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Tuesday, April 18, 2006

We had another outstanding turnout, with about 130 people chewing down on fresh, hot pizza, soft drinks and water, and cookies. Those observing Passover could only look on wishfully while sipping water. Maybe matzoh and those super-sweet brownies next year?

After an hour of eating and conversing, we made our way into the U.S. Navy Memorial Auditorium, where we began our two-hour adventure.

The first half of the evening was devoted to a team of four folks from Washingtonian magazine. Margi Dooley, the Production Manager and a former Quark devotee, described the overall process and reasons behind the change. Basically, the difficulty in integrating their workflow system with newer versions of the Mac OS and Quark started them looking. Like many converts, they had been keeping an eye of InDesign®, but hadn’t seen enough positives to offset the complications that were bound to occur with a major change in production methodology.

Paul Chernoff, IT Director, followed Margi with an in-depth discussion of the K4 Publishing System, which is an editorial system that integrates with InDesign, much as QPS (Quark Publishing System) did with QuarkXPress. One of the features of the K4/ID (with InCopy®) solution that these folks liked was the ability for the editorial staff to see their articles in layout format, just as they would appear in print. And while the editorial folks could change their text, they could not alter the layout, much to the relief of the graphic designers.

Erin Chrisinger, one of Washingtonian’s designers, spoke highly of the way InDesign made her life easier. However, a mention was made, more than once, about the mysterious disappearing keyboard. We understand that Adobe has hired the Pinkertons to track it down.

Chad Lorenz, Managing Editor of the magazine, liked the edit-in-layout mode as well. He explained how it made it “writing to fit” much easier. Quark would have required full versions of QuarkXPress to get the same functionality, and then you would run the risk that writers and editors might damage the layout. That problem doesn’t exist with ID and InCopy.

The second half of the evening was devoted to Noha and our members showing how they made use of two ID features: layers and object styles. Julien Hofberg showed a magazine done for Marriott that was produced in multiple languages. English was on the base layer, while Spanish and Portuguese were on their own layers. In this way one ID file could produce different versions of the magazine for Central and South America.

John Barnes, of Washington Apple Pi, probably the area’s oldest computer user group, demonstrated how he used layers to make production of his newsletter far simpler. ID with layers saves him hours on each issue.

Grace Taylor, a professional photographer and novice InDesign user, created a beautiful book titled, A Tibetan Odyssey. Through her highly emotive photographs, we take the journey along with her.

Then Noha moved onto object styles, a new feature introduced in ID-CS2. Most of us are familiar with character styles and paragraph styles. Object styles takes this capability to a new level allowing the designer to create beautiful graphic effects with shapes, colors, rules, transparency, and object-level characteristics and save them to be recalled over and over again. Noha showed how you can integrate this feature with paragraph styles to make formatting the most complex objects a breeze.

Raffle

The evening concluded with a huge raffle, where the prizes ranged from books, T-shirts, training DVDs, and copies of Markzware FlightCheck to Adobe Acrobat® and TWO copies of InDesign CS2!

Our thanks to the sponsors for providing the raffle prizes and for their special discounts for our members. Check out the special offers on the right. Our sponsors were:

Total Training: www.totaltraining.com
Adobe Press: www.adobe.com/adobebooks
Markzware: www.markzware.com/main_us/
Adobe Systems: www.adobe.com

Ken Chaletzky
Copy General Corp.
Washington, D.C. Chapter Representative

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