How to Become an InDesign ACE

Anne-Marie Concepcion

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In their list of New Year’s resolutions for 2007, I know a lot of InDesign users include “Get certified in Adobe InDesign,” because I’ve received a rash of e-mails from them in the past couple weeks … “How do I do it?”

It’s actually pretty easy to become an InDesign ACE (Adobe Certified Expert). You just take the official InDesign CS2 Exam — a closed-book, multiple-choice test with about 70 or 80 questions — at any nearby independent testing center that offers it (more on how to find these centers and register for the test appears below). The test costs $150 USD. Many employers will reimburse you for this, or if you’re a freelancer, it’s probably tax-deductible.

If you getting a passing score or better (usually around 70% correct is passing), you’re an ACE. The testing center tells you the minimum passing score and your score immediately after taking the test. You’ll be mailed a Welcome Kit from Adobe in a few weeks with a purty certificate and instructions on how to download the ACE logos for use in your web site, resume, or business cards.

If you didn’t pass, no biggie. You can take the test again after three months and the fee will be less (50% less, I think). Since each exam pulls its set of 80 questions or so from a bank of a few hundred questions it won’t be the exact same test, but at least you’ll have an idea of the scope and depth of the questions.

How Hard is the Test?

I’ve taken a lot of ACE tests over the years, including ones for Acrobat, GoLive, and Photoshop. (You have to take a test with each new version of each product … for CS2 I’ve just taken the ones for InDesign and InCopy.) Somehow I’ve managed to pass all of these on my first try, but for a couple that shall remain nameless I’ve staggered out of the testing center clutching my barely-passing score in my hands and had a stiff drink.

The InDesign CS2 test is not one of the nameless ones — it’s easier than some others, in my opinion. They give you at least 90 minutes but you’ll probably be done in half that time. If you’re an experienced InDesign user who works with a variety of project types (long and short docs, image-heavy and text-heavy) every day, and a good chunk of the program is quite familiar to you, you’ll probably be able to get a passing score right off the bat. There is no better preparation than actually using the program for real world jobs … and paying attention to the menu commands while you’re doing so.

To bolster your confidence, you may want to bone up on at least a couple areas of the product that a lot of people seldom use, such as the Book palette, interactive PDFs, using Bridge with InDesign, XML tags and the like. InDesign’s own online help (Help > InDesign Help) is ideal for this, as is the Adobe InDesign CS2 Classroom in a Book, especially because I think — but don’t quote me here — that all the correct answers from the actual exam are lifted right out of one or both of these resources.

Get the Exam Prep Guide

You can get an idea of what the test covers, and sample test questions and answers, by downloading the ACE Exam Guide for InDesign CS2 (PDF, 200K) from the Exam Prep Resources page on the Adobe site.

A brief review of the “Exam Topic Areas and Objectives” section shows that the test covers a fairly wide scope. Don’t let that discourage you, though. Since there’s a finite number of exam questions pulled from a larger pool, you might encounter only two or three from any one particular area. Person A taking the test might have to deal with only two XML questions, Person B might have nine (oh, lucky you). But you could conceivably fail all the XML questions and still pass, if you did well enough in the other areas.

Here’s a sample question from the practice exam:

You are editing a story in the Story Editor. A red vertical bar is displayed to the left of some of the text in the story. What does this indicate?
A. The text is overset.
B. You have edited the text.
C. Manual formatting is applied.
D. A red swatch is applied to the text.

(I’ll let someone post the correct answer as a comment.)

Register for the test

You can register for the InDesign CS2 ACE exam online, by phone, or in person at the testing center. When you register you can choose a location near you (there are over a thousand worldwide) and choose a time and date weeks in advance if you like.

The two companies that run the tests for Adobe are Pearson Vue and Thomson Prometric. Use the links to these companies from the Step 2 page of Adobe.com’s “Get Certified Today” section and you’ll be brought to the Adobe exam registration page for either one.

Good luck, and have fun!