InDesign Conference Kicks Off to Great Start
The InDesign Conference in Chicago kicked off to a great start today, with approximately 400 attendees from all over North America, and a few from overseas (including one from Hong Kong and another from Qatar). See idconference.com for more information on the show.
Rudi Wartmann of ITIP sponsored the breakfast session, showing their very cool InMath plug-in, which makes mathematical typesetting in InDesign a breeze. He was then followed by:
- Sandee Cohen and I (David Blatner) showed essential tips & tricks that every InDesign user needs to know.
- Bestselling author Robin Williams (“The Little Mac Book,” and others) spoke on InDesign’s long document features and essential typographic techniques.
- Adobe’s Terry White disclosing all the cool (and free) tools and templates you can get on the install disks and from Adobe’s Studio site. In the afternoon he talked about how best to manage graphics in InDesign.
- Sandee Cohen (“InDesign Visual QuickStart Guide”) discussed cool tips for paragraph, character, and object styles.
- Our very own Anne-Marie Concepcion explained how InCopy could be useful in a design setting.
- Pariah Burke (www.quarkvsindesign.com) presented on Cool Type Techniques and “Where Text Meets Graphics”)
- Jamie McKee explained the basics of paragraph and character styles.
- Diane Burns taught a session on tables (including some things you didn’t think tables could do).
- I also presented on how InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator work together (including why InDesign is such a great tool for photocompositing).
- Claudia McCue presented a 3-hour tutorial in the morning on Acrobat, and then followed it with an hour on “The PDF Workflow” in the afternoon.
- Olav Martin Kvern (known to friends as Ole) went deep with three hours on scripting InDesign. It was a standing room only crowd.
At the end of the day, attendees hung out at a networking reception, followed by the well-received game show “Survivor: Return to Butterfly Island,” in which 10 contestants answered InDesign questions. The last remaining contestant, Ken Hollern, won a copy of the full Creative Suite. Great fun was had by all.
Congratulations on the exciting launch of indesignsecrets.com
I’m loving the conference and can’t wait to read more great tips here!
Good luck, David & Anne Marie
Hi David,
It is truly a great privilege to attend the conference with other InDesign and Creative Suite users.
Congratulations on the launch of indesignsecrets.com.
Thank you for all the tips and tricks, Susanna (Hong Kong)
Here’s some more fun information about Day 1 of The InDesign Conference, including some photographs: http://quarkvsindesign.com/news/archives/2006/05/indesign-conference-day-1/
Just got back from the conference. I’m busy adjusting my preferences and exploring what I learned at the conference. A nice surprise when I returned, my company upgraded to CS2, how exciting. Learned alot at the conference, Barry did a wonderful job putting everything together. All of the speakers were great! Looking forward to shaving valuable time off my production process. Thank you!
QuarkVsInDesign.com now has an article, written by yours truly, on Day 2 of the InDesign Conference. It’s not as deep as the previous article because I was in the XML half-day tutorial (which was great).
If you didn’t get to attend the XML sessions, check out my article on XML myths debunked in those sessions.
I certainly agree the confrence was great.
One question: some of the conference material is supposed to have been posted at the conference website since it wasn’t available in printed form at the conference itself. Terry White on Cool Resources, Olav Kvern’s presentation on scripting, the complete conference binder, among others. Where can I find these?
Chicago, -Indesign was the first conference I ever attended, it was great that everyone was professional, knowledgeable and eager to help. I learned alot of what the program can do. Now, all I have to do, is find the time, remember how to find it and use it. It was great to find common ground with others who have customers with nightmare files. David, Claudia, Jori, Sandee and the Dr. were the best. Chicago was an ethnic invasion shock, but we survived. Glad I live in rural Ohio. Hope to see you all in Cleveland area someday!
Happy InDesigning
Harvey, we’ll be emailing you (and all the conference attendees) the URL for the PDF version of the conference handouts. The binder is a perq for conference attendees only, though!