he finds it best to use 350ppi for images (effective resolution) rather than the industry standard of 225-300ppi for conventional printing. He thinks that stochastic costs are probably about the same as conventional presses and that most of the major printers in the area are switching from their old Heidelbergs, at least for 6-8 color jobs.

Joe also talked about “dot gain,” the term used to describe how much ink spreads as it sinks into the weave of the paper. Dot gain is high when printing to newsprint and very low when printing to a coated sheet, best for color photography. As for InDesign, his favorite feature is nested styles and he showed off some layouts with drop caps in a contrasting font and color and the first so many letters following continue that same look. But the backbone of his type handling is styles, styles, styles—can’t overestimate their design and production value. Joe really puts styles to work automating as much text formatting as possible, such as styling a sidebar that has individual text items within it, separated by white paragraph rules that span the width of the frame and are built into the subhead style.

Another tip: be careful when you’re doing drop shadows in Photoshop and in InDesign. Meaning, when it comes to transparent PSDs where you’ve applied a drop shadow in Photoshop and now want to multiply/blend that to a color background in InDesign—and elsewhere in the design, you have also applied InDesign drop shadows going on colored backgrounds… this is a problem. The drop shadows, even with the same blend mode, don’t blend the same way so the easy solution and Joe’s house rule is to not put the drop shadows on in Photoshop. Do it in InDesign.

More quick tips. When he places PDF ads, he uses the Crop to Trim option in the Import Options dialog (File> Place> Show Import Options), which allows him to quickly and accurately remove any bleed or trim marks in the PDF, since those aren’t relevant in a fractional ad. using the When comping a design, he often uses Duplicate Spread (Pages palette menu) to make a design variation. And for many things, he says skip Illustrator, use InDesign, especially with Create Outlines. He loves Paste Into and dragging graphic files from the Finder right onto the InDesign page. And how about this one for a finish—for square bullets, he uses a paragraph rule with a huge right indent! (an amazing and creative solution but you might want to use the CS2 bullet feature, as Anne-Marie Concepcion suggested to Joe—although, editor’s note, better watch out for bugginess with bullets and by default, an overly wide gap after the bullet.)

Jim Maivald, owner of Desktop Design, and our trusty group leader, gave us a whiz-bang presentation of his top 10 InDesign tips.

Work backwards from your desired output, building the job you know you can print.
Optical Margin Alignment. A great feature that lets you “hang” quotes, punctuation and serifs outside the text frame. But it’s almost a secret because the command is called “Story,” (find it in the Type menu) because it automatically applies to the entire story even if only one character is highlighted. It can’t be included in a style.
Use native Illustrator and Photoshop files, rather than TIF or EPS. One file, less problems with file confusion.
Drop shadow magic. Experiment in the Drop Shadow dialog. For example, use a color other than black for your drop shadow. Or try out the Blend Modes option. Check out making a large drop shadow using zero for the offsets so you get a halo effect. And for a more dimensional look, use the Pen tool to draw a shape that mimics the object you’re starting with. Then fill it with gray, feather it and with the Shear tool or the setting on the Control palette, skew the shape to make it look more 3D.
Blend Modes—while popular in Photoshop, it’s often overlooked in InDesign. In the Transparency palette.
Alternating Table Fills. Apply color automatically to every other row or column using Table> Table Options.
OpenType secrets— Jim says replace all your old Type 1 and TrueType fonts with OpenType! OpenType is a new font technology that was incorporated into Windows and Mac operating systems back in the late 90s. System 10 and Windows XP are both OpenType compatible. The best feature of this new font technology is that it is fully cross-platform compatible. OpenType also gives you lots of special characters like additional ligatures, real fractions, fancy swash characters, and old style numbers. OpenType fonts are installed with the Creative Suite.
Adobe has recently released its entire library, converted to OpenType. InDesign CS and CS2 included free fonts with the Suite. CS and CS2 were the only fully OpenType compatible programs until Quark 7 was released. While other programs can use OpenType fonts, they cannot access the many “extra” features.
Text frame “Picture Boxes”— Style some text you wish to use as a graphic frame. “Heavy” or “Black” fonts work best. Select Create Outlines from the Type menu. Then simply place your image right into the selected frame and Fit Frame Proportionally (button on Control palette).
Overprint Preview. As a final check of your finished layout always review it using Overprint Preview. It once saved my life (and a client) when I noticed that an Illustrator file placed in the layout had some text, filled with process White, inadvertently set to overprint. The result? The white overprinting caused the text to entirely “disappear”—not exactly your desired result! ;>) Though you can’t overprint white in InDesign, you can do it in Illustrator. But it’s less likely to occur these days because Illustrator warns you that it’s unnecessary unless you are using transparency (in which case it’s still unnecessary). The bottom line is use an Opacity setting in Illustrator when you want white transparency—and always check out your InDesign layout for any surprises at the end with View> Overprint Preview.
Use an RGB workflow. The RGB color space contains more colors than CMYK. These “extra” colors, normally out of gamut for CMYK printing presses, can often be output by other devices, such as inkjets. Traditionally, we convert most of our images to CMYK before we send them to the prepress department. Once an image is converted, however, these colors are lost forever. Many experts now advocate leaving images in the “Adobe RGB” color space to pass these potential colors to your ultimate output device, or workflow.

In the last minutes of the evening, there were two brief but outstanding print design presentations. First, LN Vaillancourt, a designer from Association Management Corp, showed a really fun full-color piece for the American Pain Society’s Annual Meeting invite. It had a series of accordion-folded panels of varying widths, stretching out to about 32"! And custom illustration with rich coloration. Very playful piece but according to LN, figuring out the math for those panel widths was a challenge!

Last but not least, Robin Brown, designer for Biomet Inc., presented another full-color brochure that used a striking interplay between flat matte beige backgrounds contrasted with high gloss, spot-varnished pictures. The images were grouped together in a stunning arrangement that used compound paths to extend one image across multiple frames.

—The Chicago InDesign User Group meeting notes have been prepared by Eda Warren, Adobe Certified Training Provider and Adobe Certified Expert on InDesign CS2, http://www.go-training.com/. Thanks to Joe Grossmann and LN Vaillancourt for help with these notes.

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