InDesign

[Sports_Writer]

My writing experience is primarily online and freelance work. It seems like almost every newspaper job post requires knowledge of InDesign.

Is there a specific version that you should know? Has anyone signed up for the per month plan on Adobe.com?

 

[Mark2010]

If you've ever worked with QuarkXPress, the transition to InDesign is not that difficult. I pretty much taught myself all I needed to know by simply using what I knew about Quark and experimenting. Not an expert, but I could do enough to get a no frills job done.

Hey, if I can learn it, anyone can.

 

[apeman33]

That's good to know. We're supposed to complete our transition to InDesign by the end of the month. It also gets us off these 8-year old Apples, all of which are about to kick the bucket, onto new Apples which might actually be able to run longer than 15 minutes without crashing.

 

[schiezainc]

I took a job a couple months ago that took me from six years of using Quark into one using exclusively InDesign. I spent a week training with the person I was replacing (who was retiring) where I essentially just made a mental checklist of where everything I would need was and, on the first real hands-on day, looked like I'd been on the program for years.
It's a breeze and works really well if your chain has some kind of content management system that syncs with it. At the place I'm at, we use BLOX and apart from the occasional bug, it's great.
The best part is that when the pages do crash, and yes it still happens, you rarely lose much if anything. So much better than Quark.

 

[HandsomeHarley]

I switched to Indesign a couple of stops ago.

I echo the sentiments in that it isn't difficult to transition from Quark. However, it would be a pain in the ass to try to work with both at the same time. Some of the commands are in different places.

That said, I have worked with newer versions, but the cheapskates at my current stop basically have the beta version. It sucks. There are more bugs than a discount travel lodge. It's a pain in the ass. It gets even worse when you try to use Indesign and Photoshop, or Indesign and the Internet, at the same time. But that's a rant against the cheapskates here.

 

[Versatile]

InDesign is great.

 

[HanSenSE]

Been a few years, but it was an easy transition from Quark to InDesign.

 

[reformedhack]

I'll add to the pile. I actually enjoyed using Quark, but InDesign was a very easy transition -- and a much more powerful program if you've got entire Adobe creative suite integrated.

 

[murphyc]

I made the transition to InDesign a year ago after previously using Quark. Aside from forgetting that certain Quark commands didn't work in InDesign, transition wasn't too bad.
As for the OP, do you have any layout experience at all? If not, it probably wouldn't hurt to try the free month-long trial. It probably also wouldn't hurt to search the interwebs (and Youtube) for how-to stories and videos.

 

[nmmetsfan]

InDesign is more user friendly and is more logical than Quark. The transition from Quark to InDesign is easy to make and you can do so much more with InDesign.

 

[flexmaster33]

We did the same Quark to InDesign last summer...it was a smooth transition...of course we held a company-wide workshop among the sports writers with the tech crew to get introduced to it. That helped a lot, but it's been smooth, and now I prefer InDesign slightly, although the programs are very similar

 

[joe_schmoe]

Doing a trial of InDesign does really depend on how much design experience you have.
Almost everyone here has told you how the transition is from Quark, and that's great if you've used Quark, but reading the original post, it doesn't look like you have.
One thing you might do first is download a freeware design program (even Microsoft Publisher, as bad as it is will do if it's on your computer) just to familiarize yourself with the basics of creating picture boxes, text boxes, and simple pages and designs. Then perhaps do the InDesign trial, though I imagine neither will give you the real world experience most jobs want you to have.

 

[I'll never tell]

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.

 

[spikechiquet]

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

 

[expendable]

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.

 

[jr/shotglass]

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.

 

[JRoyal]

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 ***** and moan when the place you get a job has an earlier version that can't do the cool stuff you learned.

 

[The Big Ragu]

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.

 

[jr/shotglass]

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.

 

[buckweaver]

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.

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.