Seattle InDesign User Group Home Meeting Summary Archive

Meeting Summary

Play Well With Others: CS4 Suite Interaction
Tue, Jan 12th, 2010 at 6:30 PM
Adobe University
Event Details

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.

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Attached File/s

• Create-A-Digital-Comix_KenWhitaker.pdf  -  Delete...
• Think-Like-Web-Designer_Reid-Hurley.pdf  -  Delete...