Group Chairperson Changes
Colin Fleming, long-time chairperson of the group, kicked off the meeting with bittersweet news. Colin accepted a fantastic job with Adobe as an application engineer, but as a result he can no longer be the group's chairperson. Colin announced that Chris Jones, a former engineer on the InDesign® team and a founder of Triple Triangle, will be the group's new chairperson. Colin assured us, however, that he will continue to visit the group frequently and share the same wit and wisdom that he has been known for over the past two years.
GoLive, InDesign, and Cross-Media Worklows
Colin Fleming gave an informative demo of GoLive, and showed its cross-media integration with InDesign. In the first half of his demo, Colin focused on GoLive's intuitive paradigm for laying out text and graphics using layout grids. GoLive enables designers to achieve control over their HTML layouts while simultaneously creating layouts that are suitable for the web environment.
In the second half of the demo, Colin demonstrated InDesign’s Package for GoLive feature. He showed how ImageReady®, GoLive, and InDesign cooperate to allow you to efficiently and accurately repurpose your print layouts into web layouts. He addressed key issues, like importing text layout and saving styles as CSS, importing and converting image resolution and format, and more. He also showed crowd-pleasers like SmartObjects, GoLive's abilty to resample resized images from the original source, and its ability to intelligently fix image background problems by setting a special image matte color.
Technical issue:
GoLive and XP Service Pack 2
Windows XP Service Pack 2 has security settings in place that will not allow any active content to run on any page that resides on your local computer. This includes all pages on sites that you edit in GoLive. This new security restriction will prevent you from directly previewing any pages that rely on JavaScript, which means that pages containing rollovers, GoLive actions, and/or MenuMachine will be affected. Rob Keniger, a third-party GoLive extension developer (MenuMachine), has created a fix for GoLive.
Information on the issue:
http://menumachine.com/docs/instruction_pages/
troubleshooting/win_xp_sp2.html
The download page:
http://menumachine.com/docs/instruction_pages/
troubleshooting/mark_of_the_web.html
Text Count Demo by DTP Tools
Jan Macuch from DTP Tools presented a new InDesign plug-in — Text Count — that provides extensive support for finding overset text; for counting characters, words, and lines; and more. It also provides a special “fit text to frame” function that performs copy fitting. Jan also demonstrated how the plug-in can convert counts into actual dollar amounts, allowing you to easily bill for jobs for which the cost is calculated by character, word, or line.
Real-World InDesign Tips From Designer Jack Connick
Jack Connick, a Seattle-area designer with over 25 years of experience in graphic design, presented some of his favorite workflow tips and tricks.
Jack showed us how he has made a PDF workflow a reality. You can realize large savings on prepress by submitting files to printers in PDF format. He was recently quoted $40 per page for PDF files, or $250 per page for native files, for a magazine he produces. However, there are some basic tips, like previewing your files in Photoshop® and checking them with the eyedropper tool, that can save headaches. This is also improved in CS, because you can preview your separations and see the ink percentages as you roll over objects. He also suggested that Pantone colors be turned into their CMYK equivalents before the file is ripped into PDF. This was necessary due to the fact that he was using InDesign 2.0 and Photoshop® 7.0, which use different versions of the Pantone library, although the CS versions of the products would not encounter this issue.
Jack then showed us how easy it is to make composite images from several individual images by cutting them from InDesign and pasting them into Photoshop, adding any touches there, and then re-placing the image in InDesign with one that is smaller and will rip better than individual, rotated, or scaled images. Using layers can help keep type wraps, so as not to disturb the layout.
Jack reminded us that libraries are a powerful way to streamline your work. Jack showed us examples of how he builds reusable constructs like pull-quotes, images, and captions, and even entire spreads in libraries, and then drops them into layouts. Libraries are a simple way to automate your workflow.
Finally, Jack showed us some fantastic examples of how he has been able to make richer designs by combining InDesign’s powerful features with increasingly affordable full-color printing. He showed us a brochure that had evolved from a two-color job designed in PageMaker® into a rich, elegant, four-color design in InDesign that incorporated drop-shadows and more.
Focus Segment: Layers
This meeting introduced a new feature for the Seattle user group — focus segments. A focus segment goes into detail on a particular feature, covering characteristics of the feature, tips and tricks, and real-world examples.
Colin started us off with a powerful understanding of layers and the InDesign stacking order. He showed how we can use layers to create master pages that are not always “at the back.” He covered InDesign's powerful features for enabling or disabling text wrap on a per-layer basis. He even showed us cool tricks for hiding or locking all the layers but one (option-click on the icon in the Layers palette) and selecting all the objects in a layer (option-click on the layer name). At the end of the layers segment, guest speakers Heather and Lisa from REI showed us how they use layers to customize catalog layouts for particular markets. They separate market-specific messaging, stickers, and more into layers to easily customize their layouts for proofing and print production.
Raffle Mania
As always, we had a fantastic raffle, which included a copy of Suitcase 10, books from Adobe Press, training from Total Training, and a very special package of stock layouts from StockLayouts LLC. We appreciate the donations of all the companies that contributed raffle items.
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StockLayouts LLC
This company offers a library of design templates at affordable prices. Value-bundled CDs, which contain hundreds of predesigned templates, stock photos, and artwork are also available at affordable prices.
http://www.stocklayouts.com/
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Special Thanks to Volunteers
Thanks to Samuel and Sheila for helping to organize the group. If you would be willing to help with check-in, pizza, etc., at the next meeting, please contact the chapter representative.
Sincerely,
Chris Jones
