Portland InDesign User Group

Meeting Notes Archive

Friday, October 15, 2004

October’s meeting was the most successful meeting to date for InDesign® users all over the Portland area. We had around 40 people arrive eager to meet each other, learn something new, and win some great prizes.

Gabriel Powell, our chapter representative, showed us how to take full advantage of paragraph and character styles. He began with the basics by showing us how to create styles, and then went on to show us how to apply them. From there, he took us to the next level by introducing us to some great timesaving tools.

Gabriel expressed that it's essential to have a good idea of how the overall design of your document will look before defining styles. You can always modify them later, but it helps to foresee the final result, especially if you want to use nested styles effectively. Once you're ready to define and apply styles, here are some guidelines to make you're job much easier and more productive:

Define paragraph styles first, and then define character styles. If you do, the character style will only pick up on the formatting that is different from the paragraph style. Doing this will aid in creating easier-to-manage styles and allow you to create more predictable and efficient nested styles.
Use the eyedropper tool to quickly apply paragraph or character styles. It allows you to quickly copy and apply many object and text attributes, including styles. Double-click the tool to find out what it offers.
Use the Find/Change feature found in the Edit Menu to quickly apply character styles. Open Find/Change, then choose More Options. From there you can search for format settings and replace them with other format settings, including paragraph and character styles.
Use nested styles whenever possible. Start by creating paragraph styles first. Then define all necessary character styles. From there you can begin nesting the character styles into the paragraph style. You'll find that nested styles works best when applying them to predictable design elements. For more information on nested styles, check out the new InDesign Magazine.

There is a great article on Nested Styles written by David Blatner. For more information, visit the website at www.indesignmag.com.

Rod Cooper, from StockLayouts LLC, joined us to present their agency-quality templates that are available for InDesign. Their templates are royalty-free and include customizable layout files and high-resolution stock photos and illustrations and are produced to technical standards suitable for commercial printing.

Learn more about StockLayouts.

Thanks for the Prizes!
Thanks to Adobe, Adobe Press, StockLayouts, and Kitchen Wisdom Publishing, people walked away with some great books and InDesign resources. That royalty free design collection from StockLayouts was greatly appreciated. So was the copy of Adobe InDesign CS. In addition, the Recipe Design Wizard™ plug-in for Adobe InDesign is going to give someone a great-looking recipe book.

And Thanks for the Help!
Thanks to the Tom Cicchelli and The Art Institute for providing us with such a great meeting room. Thanks to Richard, Rod, and those who helped clean up the meeting room. This help is really important in making our meetings easier to run and organize. We also thank Adobe for their great support.

Photos From This Meeting
Photos are available from this user group meeting.
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