Excellent venue as always. Tonight's speakers were knowledgeable and it was great that they shared "real-life" knowledge and experience.
McMurry Town Center
Event DetailsThe first meeting of 2010 proves to be the most successful one yet, with 65 members in attendance. Director of Content, Rick Burress, spiced up the networking session with some trivia questions that led to more opportunities to win fabulous raffle prizes. The networking session was a casual way to learn new tips and meet new people.
Lisa Quirin led off our Member Minute with some important tips on using libraries. With a quick show of hands, we found that only about 1/4 of our audience was taking advantage of this powerful InDesign resource. Libraries are an easy way to quickly drag and drop commonly used elements into your layout. Some properties of InDesign libraries are similar to InDesign documents. For example, each library is stored as a separate file on your hard drive or server, and they remain open until you close them. However, they take up much less space than a document, because they open in a small panel, so you can have multiple libraries open at once and only take up a small fraction of the screen. And when you're not using them, you can still keep them open for easy access but minimize them like panels. The other great thing about libraries is not only do they store the size, shape, link information, and properties of the elements you add; they also retain the page coordinates of each item, so you have the ability to place that item at the exact same location the next time you use it. To do so, you would use the Place command in the panel options instead of using the drag-and-drop feature.
There are a number of ways libraries can be used. As a freelance designer, Lisa often uses her libraries to add page slugs at the bottom of her layouts that include her logo, the page specs, her contact info, etc. Here are some other applications for using an InDesign library:
Note: Libraries can import styles and swatches embedded in each item, so if you don't want to introduce new styles, be sure to break links to styles before adding them to your library.
Our main presenter, Shannon Cross, Production Artist from Ironwood Litho, discussed some of the challenges she's encountered during prepress. She showed us some tips on how to avoid those issues using features available in InDesign. One of those features is the Live Preflight feature available in CS4. Live Preflight points out possible printing problems on-the-fly by tracking a number of parameters you set in the preflight window. Another feature that Shannon covered in detail was the file export settings used to create a press-quality PDF. Shannon's presentation showcased 10 valuable printing tips. While she went over each tip, she also emphasized the importance of building a strong relationship with your print vendor to avoid unexpected outcomes.
You can download a copy of Shannon's tip sheet at the bottom of this summary page under the PDF File/s heading.
Since our presentations ran a bit longer than expected, we were not able to include the Ask Your Peers segment in this meeting. However, we will bring that back for the next meeting, so come prepared with questions. Or if you can't wait that long, feel free to e-mail our chapter reps and we will do our best to find an answer for you.
We were very fortunate to have Photolibrary be our first presenting sponsor this meeting.
The Photolibrary Group represents the world’s leading stock brands and the finest photographers from around the world, to bring memorable, workable content to the creative communities in Europe, America, Asia, and the Pacific. They provide customers with access to over 5 million images and thousands of hours of footage and full composition music.
Photolibrary representative Melissa Rhodes provided us with food and prizes at the meeting. In her brief presentation, she gave us an overview of Photolibrary's services and how they can serve us in the future. And as a member, IDUG Phoenix saves 25% on all purchases at www.photolibrary.com. Just enter IDUG25 in the promo field at checkout. For questions or more information, contact Melissa at melissa.rhodes@photolibrary.us.com. Thank you, Photolibrary and Melissa, for your generous support!
A special thanks to our other sponsors: Adobe, Shutterstock, Artistec, Lynda.com, InDesign magazine, My Resort, O'Reilly Press, and McMurry.
Our raffle winners for this meeting include:
Our next meeting is scheduled for March 23, 2010 from 5:30pm-7:30pm. Please register online.
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United States of America