Getting Your Admin Staff Trained On InDesign
Posted on May 16, 2008
Filed Under Computers and Technology |
InDesign is a key part of the arsenal of every graphic designer. It seems to have won out as the designers preferred page layout tool. However, increasingly, InDesign is also being used by general computer users within corporations keen to save money by producing some of their corporate literature in-house. So how do you train your admin staff to use a precision design tool like InDesign?
When attending a training course on InDesign, general users need more than an explanation of how to use the various tools and functions of the software. They need to learn about the page layout arena and how it differs from familiar programs like Microsoft Word. They need an overview of the typographical controls offered by InDesign, an explanation of how to specify colour for print and how to work with images.
InDesign offers a much greater degree of accuracy than programs like Microsoft Word. It allows users to precisely determine how and where elements will print on the page. Anyone attending an InDesign training course should learn about the tools that are used to achieve this accuracy. They should be shown how to use the grid, the baseline grid and ruler guides. They should feel confident about getting elements to print out precisely where and how they should.
The terminology which InDesign uses often looks back to the pre-electronic typographic age and is often a mystery to the general computer user. InDesign training should clarify these terms, perhaps by offering trainees some background facts and, wherever possible, by showing the similarity with parallel features in more familiar software. For example, we might compare what InDesign calls “leading” with what Microsoft Word calls line spacing in.
Because InDesign offers so much flexibility in transforming imported images, your average user often gets carried away and ends up scaling images up or down by huge factors. It needs to be explained that scaling up or down by more than 10% or so is undesirable since this can cause artefacts to appear in the printed image.
Colour terminology is often another cause of some confusion. The key facts that people will need to learn here are the difference between the CMYK and RGB colour spaces, how a colour print job is separated into the different plates and the difference between spot and process colours.
InDesign is meant to be used to create high quality output. Regardless of their background, new users must have it drummed into them how important it is to pre-flight documents, resolve errors and then package the job ready to be sent off to a printing company. They also need to learn how to produce a high- resolution PDF file.
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