Saturday, May 9, 2009

One-Day InDesign Workshop: What I Learned...


This past Friday, I enrolled in a workshop to help bring myself up to speed on the current layout design program which is quickly becoming the industry standard: Adobe InDesign CS4. For those of you who don't know, CS stands for Creative Suite and it is the premiere design software package on the market today for both print and web design. Now, although I have a undergrad degree in Graphic Design, the industry has switched from using Quark Xpress to InDesign pretty exclusively and I wanted to be up on the latest software before I started my Grad Program at the University of Baltimore this Fall.

The workshop was taught by an adjunct professor at UB and covered everything necessary to be proficient within the layout program's environment, from basic document tools to setting up complex templates for larger documents. Although it was geared toward teaching the basics to those who were not familiar with the layout software whatsoever, I still found tremendous value in what was being presented. The few areas in which I could "feel" my way through, given my background with Quark, were made much more clear and the areas in which I had struggled or in which had previously taken unnecessary steps to preform were simplified.

Upon completion of this one-day InDesign workshop, I feel that the time and money spent will save me hours of aggravation once the semester starts and the assignments begin to role in. This workshop also gave me the experience of being back in classroom setting, which I have not had in a number of years. This workshp was overall an invaluable experience and I look forward to the several other workshops I plan to attend over the summer.

Up next: Adobe Illustrator – Pen Tool Workshop!