Adobe Education Exchange, InDesign

I’ve mentioned before that I am taking courses through AdobeEdEx in order to advance my skills with Creative Cloud programs. One of the hardest courses I took so far was Desktop Publishing in the Classroom, which focused on using InDesign. InDesign, while not a complete mystery to me like Illustrator, still eludes me on the more intermediate and advance use of the program. In the past, I used it to create business and postcards for my website. I also used it to create a process book for my mid-program review in grad school (*cough* that was almost a decade ago), but forgot most of what I learned. This class was the perfect refresher and pushed my skills beyond what I initially learned the first go around.

The classes had five projects (*flail*) that had to be completed:

1. Business card
2. Social Media Graphic/Postcard
3. Flyer
4. Brochure
5. Interactive PDF

The first two projects were fairly easy, but I did want to master using character/paragraph styles which I never bothered with in the past. I also got to incorporate Adobe Typekit typefaces which was exciting because all my default typefaces are boring and sad.

Once I got to the flyer, then it got more challenging. But this was also where I started to think more thematically with the different materials, trying a consistent design, type, and color palette.  The biggest challenge I had was on the interactive PDF which was so out of my realm. I had to closely follow the tutorial because it was easy to get lost.

You can see a more detailed overview of my learning on my class journal:

While I learned a lot, there still feels like a wealth of knowledge that I could potentially learn for InDesign. I feel much more comfortable approaching tutorials on my own having the basics covered. I’ll let you know if I continue more on this program in the future!