Little things mean a lot

Got home at a not-too-obscene hour this evening (9pm) and treated myself to a bottle of wine, of which I am currently enjoying the second glass. *sigh*...so nice.

I'm into the final phase of this humungous project I've been working on for the last few months. Tomorrow it'll all be wrapped up and sent off to the printer. Mark my words, though...sometime between this coming Wednesday, and the following Wednesday, I will get sick. Probably just a cold. It happens every time I finish a big, stressful, long-term project. As soon as it's finished, I kind of wilt, no longer having the momentum of nervous energy to keep me going. Within a few days to a couple of weeks, my newly relaxed system is attacked by marauding germs and doesn't have the energy to fight them off. There have been a couple of days in the last few weeks when I've thought I was coming down with something, but have either fought it off, or was just mistaken.

Anyway...what I really wanted to write about was this cool new program I've had to learn to finish off this project. You may remember I was having a lot of trouble with crashing and losing my formatting and stuff.* Well, out of desperation, I took the tiger by the tail and switched to a completely different program, with which I had only the slightest familiarity.

The original program was called QuarkXpress. I've been using Quark for 17 years. I taught myself to use it, and I consider myself a power user (except for a few arcane little things that I've never really needed anyway.

But Quark just didn't seem to be up to the challenge of this almost 400-page document I was working on...even though said document was entirely text and had not a single graphic anywhere. It kept crashing. Then it started to do some truly bizarre things...things my IT department had never even heard of. Being a seasoned and confident Mac user, I rarely experience issues I can't deal with on my own. So, I'm convinced, my computer sits there all night coming up with weird and wonderful ways to stump me and my IT department. I always come up with the best problems for them...they told me so.

I really should start shutting the damn thing down at night. It has far too much down-time in which to plot against me.

After one particularly blog-worthy round of fuckitudinousness which cost me about five hours worth of work, I flung my hands in the air and said "fuck it...I'm going to do this with InDesign."

For those who aren't familiar with it, InDesign is a relatively new program created by Adobe. It's pretty much designed to do the same kind of things as Quark (any kind of design/publication that will end up in print), and was launched against Quark in an aggressive campaign to steal the mighty graphic designer market.

InDesign got off to a rocky start. Adobe hadn't done their homework well enough at first, and the program just wasn't robust enough to be considered for use in a real production environment like the one I work in. Plus, hardly anyone else used it, so sending InDesign files around was likely to get you a lot of complaints from production departments who couldn't do anything with them.

Well, Adobe got smart. They did their homework. They worked out the kinks in the program. They marketed the bejeebers out of it. They evangelized it all over the damn place.

And their master stroke? They bundled it with all their other heavy-weight programs: Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat/Distiller, not to mention a few lesser-known but very useful programs. So now, for less than what it would cost to buy a single copy of QuarkXPress, you can buy the Adobe Creative Suite and pretty much be set up with everything you need to run a production/design workstation.

So, when any designer or design department needs Photoshop or Illustrator, they also get InDesign in the bargain. Great way to tempt people to try something they might not have bothered with otherwise. Might as well check it out, right? It's right here on my computer anyway.

But the result of this has had a much greater impact than might at first be apparent. Not only does pretty much every professional design station now have a copy of InDesign by default, just because they need Photoshop and/or Illustrator anyway, but schools are included in this process. And guess what, folks...schools don't have a lot of money to throw around. Schools are going to look at where the trends are going in design and go in that direction too, if they can afford it. And how much easier is it to afford to equip hundreds of student workstations with a bundle of five or six new, exciting software titles that cost the same as one relatively stodgy, not very well supported title? And we're not even talking about the cost of upgrades here. Yeesh.

About two years ago, I started noticing a curious trend. Students were coming out of design school with hardly any experience with QuarkXpress. They were being taught InDesign in school. Well, that was a pisser for me, seeing as my whole operation revolves around documents built with Quark. I was pretty pissed off, to tell the truth, and I let a few college administrators know it! But now I understand.

So...back to my story.

Now, InDesign is a program with which, as I said, I have only the most rudimentary familiarity. But I had to do something. I would never have made my deadline if things had carried on the way they were going with Quark. So I made the bold and terrifying decision to build the damn thing in InDesign. I had a manual I'd bought for myself months prior. I got it out and just started looking up everything as I needed to do it. It was kind of like learning to write English with an entirely different alphabet.

One advantage I had was my familiarity with Quark. I knew that InDesign was created to replace Quark, so of course it has to do all the same things as Quark does. I just had to figure out how. Most of the keyboard commands are different, which screws me up continuously... I keep typing Command-E to import pictures or text, and get the Export dialogue box instead. Simple things like cropping photos are a bit of a mystery to me still. But everything is there...you just have to find it. The menus are different, and in a lot of cases the actions have different names (ie: Place, rather than Import) which can make it difficult to find what you need in the manual's index.

But I'm doing it! I've just finished laying out a 368-page document full of phone listings, subdivided into 19 different sections, each of which has its own unique page headers and side "tabs". I've also completed the yellow pages section... 99 pages full of ads. And I bet I've saved a third to one half of the time it would have taken me to do the same thing in Quark. (makes me cringe a little thinking "what if I'd done this all in Quark...even if it had been behaving?...I'd have missed my deadline!)

Those headers and tabs were the source of a huge amount of excitement and glee for me this evening as I figured out how to do in about half an hour what would have taken me at least four hours of incredibly tedious manual fiddling to do in Quark. I'm glad the office was empty, because my whoops of delight and excitement when I worked it out would have been embarrassing. (I need to take note of moments like that. They're instructive...they give me a window into the types of things that get my motor going...the types of things I should be looking for when deciding on a new career. But that's another topic for another day.)

So, while I am still very much an InDesign beginner, I have one thing to say about this wonderful new program I am learning...

I LOVE INDESIGN!!!!


*Note: I finally discovered what was causing Quark to crash and act so weird. Believe it or not...it was my mouse.