InDesign for Beginners, Novices, Amateurs and Students (aka InDesign for Dummies)

Your User Group Comes to the East Hollywood

Continuing the policy of holding meetings in various locations throughout the southland, this meeting will be held in metropolitan Los Angeles at Los Angeles City College, located near the Hollywood Freeway, east of Hollywood and south of Los Feliz.

This Month’s Topic: InDesign for Beginners, Novices, Amateurs and Students (aka InDesign for Dummies)

Don’t know what a pica is? Intimidated by all that InDesign has to offer but still fascinated by it? Embarrassed to ask questions in front of God and everybody? Then this is the meeting for you.

With all this talk of ePubs, interactivity and animations, we sometimes forget that a lot people use InDesign to produce simple flyers or organization newsletters. If you are new to InDesign or a beginner, if you bought InDesign years ago but it sits unused because you were overwhelmed, if you have InDesign but still use Microsoft Publisher, this is the meeting for you.

In the first third of the evening we begin at the beginning and build a simple document slowly. The remainder of the evening will be devoted to your questions — everything you wanted to know about InDesign but were afraid to ask. Bring your questions to the meeting or email them to us in advance — or do both.

Perks for Experienced Users

So what if you aren’t a novice and have done intimate things with picas? Should you stay at home? Of course, not. First, InDesign has soooooo much to offer that even experts can’t know it all. You might learn just one extraordinarily useful tip at this meeting that somehow you overlooked. Second, we are counting on experienced users to answer the questions posed by novices. Experienced users who attend and answer at least five questions posed by beginners will receive a free T-shirt. Let the world know you’ve got skills. If someone asks an involved question, or someone doesn’t “get” the answer during the meeting, perhaps a more in depth conference can take place during the break.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and he won’t have to call technical service. In addition to answering your questions, we want everyone to leave the meeting with some sense of how to find answers to the questions that will come up tomorrow, next week or next month. Everyone who attends will receive a packet of resource information listing websites, schools, books, classes, magazines, tutorials, associations, conferences, etc. — all the places you can go to help make you an InDesign expert.

Agenda

7:00 p.m. - Meet and greet
7:30 p.m. - Welcome and announcements
7:45 p.m. - Presentation (with mid-presentation break)
9:45 p.m. - Raffles
10:00 p.m. - Goodbyes

Faculty and Staff Center

The address of the campus is 855 N. Vermont Ave., but that is not the address of the Faculty and Staff Center, which doesn’t really have one. The Center is located slightly northwest of the intersection of Monroe St. and New Hampshire Ave. It is south of Da Vinci Hall and west of the Student Life Cub Center. If you get lost, call 323-662-5276 (Campus Cops) for directions. For a map, go here: Campus Map.

Parking

Parking at LACC can be difficult. Be sure to arrive early enough to find a space.

Raffles

• SOFTWARE: Adobe CS5.5 product (InDesign, InCopy, Illustrator, Flash Professional, Dreamweaver or Flash Catalyst). Value to $699.
• SOFTWARE: Markzware product (Q2ID plugin, Corrupt InDesign File Recovery Service, Quark to InDesign File Conversion Service, PageZephyr, FlightCheck or PUB2ID). Value to $399.
• HARDWARE: Hewlett-Packard 20" wide-screen LCD monitor, model S2031. Value $169.95. We’re giving away TWO of these!
• TRAINING COURSE: Mogo Media instructor-led class “CSS for Designers” presented by Brian Wood. All-day class September 22, 2011 in Los Angeles. Value $149.
• PUBLICATION: InDesign Magazine. Value $69. We’re giving away TWO of these!
• BOOK: “You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story!” by Richard Schickel. Value $29.98.
• and more!

Sponsors

Adobe InDesign Magazine
O’Reilly Press
Peachpit Press
Markzware

Refreshments

The evening’s refreshments are provided courtesy of Tim Jones and Accelerate Computer Training. ACT provides hands-on computer training classes to Southern California in accelerated one- to three-day, instructor-led, small-group classes. Based in Long Beach, California, ACT delivers top-quality Adobe authorized computer training on both Mac and Windows computers in many popular applications for all levels of users. Students may re-take a class as many times as they would like for free for up to six months from the original class date.

Shouts

Special thanks to Gohar Amirkhanian, Joni Varner, Vaughn Obern and Dan Wantanabe, all of whom, more or less, hand a hand in us meeting at Los Angeles City College.

Meeting Notes

By Alvin Takamori

Continuing the policy of holding meetings in various locations throughout the southland, the September meeting of the Los Angeles InDesign User Group was held at Los Angeles City College in East Hollywood.

Our homegrown presenter, Michael Diaz, spoke on the topic “InDesign for Beginners, Novices, Amateurs and Students (aka InDesign for Dummies).” Not only is Michael an active member of our group, but he is a certified Adobe Expert in InDesign and is currently the Content Services Manager at Source Interlink Media. There he is responsible for the conversion of InDesign content to XML for 50+ magazines, the creation of a CMS Taxonomy and the conversion of InDesign content to ePub.

Michael began with the basics of InDesign, demonstrating the various panels and how to access them. Then he demonstrated the various ways to maneuver through a multi-page document. We were also shown several ways of zooming in and out of a page, including clicking and holding the hand tool and pressing the up or down arrow keys to select the size of the area to zoom to. Michael suggested ways to arrange windows and then pointed out the window application bar and some of the elements on it. We saw how to change ruler units from picas to inches, or anything else you want, by control- or right-clicking directly on the ruler. Returning to panels, he demonstrated how easily panels could be rearranged and docked together in different groups and how to save those workspaces. It was also pointed out that there are numerous options that are accessed directly from the panels.

A key feature of InDesign are preferences, and Michael gave us a quick tour of the assorted settings that can be adjusted there. Then he gave us an introduction to the tools. Creating equal spacing between multiple shapes with the Gap tool and loading the Eyedropper tool with sampled text styles were a couple of highlights. He also discussed the options in the New Document dialog box, the endless list of keyboard shortcuts and how to create custom shortcuts, and how to create and move guides.

All attendees received a packet listing many resources for learning more about InDesign. From the InDesign User Group and Adobe websites, to books, training videos and websites, to private trainers, there are numerous ways to become more educated about this software program.

As always, we had some lucky raffle winners at this meeting. Faiane Berger and Nancy Fox won InDesign Magazine subscriptions, and Nancy Lim and Chris English each won a Hewlett-Packard 20” LCD monitor. Greg Overton continues to prove that the more tickets you buy, the better your chances, as he won the Mogo Media “CSS for Designers” training class and Markzware software. Wayne Cosman won the grand prize, Adobe software, and selected InDesign 5.5.

Thank You

Here’s a shout out to the meeting’s facilitators: Adobe, Mogo Media, Markzware, InDesign Magazine, O’Reilly Press, Peachpit Press, and to Gohar Amirkhanian, Joni Varner, Vaughn Obern and Dan Wantanabe, all of whom, more or less, had a hand in us meeting at Los Angeles City College.

Job Opportunities

We are looking for people who want to get involved with the administration of the group. Maybe you have web skills, newsletter skills, an eye for photos, want to conduct the raffles. Whatever. Let’s talk.

Orange County InDesign User Group

This isn’t really an industry event, but it may very well be of interest to you: The Los Angeles InDesign User Group now has less territory to cover in trying to serve the needs of InDesign Users in Southern California. You asked for it. You got it. Scot Trodick of Orange County Digital Arts has set up the Orange County InDesign User Group. Yea! Not only will those in Orange County have access to ongoing meetings rather than once-in-a-while, but Los Angeles members who didn’t want to travel far south for those occasional meeting no longer have to. Welcome Scot, and good luck!

First meeting of the Orange County chapter will be held Tuesday, October 4. Go to http://www.indesignusergroup.com/chapters/orangecounty to register for the chapter or for the meeting.

Next Meeting

John Schuman will be on the dais at our next meeting, November 17, 2011 at 7 p.m. at the Yahoo Center, 2500 Broadway St., Santa Monica, CA 90404.

John currently holds the title of Senior Product Manager, WW Education, for Adobe Systems Inc. John has almost 20 years of experience in the field of digital imaging with over ten of those years focused primarily on web design and graphic technology. John joined Macromedia in 1998 following several years of digital imaging production experience in the San Francisco Bay Area and subsequently served as regional Solutions Engineer for Macromedia in Singapore from 1999 to 2001 where he spoke to thousands of Web professionals across the Asia/Pacific region at seminars and industry events. Upon returning to the U.S. in 2001, he took the role of Senior Education Solutions Engineer, focusing primarily on Higher Education in the North American region. John currently resides in Los Angeles, California.