Reno InDesign User Group

Meeting Notes Archive

August 7, 2007

We had a great turnout for our August 7th meeting in the Frandsen Humanities Building on the UNR campus. There were several first-time attendees, many from the University. As many institutions are discovering, an InDesign workflow is not only for their traditional publications, but is also becoming a necessity for all their communication and marketing efforts.

This was the underlying theme for the majority of our presentation segments for the evening. InDesign is now becoming popular among non-traditional users, like marketing administrators and University Department heads. In the past, they were limited to the availability of resources to produce their newsletters and brochures. Now, they plan to create more content themselves, in the “native” application.

Jim Cooper, our User Group chairperson, demonstrated how new users can immediately capitalize on the powerful features of InDesign. We started with a basic review of InDesign terms, like Objects, Paths, and Swatches. We went back to basics on types of objects and a brief overview of Stroke/Fill attributes. The most important part of this exercise was the emphasis put on the InDesign Object Styles panel.

After it was well-established that we could easily replicate our creative efforts (or those of a top-notch designer) using Object Styles, we turned our attention to the InDesign Effects panel. We then saw a (too) brief overview of some basic effects, like Drop Shadow, Bevel and Emboss, plus Inner Glow.

This was followed by a discussion of at least three ways to duplicate “killer” effects and introduce them into other InDesign documents: Libraries, Snippets, and creating Object styles that can be “loaded” into other documents or via interchange of objects between two open documents.

We also had time for demonstration of high-impact text styling utilizing the Bullets, Tabbing, and Nested Styles. We also saw a comparison of InDesign Table features with those possible with simple “tabbed” text.

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