MAJOR RESEARCH/CREATIVE ACTIVITY SAMPLE #8
"Mastering Adobe InDesign," Sybex, Inc., September 1999. Co-author (Renee LeWinter) of third-party software manual for brand-new professional page layout application.
Adobe Systems, Inc., publishers of the widely-used graphics programs Photoshop, PageMaker, and Illustrator, have been hinting for several years that they were putting together a page layout software application intended to challenge QuarkXPress for market dominance. That brand new application, first code-named "K2", has been developed and is now being published as Adobe InDesign.
Sybex, Inc., the largest independent publisher of computer trade books in the world, asked me to develop and write what would be one of the first third-party manuals for this new software, for their best-selling Mastering series. I jumped on this opportunity, believing that this School and my students would benefit greatly from me becoming one of the world's first experts in this new application. Because of delays in Adobe's release of the beta versions, our writing and production schedule became compressed, so in order to meet our planned publication date we contracted an additional author, Renée LeWinter, to write a third of the book. The book was edited by the acquisitions editor, the project editor, a copy editor, and a technical editor.
I have been working with the application since beta version 2, which was the first version sent out to reviewers and authors. We have since been given beta versions 3 and 4. Being one of these official beta testers has been really rewarding for me, because in addition to using these beta versions to learn and document this application for my book, I have been contributing to the ongoing pre-release development and refinement of the application.
The challenge in writing this book has been becoming an expert in a software application that has not yet even been published. For example, when I wrote the ACE Photoshop Exam Cram, I was able to fall back on my many years of experience in Photoshop. But with InDesign, I had to learn and master the software from scratch.
Adobe InDesign has been developed to provide a more efficient application for multi-page publication design and production. For this reason, the newspaper design industry has been waiting anxiously for its debut, as discussed in the attached article from a recent issue of Editor & Publisher.
After having learned this application, I can say that its hype has not been overblown. I think that neither QuarkXPress nor Adobe's own PageMaker application offer more efficient and capable document production. I think that within the next few years, InDesign will steadily work its way into a dominant market position in our industry. I believe this not only because of InDesign's own features, but also because of its integration and common interface with Adobe's other graphics applications, which also dominate in the market.