September 23 marked the most recent meeting of the New York City InDesign® user group. A capacity crowd of nearly 140 members attended this fall event, graciously hosted once again by Pratt Institute’s Manhattan facility on 14th Street.
Meeting Notes
The meeting began with a few job announcements from Monica Walsh, of Creative Network Systems, and Dan Rodney, of Noble Desktop (see special announcements below).
Afterwards, InDesignUserGroup.com webmaster and designer Chris Converse walked the audience through the newly updated site. Chris made special mention of some of the new features of the site, including a section devoted to world language support. and the new meeting topics archive; a resource for finding information presented at InDesign user group meetings all around the United States and Australia. Trends in the wesite traffic remain impressive, reaching 26,000 unique visitors in August 2004. While a more visually appealing statistics page is being developed, the chart in the presentation is available here. In addition, Chris showed a prototype of a new audio feature for the site — which is featured in these notes! Click on the green butterflies throughout these notes to hear sound bites from presenters at and attendees of this meeting.
Following Chris was InDesign expert and local author Sandee Cohen. Sandee’s presentation explored a lesser-known niche of InDesign — creating and exporting media-rich, interactive PDFs. Sandee focused on how to place QuickTime-compatible movies or audio (swf, mov, aif, mp3, etc.) into an InDesign layout and showed how to add metadata, set a poster frame, and choose whether to hide or show the controller. In addition, Sandee demonstrated how to create buttons with rollovers to control the movie and discussed the pros and cons of embedding the movie in your layout.
After a short break, chapter representative Scott Citron announced two job openings in the exploding market for InDesign artists. For more information regarding these positions, see below. Adobe’s Gary Cosimini also addressed the group by showing several new magazines that are now created with InDesign, including All You, from Time Inc. Gary explained how acceptance of InDesign in the magazine publishing world is moving rapidly.
Next up was Scott Citron again, whose presentation was titled “InDesign 101 for Newbies.” With nearly half the evening’s attendees recent InDesign converts, Scott showed the basics of creating a simple one-page flyer. Along the way he demonstrated a number of tricks and techniques, for example, how to drag and drop images into InDesign from Photoshop®, Illustrator®, or the MacFinder. Scott also showed a crowd-pleasing way to quickly sample type in your layout by selecting a text frame, inserting your cursor in the Fonts field of the Character palette, and then tapping the up or down arrow keys on the keyboard to cycle through all available fonts.
After Scott’s presentation, the floor was opened up for a general Q&A, which fielded a number of excellent InDesign questions from the group.
What’s Your Favorite InDesign Feature? Our members tell you theirs.
Finally, the evening came to a close with the customary raffle. Among the prizes given away were T-shirts, books from Adobe Press (thanks to Jeff Warnock), training DVDs (thanks to Total Training), and copies of Adobe software (thanks to Adobe).
Thanks again to everyone who worked so hard to make this event come together: from Adobe, Noha Edell, Gary Cosimini, and Pamela Chan; members Paul Tomzak and Betty Sperber; presenters Chris Converse, Sandee Cohen, and Scott Citron; and Antoinette Perry, Kevin Tassey, and Mike of Pratt Institute. We also want to thank MacDesign magazine for the complimentary issues of their magazine that were distributed to attendees of the meeting.
Photos From This Meeting
Photos are available from this user group meeting. See the photos.
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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.
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