Getting Your Admin Staff Trained On InDesign

Graphic designers are increasingly adopting InDesign as their preferred page layout tool and are constantly singing its praises. I've personally been conducted numerous conversion courses for designers keen to make the switch from QuarkXPress to InDesign. However, as a trainer, I have noticed another trend: the widespread adoption of InDesign by corporations keen to have their own staff produce in-house documents which have hitherto been outsourced. Running training courses for this new type of user accounts for a significant amount of the InDesign training that I offer.

If someone attending an InDesign training course comes from an admin background and is used to programs like Microsoft Word, the training needs to give them some insights into the world to which InDesign belongs. They need to learn something about typefaces, fonts and typographical controls. They need to understand image file formats, image manipulation and the definition of colours for print.

InDesign is a precision tool, allowing the user to very accurately specify the attributes of all elements on the page and the relationship between them. Most general users will remain unaware of this precision unless it is pointed out to them. During training, they should learn the use of ruler guides, grids and baseline grids and basically how to make elements align correctly and print in the right place on the page.

The terminology used in InDesign often harks back to the pre-electronic typographic age and is often confusing to the general user. It's important to clarify these terms, perhaps by offering users a bit of background information and, wherever possible, by making comparisons with similar features in familiar software. For example, we might compare leading in InDesign with line spacing in Microsoft Word.

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 can also confuse the general InDesign user. The key facts that people will need to be taught here are, firstly, the difference between the RGB and CMYK colour spaces; secondly, how the colour print job gets separated into the four different plates and, thirdly, the difference between process and spot colours.

InDesign is meant to be used for creating high quality output. New users of the program must be told how vital it is to pre-flight documents, fix errors and then package the job so it can be sent off to a printing company. They should also be taught how to produce a high-resolution PDF file.

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The The writer of this article is a trainer and developer with Macresource Computer Solutions, an independent computer training company offering Adobe InDesign Classes at their central London training centre. Don't reprint the same version as everyone else. Get your own unique content InDesign article here.

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