InDesign: So Simple a 58 Year-Old Can Master It
Written: Apr 22 '08 (Updated Apr 22 '08)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Professional design software with professional results.
Cons: Slow to load, need to resize photos in different program.
The Bottom Line: While InDesign seemed difficult to me at first, it soon became my preferred design program because of the high-quality, precision final results.
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| frazzledspice's Full Review: Adobe InDesign® CS3 Full Version for PC (2751... |
Start a new job--learn a new skill. At age 25, that's easy. At age 58, it's not so easy. As a Communications Director at a non-profit organization, I felt comfortable with my writing background and my talent as an ideas person, but considerably less so in the great unknown field of graphic design. To make matters worse, my first assignment was to put together the quarterly newsletter on InDesign, a program I'd never used.
That was four months ago. I learned the program sitting with the Dummies Book at my left and the Help Menu at my right, and the printer just a phone call away. "If you want to, you can put it together in our office, so that if you have any questions, we can help you," their whiz kid said, who was obviously able to work faster than the speed of light in InDesign.
But much to my astonishment, the Dummies Book and the Help Menu were enough for me to figure out what I needed to figure out, and to even get good enough at it that I now consider it easy.
Does Menu-Driven Help When the Menu Is in a Foreign Language?
InDesign is in English, of course, but it uses some terminology that laypeople don't use. Like "bleeds" and "slugs" (a tiny bit of space in the side margins that ink might creep out onto.) Or "gutters" (the space between columns--if you are making a trifold or quarter fold brochure, you'd better have enough of a gutter to keep the print from falling into the fold.) Or "leading," a term used to describe the space between lines, which is measured in points instead of single or double space. If your text size is 12, for example, and you want more space between lines, change the leading to 14 or 16. This made using the Help Menu (and the Dummies Book) difficult--there should have been an answer for "double-space" that said, "See 'leading.'"
You can get glossaries of these terms on the Adobe website or About.com, and if you've never worked in a design program before, you should probably print one out.
Like Any Other Program, the More Choices You Have, the More Difficult the Program
But you don't have to learn everything right away, and you don't have to use it all right away (you just have to wade through it all to get to what you need.)
You can access most of what you need to find in two ways--through the Drop-Down menus on top, and through the toolbars on the sides. Since I'm not always good at figuring out what those icons are supposed to be, having the choice of using words made it a little easier.
At some point in time (after one newsletter, a dozen or so brochures, and several posters and cards) it became easier than Publisher and Word. Co-workers would give me half-completed projects--brochures in Publisher, envelopes in Word--and it seemed easiest and most natural to put them in InDesign. It just takes the patience and discipline to say to yourself--"OK, this will be harder and slower before it becomes easier and faster, but the easy and fast will come."
What I Like About InDesign
InDesign produces a beautiful, precision-made document that is printer-ready when you package it and e-mail it off to the print shop. You can buy it in a “Creative Suite” with other Adobe products--Ilustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat 8 and more. Having all Adobe products would probably result in easier interfaces--I have Corel Photo Paint at work, and going back and forth is probably not as easy. Having the Creative Suite would also mean that the different toolbars, drop down menus, etc. would be very similar, making for an easier learning experience.
You can create PDF files in just a few clicks (you need a separate program with Publisher, or you have to have PDF capacity in your printer.)
What I Dislike About InDesign
Resizing photos has to be done in a photo editing program. This allows for greater precision, but for small, simple resizes it would be nice to be able to do it in InDesign. You can crop in InDesign, but you lose part of the visible photo area.
The program doesn’t load that quickly, and even though it could be my office computer, it seems to move more slowly than other programs on my office computer.
There is an online exchange, and an online forum available, but Adobe doesn’t have the amount of templates or clipart available as Microsoft does, for example. If you own other Microsoft products, however, you can still use all their clipart and templates.
Recommendation
This week I spoke to a small business owner who prints missionary newsletters. I told her how much money my company saved on printing when we submitted our work in InDesign. She told me that some missionaries (who need every penny) use programs like Publisher, and that they accept things in Publisher, even though InDesign and Quark are preferred, but that some need to have their work professionally set up, resulting in much more expense.
And so, if you use professional printers, it will save you money to use programs like InDesign or Quark. If you have a non-profit or educational business, purchasing the software will be less expensive.
And if I could learn it at 58, with the Dummies Book on my left and the Help Menu on my right, so can you!
Recommended:
Yes
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