InDesign Seminar

Last Friday I went to a Kelby Training seminar on Adobe InDesign. It was held in the convention center in Sacramento, which is good because that's before the crazy Sacramento freeway interchange where 3 freeways called I-80 intersect with a bunch of other freeway's and I always take the wrong one. =)

The seminar was taught by Taz Tally who was exceptionally good. Not only did he make a software training class interesting, he had a lot of tips that were relevant to my job, not to mention a comparison/contrast with Quark. I learned a lot. I spent most of the seminar mentally banging my head into a wall wishing I had known this stuff a year ago when preparing my portfolio at Davis. I learned tons of time savers and shortcuts that I had no idea even existed. Plus there was a section on Adobe Bridge which is a feature that I just started using a few months ago - but I'm planing on using a lot more now since it has some excellent features (most notably the batch rename and info template).

The best thing is that the seminar came with a booklet that followed along with the seminar and had room in the margins for notes, so I could pay more attention to the demonstrations instead of furiously jotting notes like I was back in college. I also joined the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP), which gives me access to tips and tricks for all the adobe products and discounts at a bunch of places. So here's to starting my new life as an InDesign pro.

Open Office

For once I paid attention to some pop up advertising. Java was doing it's update thing and it had a little ad for a program called Open Office. So I went to the site and downloaded it. It's great! I use Works for all my word processing/spreadsheet needs. But it doesn't open .doc files. So when someone sends me a word file I can't open it. But Open Office is solving that for me in a big way - it even has a program to open Power Point files, and you can edit and save in the same format. This thing is awesome.

InDesign Seminar

So next friday I'll be up in Sacramento all day with a bunch of other designers and artsy people for an InDesign Seminar. I'm hoping this will bring back all the InDesign stuff I learned up at Davis. I haven't used the program since I graduated so this will be a nice refresher course and I'm hoping to pick up some advanced skills. It's from 10 to 5 so I'll be inundated with tons of info. But that's good. After that I'm planning on doing some mock-ups so I don't lose the skills.

Additionally I ordered Quark a few days ago and it should be on its way. Quark was one of those programs that we didn't learn in school. All of my teachers always insisted that it was an outdated program that no one used - come to find out nearly all the places I apply for work require it. So I'm going to do some online classes so I can at least be familiar with the program. Hopefully it'll be similar to InDesign so I'll be able to pick it up quickly.