Meeting Summary: Creative Inspiration

Wed, Nov 16th, 2011 at 6:15 PM

Schoolcraft College

Event Details

We were back at Schoolcraft College for our November meeting, with 162 attendees noshing on pizza and cookies while networking and waiting for the creative inspiration presentation to begin.

A team of designers from Team Detroit's full-service design, broadcast and production studio The Park showed us an impressive portfolio of their work. Then they took a deep dive into a great case study of their rebranding assignment for WDET. Thanks to presenters Tim McCaffrey, Senior Designer, and Christine Jones, Associate Design Director, for sharing. They also brought along some of their colleagues who were available for some personal Q & A from members at the end of the night.

New products mentioned that members might be interested in were the Annotations plug in by DTP (14-day trial available at www.dtptools.com/annotations), the eDocker Tablet Publisher which will convert your InDesign files to HTML5 for the iPad, and the Fotolia extension for InDesign CS5/CS5.5. Check out the Fotolia contest at www.fotolia.com/IDUG where the grand prize is a Wacom Inkling! Contest closes 12/15.

More raffle prizes were awarded than ever before including one Annotations plug in, an eDocker Tablet Publisher worth $995.00, t-shirts, books, laptop Coolers, lipbalm, InDesign Magazine subscriptions, a StockLayouts Template Library subscription, Shutterstock subscriptions, and a grand prize of Creative Suite 5.5 Design Premium. Happy holidays to all!

Thank you

Thanks to the following sponsors:

* Adobe Systems Inc.

* DTP Tools

* Peachpit

* O'Reilly

* Shutterstock

* InDesign Magazine

* Markzware

* Stocklayouts

* XChange International

* eDocker

* Schoolcraft College for the meeting space and food, especially the Computer Graphics Technology Department for event support.

Comments from attendees

Excellent speakers, very relevant topic. Loved the presentation of the WDET brand story.

Very good description of the creative process. It was explained with a clear vision of what really happens in a creative environment. Would definitely come to another presentation from The Park!

Love their enthusiasm about each job and dedication to their clients. The amount of research was huge and appreciate how they wanted to make the project really represent who their clients are.

Fantastic designs; very inspiring.

Excellent -- they drove up my creativity level! Great support from Schoolcraft -- kudos to them.

Presentation was great. So many outstanding design pieces that gave me inspiration for future projects. WDET brand story was a topic I was waiting for. It is very interesting to see behind the scenes of creating and reshaping the brand.

Where did the time go? Best yet and both presenters were great in presenting what Team Detroit/The Park does and who they are. The presenters held my interest from start to the end.

Very inspirational and motivating!!!

Love the reinforcement of the research in your process.

This was an amazing presentation! So much focus is usually just put on how to use tools like InDesign and other software but talking about the creative process and how that works is awesome! This is the first meeting for me but not the last.

It was great to get a look inside a large and very successful design firm. I enjoyed the work they showed and loved the explanation of the WDET project. Seeing how other designers tackle a project is extremely educational and inspiring.

Next Meeting

The next Detroit IDUG meeting will be Tuesday, January 31 at Schoolcraft College in Livonia. Topic will be Interactive PDFs and Accessibility with Adobe Certified Expert and Instructor James Fritz. Check out his training tutorials on lynda.com.

Donna Gniewek
Detroit IDUG Chapter Rep