Wow. That’s about all we can say.

The first-ever InDesignSecrets Print and ePublishing Conference took place last week in Seattle and it exceeded our every hope and expectation. We had over 200 attendees from six different continents converge on Adobe University (which Adobe was kind enough to let us use). The weather was extraordinarily beautiful, but of course most of the time we were inside listening to an even more extraordinary line-up of publishing experts. A great time was had by all.

Here’s what it looked like inside the main room (when the airwalls were removed we had three large screens plus two smaller screens):

David presenting on "From InDesign to iPad"

Presenters and attendees would mingle in the back of the room. Here are three indesignsecrets contributors (and speakers) hangin’ out:

Mike Rankin, Keith Gilbert, and James Fritz maccin' out in the back row

You can find more photos on our flickr group. Other folks have also posted photos on Facebook and elsewhere, but we’ll let them post those links below in the comments if they feel so inclined.

One of the most interesting aspects of the show for us was watching the #pepcon hash tag on twitter. It was amazing seeing so many people “talking” in realtime about the sessions.

Because there were so many people in from out of town, Anne-Marie had a great idea to run a Thursday-evening “Ignite InDesign” event, where we encouraged attendees to sign up and present a 5-minute slideshow on any InDesign-or-publishing-related topic. It was superb — a wide range of serious-to-funny, educational-to-wacky… We had no idea how many people would show up, but we enticed them with mini-cupcakes and it was standing room only!

Kris Coppieters showing his amazing CSSDK "fitting" plug-in

With an all-star line-up of presenters at the conference, including Rufus Deuchler, Russell Viers, Mordy Golding, Michael Ninness, many (but unfortunately not all) of the indesignsecrets contributors, and too many others to mention (check the archived speaker page), the sessions were bound to be high-quality… and they did not disappoint!

For those of you who were there: Thanks for coming! If you weren’t able to be there this time, don’t worry: We’re pumped to do it again in another city. Make sure you’re signed up as a (free) member on this site so that you’re on the mailing list… that way you’ll always be among the first to know about upcoming events.