Seattle InDesign User Group

Chapter Homepage Meeting Summary Archive

Meeting Summary: Play Well With Others: CS4 Suite Interaction

Tue, Jan 12th, 2010 at 6:30 PM

Adobe University

A Web Designer's Perspective of the Creative Suite
Presented by User Group member Anne Reid, an instructional designer at Seattle Children's Hospital, & Dave Hurley, the IT Director of Computing for UW Biology
(A PDF of this presentation is available below.)

Using InDesign to lay out a website

Website loading with the 1 second rule and the Powers of 10, Times Scales in User Experience
Hexadecimal numbers, web safe colors (several color converters available online)
Authors for web usability: Steven Krug and Jacob Nielsen
Typographical control: use web safe fonts, such as Arial, Verdana or San Serif fonts. One way around fonts that are not web safe is to take a screen shot of the text and make it a GIF.
Take images and text from InDesign and place into Dreamweaver. With Dreamweaver not having a menu bar, CSS is used to control your website.
Screen properties: screen resolution 1/4 of the size for compared to print. With the larger monitors, websites are 1,000 x 800 pixels and mobile devices are 240 x 300 pixels. The W3C standards were mentioned as an excellent place to check for websites changes.
Dreamweaver templates
- import images and text from the InDesign layout to build the website
- Use the InDesign file to show the client
- If there are any changes to be made, it is done in InDesign, before the website is ever made

Create a Digital Comix
Presented by User Group member Ken Whitaker, Managing Director of Leading Software Maniacs
(A PDF of this presentation is available below.)

Plan and create a digital comix

Important to plan the project, the layout, paper size, designing the cells, the layers, artwork and frames for the storyboard and the overlay header text
Create cells using Illustrator to prepare online views or high resolution print files
Use royalty-free photos or sketches
Use ToonIt plug-in by Digital Anarchy. ToonIt gives photographs a cartoon look with cell-shading, hand-drawn look, or outlines on an image. The photos can even look like a pen and ink drawing or a woodcut.

Blatner Tools and the upcoming InDesign Secrets Conference
Presented by David Blatner, co-host of InDesignSecrets.com, Editorial Director at InDesign Magazine, co-author of "Real World InDesign" and "Real World Photoshop"

InDesignSecrets Print and ePublishing Conference
May 12-14, Seattle, WA
http://www.indesignsecretslive.com
InDesign User Group members can get 10% off the conference registration fee. See the Member Benefits area (or your email) to get the discount code.

Blatner Tools: a new InDesign Plug-In by DTP Tools
A suite of 12 plug-ins, has over 100 new features for InDesign users, including:

Keep track of recent documents
Create style reports
Create quality assurance reports
Make fractions
Special text controls
Ability to create keyboard shortcuts for colors swatches
Ability to create keyboard shortcuts for layers
Seattle InDesign User Group members can get 10% off Blatner Tools by visiting http://www.blatnertools.com and downloading the Mac or Windows (CS3 or CS4) version. See the Member Benefits area to see the discount.

Preview of an InDesign Secret: Making an Object or Text Change Based on Left or Right Page (that which can't be done): See the post on InDesignSecrets.com

RAFFLE
Lots of exciting prizes raffled off including subscriptions to InDesign magazine, t-shirts, reference books, a copy of the ToonIt plug-in, Blatner Tools plug-in, and a copy of InDesign CS4.

Thank you

Thank you to our wonderful volunteers:
Nancy Yee - Check-in
Amy Ball - Check-in
Annette Dwyer - Note Taker

Our fellow User Group Members who offered presentations:
Anne Reid & Dave Hurley
Ken Whitaker

Upcoming Industry Events

InDesignSecrets Print and ePublishing Conference
May 12-14, Seattle, WA
http://www.indesignsecretslive.com
InDesign User Group members can get 10% off the conference registration fee.

Next Meeting

Our next meeting will focus on Workflows; we want to compare & contrast how different shops and individuals do things in different ways. Whether Design-, Production-, or Account-driven, organized on a server or your desktop, each approach is unique and solves a different need.

We want to hear from you! It won't be necessary to prepare files for presentation, but we're hoping to have participation from a wide variety of our User Group Members- please contacts us at seattle@indesignusergroup.com to tell us how your workflow works for you.

Interested in earning a few extra raffle tickets? Volunteers who help with photography, check-in, or note-taking will receive extra tickets for helping out. Contact us at seattle@indesignusergroup.com if you're interested.

As always, if you have suggestions for specific topics or are interested in presenting, please contact us at seattle@indesignusergroup.com.