Phoenix InDesign User GroupMeeting Summary
First meeting, well organized, useful information, just long enough, venue is well set up.
Tue, Nov 17th, 2009 at 5:30 PM
McMurry Town Center
Event Details President Tami Rodgers kicked off our November meeting with an introduction of the new leadership team and some new business items. The leadership team has been busy the last couple of months, organizing new ideas for the format of the meetings and developing plans for sponsorships and/or other ways to raise funds to support the meetings.
Director of Content, Rick Burres, lead the Member Minute session in Billie Worth’s absence. He introduced our members to the Data Merge function. Have you ever had to create personalized versions of a single design like personalized postcards or name badges for an event? The data merge function allows you to create your design and then fill in all the variable fields with two clicks. However, the real power of the Data Merge function is the ability work with image files as well. Using the example of a reward certificate, Rick demonstrated how to create a data file, how to save a data file, and how to use the data file in InDesign to create data fields. The result was multiple reward certificates populated with the person's first and last name along with their portrait.
Our main presenter, Barbara Denney from Arizona Highways magazine, shared with us some valuable tips on typography. Below are some of the topics she covered.
• Optical vs. Metric Kerning
Barbara began with a brief overview of optical vs. metric kerning. She showed some samples of a few different fonts with the settings applied. The visuals really helped us see the differences between the two settings and how it affects the overall look of your typographic design. McMurry's typographic guru, Marc Oxborrow, also chimed in to help explain the differences between the two. Simply stated, optical kerning is the spacing that InDesign thinks your font needs, while Metric kerning is the spacing that the font designer thinks the font needs. Early font designers spent lots of time building the proper kerning for certain letter pairs, but font design today is less meticulous about font kerning, so the key to using the correct kerning setting really depends on the font. There is no hard-and-fast rule on which one should be used.
• Adobe Paragraph and Single-Line Composer
Another helpful tip that Barbara shared was the Adobe paragraph composer setting that is hidden in the Paragraph panel. This option helps sculpt your paragraphs so they have a more polished look. It can also be helpful for eliminating widows and orphans from your design. Barbara demonstrated a few examples of how this option helped with justified text. Although InDesign, usually does a good job of sculpting the paragraph, the single-line composer option also gives you the opportunity to sculpt the paragraph manually.
• Optical Margin Alignment
The next function Barbara introduced was the optical margin alignment setting that is hidden in the story palette. Checking this option gives the visual appearance of hanging punctuation. For example, a quote mark before the beginning of your paragraph can hang outside of the text frame, keeping the rest of your text aligned except for the quote mark. This simple option could create that dramatic typographic impact you are looking for.
• Using the "Next Style" function when creating styles
Barbara also introduced us to the power of the apply "Next Style" option. The purpose of the Next Style option is to automate the applying of sequential styles to multiple paragraphs. For example, suppose you have three styles for formatting a magazine article: Head, Deck, and Body. Head uses Deck for Next Style, Deck uses Body for Next Style, and Body uses [Same Style] for Next Style. Activating the "Apply Next Style" command would format the first paragraph with the Head style, the second paragraph with the Deck style, and all other paragraphs would be formatted with the Body style. In CS4, this option can be activated using the context menu when you right-click on selected text. In previous versions of InDesign, this option can be applied using Object Styles. When creating a new Object Style, make sure the option is checked in the Paragraph Styles tab.
• CS4 tips and typographic samples
Barbara also shared with us a few of her favorite new features in CS4 that were not related to typography, such as the live preflight option, the Link Info panel, and the use of tabbed documents. Barbara concluded her presentation with a showcase of great typographic examples from her work at Arizona Highways magazine.
Ask Your Peers
One of the new segments added for this meeting was the “Ask Your Peers” session, an informal Q&A session that allows people to ask questions that either the presenters or other attendees can answer. We received some very positive feedback from our attendees about this new format. Some of the questions that were asked include:
• Can you change the fitting on all of your picture boxes?
• Where are workspaces saved?
• What is InCopy for? Who is using it and how is it working for them?
• How do you save hi-res versions of complex illustrations (i.e. mathematics equations or engineering diagrams) that are exported from a proprietary software and then embedded in word?'
Each question sparked a great dialogue among the group. Needless to say, this meeting was another great success. People had the opportunity to learn new things and network with peers before and after the meeting. We look forward to seeing you at the next meeting. Thank YouSpecial thanks to our sponsors for support and raffle prizes...
Adobe, Shutterstock, Artistec, InDesign magazine, Peachpit Press, and McMurry
Our raffle winners for this meeting include:
Sharon Siedl - Shutterstock prize pack
Heidi Easudes - 1-mo subscription to Shutterstock
Jerry D'onofrio - Artistec Training
Sharon Siedl - Real World: Adobe InDesign CS4 book
Alex Butterbrodt - Adobe InDesign Styles CS4 book
Claudia Saavedra and Jenny Poon - 1-yr subscription to InDesign magazine
Lisa Quirin - InDesign CS4 software Next MeetingTuesday, January 26, 2010 @ McMurry
5:30 - 7:30pm
Photos From This Meeting
Photos are available from this user group meeting.
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