InDesign Case Study
My crowning glory— or is it crowing glory? — for this semester wasn’t mastery of the course material for the course in visual thinking. Applying semiotics to imagery was rather interesting but the readings contained more words than images. They’d even describe images that weren’t included as if we were supposed to somehow see the painting or publication referenced.
Goodbye APA as a style guide. I was beginning to start emails with ” Shepherd (2011) stated that”. I now know the beauty of using a a guide but I think I’ll migrate over to the Associated Press (AP).
Hello InDesign from Adobe. Where have you been all my life? I’ve cast aside Microsoft Word with it’s finickiness (images that move around) and lack of style control for objects and tables. I’ll still use as writing tool — the grammar checking is great! — but I’m moving on.
I figured out how to manage a large number of images and their captions. Using Adobe Bridge I was able to create metadata for each image. InDesign is smart enough to read the data and generate a caption. In the future I’d like to write a book stuffed full of screenshots so this was important to me.
Styling, already familiar from Word and CSS, became easier as I worked with the tool. Tables and object styles are great tools for consistency. Running headers, sections, table of contents are now all easy as pie. Well, not pie because I’m not a great baker.
Take a gander at the paper if you like. I couldn’t bear to explore an esoteric visual topic so I performed a case study for a non-profit website that I’m trying to improve. The paper examines five websites and how the designers created a visual hierarchy, consistent color palette, and a whole host of other visual cues. I can now move forward with the non-profit’s webdesign copying ideas from the best.
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