New York City InDesign User Group

Meeting Summary

Event Details

Over 160 people filled Katie Murphy Amphitheater at FIT on Thursday evening, April 24, to hear presentations by InDesign experts James Conway and Gabriel Powell.

Conway, principal of C2 Graphics Productivity Solutions in Milwaukee, WI, gave an introduction to web design for print designers. By showing direct parallels between designing for print and designing for the web, Conway helped demystify web layout for many in the group. Toward the end of James' presentation, he paid special attention to the current problems of migrating an InDesign layout directly to the web using Adobe's existing cross-media technology.

After a quick break, former Portland, OR, IDUG founder and chapter rep Gabriel Powell took the podium. Gabriel, whose first book, "Instant InDesign," was recently published by Adobe Press, took the opportunity to demonstrate the power of InDesign's underutilized Data Merge feature. In his example, Gabriel showed how Data Merge combines standard comma- or tab-delimited data with images plus a little bit of formatting to quickly and efficiently produce a multi-page tool catalogue. At the end of the demo, Gabriel got a chance to show off EasyCatalog, a powerful catalog creation plug-in for InDesign from 65 Bit Software, Ltd.

The evening wrapped up with a new variation on our standard raffle. This time, raffle buyers could place tickets for specific items instead of the usual approach of throwing all the tickets into one big box. Among the prizes raffled were several books from Adobe Press and O'Reilly Publishing. As usual, the big-ticket items were software packages from Adobe Systems, with one copy of InDesign CS3 and one copy of Dreamweaver CS3 given away.

Thank You

Thanks again to our sponsors for their generosity. Thanks too to Gabriel Powell and Scott Citron, who both contributed copies of their books for the raffle. And last but not least, thanks to everyone who came out for this event and gave us their generous feedback.

Upcoming Industry Events

Our own Noha Edell will be conducting a three-hour InDesign Workshop on Wednesday, May 21, 2008. Presented in partnership with Essex Computers, this free event will be held at the Renaissance Meadowlands Hotel in Rutherford, NJ. For more information, click here.

Comments from the evaluation sheets

"Very good content. I learned a lot about Data Merge."
"Highly comprehensive. User friendly."
"Very good. Would be worthy of a full-day seminar."
"Enjoyed it but I wish we had more time for the template design part."
"Intro to web design was great. Let's have more."
"Very good. Love coming to the meetings. It simplified the thought process."

Next Meeting

Our next meeting will be on Thursday, June 19. Stay tuned for more information about this event as it becomes available.

Scott Citron
NY IDUG Chapter Rep