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InDesign

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by Sports_Writer, Oct 9, 2013.

  1. I'll never tell

    I'll never tell Active Member

    Check Youtube. People don't really think about using it for its volumes of tutorials.

    And thank Jesus every day you're getting to work in InDesign ... and not CCI.
     
  2. spikechiquet

    spikechiquet Well-Known Member

    We have InDesign, but barely use it. We are using a web-based design program now.
     
  3. expendable

    expendable Well-Known Member

    When my former shop went to InDesign, I cheated by switching to Quark keys. I never learned the ID functions. Now that I'm teaching some of my students on InDesign, I...Iiii...have regrets.
     
  4. jr/shotglass

    jr/shotglass Well-Known Member

    Count another InDesign fan here. Suggestion: Commit to memory some of the key combinations you'll need to do common tasks. For instance, knowing I can size a photo down to the window with CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+E is a great time-saver. An overline or underline with CTRL+ALT+J ... another one. They're gold on this program, and eventually it's down to muscle memory. You don't even have to think about it.
     
  5. JRoyal

    JRoyal Well-Known Member

    I'll echo the praise for InDesign. Far better than Quark.

    As for your questions, if you can afford it, getting it for a couple of months to get familiar wouldn't hurt. There are plenty of tutorials on Youtube, or you can check Lynda.com if you want something more formal.

    And I'd just pick a version. There are some things you can do in later versions that you can't in earlier, but if you learn one version, it translates pretty easily to the later ones. A lot of papers are probably on CS4 or later, so I'd get at least CS4, but you can always just subscribe to the latest and bitch and moan when the place you get a job has an earlier version that can't do the cool stuff you learned.
     
  6. The Big Ragu

    The Big Ragu Moderator Staff Member

    The responses on this thread are really interesting. I come from a magazine and newsletter background, and have been at it for a long time. I remember when Pagemaker dominated the marketplace -- it actually revolutionized page layout. Quark came in in the late 80s, and by the early 90s, it had probably taken away dominance from Pagemaker. Throughout the 90s and into the early 2000s, it seemed as if Quark would never lose its cash cow of a business. I can't remember exactly when Adobe did the first version of InDesign. I wasn't paying attention. But I made the switchover with CS2, probably in 2005 -- just for a couple of projects here and there. We were stuck with Quark for other things for legacy reasons. The more we used InDesign, the more intuitive, and better, it seemed. You could get to the same place as you could with Quark, but it just took less time, and integrated really well with Photoshop. I don't do a ton of design work myself, but I can't imagine working in Quark. We don't even bother to update with new versions anymore.

    There was a time in the early 2000s, when I was doing magazines, when I could have never imagined anything taking away the market from Quark. It's stunning just how unable they were to keep what they had. Too stodgy, too slow innovating and too slow keeping up with what Adobe did with InDesign.
     
  7. jr/shotglass

    jr/shotglass Well-Known Member

    I was anxious to paginate before we actually had a pagination system in the early '90s. So I learned how to send complete Quark pages. Where we've come since then is just earth-shaking.
     
  8. buckweaver

    buckweaver Active Member

    Quark's decline has very little to do with the lack of innovation in its desktop publishing program and a lot more to do with Adobe having a much more diversified business from the very beginning, when Photoshop, Illustrator and other core CS products were first developed.

    Individually, QuarkXPress and InDesign aren't that different, which is why we've all been able to transfer skills from one program to the other so easily.

    But what makes InDesign (and the whole Creative Suite) so powerful is that Adobe is able to integrate all its products together — products that Quark had little interest in developing on its own. Adobe's been developing them since the late 1980s. Its dominance was a foregone conclusion. Once Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2003, there was no question that Quark was doomed.
     
  9. Versatile

    Versatile Active Member

    Even aside from the streamlining with Photoshop and Illustrator, InDesign is significantly smoother and more versatile than Quark.
     
  10. The Big Ragu

    The Big Ragu Moderator Staff Member

    The integration with Photoshop, which I pointed out in my post, was a major selling point for InDesign. But Quark was really slow to innovate, too, and InDesign introduced a lot of features that Quark took forever to keep pace with. In particular, InDesign allowed you to import graphics with layers and turn them on and off. And this was a biggie for stuff we were doing -- Quark took forever to introduce simple drop shadows. The last few versions of Quark we worked with where also incredibly buggy compared to InDesign. Of course it helped Adobe that InDesign integrated so well with Photoshop and Illustrator and they took market share by bundling them in creative suites. But Quark did a crappy job of seeing what was happening to its brand and investing to keep what it had taken so long to get. If you remember the days of Quark having the whole market, it really is stunning how far they fell -- really from around 2003 on, when Adobe came out with CS.
     
  11. Football_Bat

    Football_Bat Well-Known Member

    We switched from Quark to InDesign at some point in 2006 (during the summer, thank goodness), and the transition was an extreme pain in the ass. It's all good now, but I remember bitching about some of the handy Quark features that went away. Cutline info used to drag with the art, for example.
     
  12. Drip

    Drip Active Member

    InDesign is pretty cool to work with. It has some quirks, like every system but NO BEACH BALLS!!!!!!
     
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