Vancouver InDesign User Group Home Meeting Summary Archive

Meeting Summary

Prepress - Best Habits
Tue, Sep 22nd, 2009 at 6:00 PM
Vancouver Film School - Theatre
Event Details

The Vancouver IDUG held its 3rd meeting of the year on Tuesday Sept 22 2009. The topic was Prepress—Best Habits. Nearly 75 members attended this meeting.

Prior to the meeting, members enjoyed refreshments that were kindly sponsored by Simply Computing on Broadway and Pine (http://www.simply.ca

).

Jeff Kew began the meeting with a quick intro of Adobe's Sebastian Distefano and himself, for the new members. Jeff followed up by discussing and showing off the plug-ins that were graciously donated by our meeting sponsors for door prizes.

Sebastian Distefano focused on Adobe tools such as the Ink Manager, Separation Preview, Flattener Preview and PDF/X export settings. In the second half of the meeting, Jeff Kew started off by reviewing some online resources then moved on to demonstrate some real world practical examples/tips and tricks of prepress and also discussed how many third-party plug-ins can be big timesavers in the prepress process.



We concluded by drawing evaluation forms for prizes.

Thank you

Many thanks to our sponsors for donating the following products and services for this meeting. Best prices for books are usually found at Amazon.ca, and don't forget that there are often discount member benefits for book purchase; check these out in the Member Benefits area on the IDUG website.



InDesign CS4 software

http://www.adobe.com/products/indesign/family/



Books and DVD's on Photoshop, InDesign, and Prepress

http://www.focalpress.com/

http://oreilly.com/

http://www.peachpit.com/index.aspx





InDesign plug-ins from the following companies:



65 Bit - Multido & Reveal (these are free, get them now)

http://www.65bit.com/products/products.shtm



CtrlPublishing - Ctrl Layers

http://www.ctrl-ps.com/products/ctrllayers



Extensis - Suitcase Fusion 2 and Portfolio 8.5

http://www.extensis.com/



FOLDRite - Template Master ($99 sale on right now)

http://www.foldfactory.com/shop.php



InsiderSoftware - FontAgentPro

http://www.insidersoftware.com/FA_pro_plus.php



GLUON - Cropster for Mac

http://www.gluon.com/product-cropster-id.html



Gridiron Software - Flow

http://www.gridironsoftware.com/products/flow.html



Markzware - FlightCheck Pro 6.5

http://www.markzware.com/flightcheck_professional/



Zevrix - Bundle (LinkOptimizer lite, BatchOutput, InPreflight)

http://www.zevrix.com/index.php



And Photoshop plug-ins:

Nik Software - from the Complete Collection (for Photoshop, Lightroom or Aperture)

http://www.niksoftware.com/



Alien Skin - Blow Up

http://www.alienskin.com/blowup/index.aspx



Printing Gift Certificate:

TPH - Biz Card Printing: 250 Digitally printed cards

http://www.tph.ca/locations/default.aspx?
(1177 W. Hastings St.)




Many thanks to Adobe for their ongoing and generous support. Without them, we wouldn't be having these meetings.



Facilities for the meeting supplied by the Vancouver Film School, http://www.vfs.com.



A special thank-you to Sebastian Distefano for going the extra miles to be with us (over 3000 of them). Also a special thanks to our volunteers who put these meetings together; Jeff Kew, Trish Anderson, Regina Leung, Miles Harrison and Michael Yee (our guest registration attendant). And last but not least, thanks to everyone who came out for this event and gave us their generous feedback.

Upcoming Industry Events

The InDesign Seminar Tour
Discounted Entry Fee for IDUG members

Get 10% off your entry fee for any location of the InDesign Seminar Tour. See the event details at www.indesignusergroup.com/events, and find the offer code on the Member Benefits page on this site.

Please note this same discount code also entitles any IDUG member to $100 off the Washington DC InDesign Conference (Nov 4-6, 2009, www.mogo-media.com/conferences/the-indesign-conference/2009/washington-dc/)

and $50 off of the Washington DC Photoshop Live event (Nov 2-3, 2009, www.mogo-media.com/conferences/photoshop-live/2009/washington-dc/).

http://www.mogo-media.com/

Mogo media offers seminars and conferences on InDesign and other Creative Suite applications across Canada and the USA. Upcoming seminars include Photoshop Channels and Masks with Deke McClelland in Toronto. Click the link above to learn more.

15% discount off Adobe Software at the Adobe Store

As an IDUG member, you are entitled to get 15% off your next Adobe software purchase! To see the simple steps to receive your coupon code, look in the right column of the Member Area on this site or your chapter home page -- remember, you must be logged in in order to see this information.

InDesign Magazine: Discounted Two-Year Subscription
Exclusively for IDUG Members

Get a two-year subscription for only $39! Use the discount code IDUG09 when signing up at www.indesignmag.com/idm/purchase.html.

Looking to become a Certified ACE?
It can be difficult to get ahead in today’s market and stand out from the crowd. Becoming an Adobe Certified Expert is the answer.

Adobe certification is an industry standard of excellence, and the best way to communicate your knowledge, skills and experience to prospective employers or clients.

At $150USD per exam it’s not cheap or indeed easy, so plenty of study and practice is required. AceQuestions Practice Exams are written by an Adobe Certified Expert and are designed to simulate the real exam. The exams are setup as interactive PDFs with clickable radio buttons for multiple choice answers. All you need is the FREE Adobe Acrobat Reader (Acrobat 7 or higher recommended). Your result is calculated as a percentage, just like the real thing!

AceQuestions Practice Exams are affordably priced. Good luck with your certification!
http://www.acequestions.com/

Comments from attendees

"As always, Seb is a fascinating speaker" - Wes Jang

"I think Adobe guest was absolutely amazing.
Thanks for bringing him in" - M. Yigit Karakilic

"Excellent presentation/topic, lot's of useful info" - Five Seventeen

"Like the balance of Adobe and non-Adobe perspectives" - Alex Henning

"Perhaps tried to accomplish too much in one meeting.
More focused approach might have been more useful" - Eileen O'Hanley

"Very informative and helpful as always" - Malcolm Summersby

"Very easy and understandable, talking about day to day issues" - Thorsten Gohl

"This was my first event, and I was very impressed" - Megan Hollstedt

"Good rundown/demo of the stitching issues and overprinted spot colours in flattened PDFs…great real world prepress and file-fix tips" - Cam MacGregor

"Good topic tonight - perfect in fact - it answered a lot of questions"
- Beth MacLaren

"Thanks for sharing all the tips and tricks. I've learnt a few new things" - Amy Lau

"Great technical info for prepress, updates and plug-ins" - Diane Smallwood

"The loose format was OK, but not as focussed as prior sessions" - James Gross

"Both great presenters" - David Bailie

"Jeff showed great tips for prepress" - Maggie Tung

"Great recommendations for plug-ins plus other programs" - Ruth Johnson



Next Meeting

Our next meeting will likely be sometime in December.

We will be discussing Asset Management.
I've titled this meeting "DAM - WHERE'S THAT FILE".

Extensis will be sending one of their specialists to talk about Asset Management -Best Practices.

We also discussed a meeting idea for the spring - bringing in a local colour management expert to discuss this topic and how it relates to InDesign.

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