Customer Reviews

Getting Started with Adobe InDesign CS2 Personal Seminar

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Terry White has an excellent reputation as an InDesign trainer so I did not hesitate in purchasing this. After viewing, my own opinion on this particular training vehicle is that the beginner would be totally lost even though it is being marketed for the Beginner/Intermediate. The video quality is so out of focus and so fuzzy that one can barely make out the screen shots, regardless of whether it is played full screen, or 100% as recommended or even quarter screen. The video tech support site states that this is something we have to live. I didn't pay good money for fuzzy! Had I seen the DVD prior, I would not have bought this. If you really want to learn InDesign CS2 and for about the same price, I would go with the Lynda.com's Adobe InDesign CS2 Hands-On-Training which uses the Apple Quicktime movie format (if you don't mind looking at Windows screen shots) and an excellent book which covers much more as opposed to the slim booklet that comes with Personal Seminar.

In this DVD and handbook combination, Terry White does a great job of introducing Adobe InDesign CS2. Most books written about graphic software have two parts. The first covers the tools and techniques and the second covers how to apply that knowledge to examples or projects. Let's face it. The first part of these books is always a boring necessity. But this author alleviates that boredom with this DVD in which he discusses the most popular InDesign tools and techniques as well as what's new in CS2. Watching the DVD is much easier than reading 100+ pages of text and it is also a better way to learn. After viewing the DVD, you are ready to tackle the projects in the accompanying handbook.

On the DVD, White begins by demonstrating some of the new InDesign templates and the Adobe Bridge. He then covers all the new features that will increase your productivity such as Object Styles, Quick Apply, mapping Word styles to InDesign styles, Anchored Objects and Snippets. Next, he explains the new text features; Dynamic Spelling, Autocorrect Spell-Checking and Drag and Drop Text. Finally, he discusses new publishing features for PDF and HTML formats and the new InBooklet SE to create printer spreads.

The DVD comes with a handbook but this is not one of those "user's guides" that you immediately toss into a drawer. In fact the handbook has several interesting projects that help you apply these skills and teach you some new ones along the way. For the novice, the handbook covers basic skills of InDesign with projects such as building a photo book, placing an image inside text and creating a backscreening photo effect much like that popular with Photoshop users. For the advanced user White includes more challenging projects such as adding interactive multimedia files to a PDF document, using data merge to dynamically build page content from external text files, building a table of contents with InDesign's automated feature and how to prepare InDesign documents for the printer.

Terry White has been with Adobe for seven years and is now the Technical Resources Manager for North America. He also is a columnist for Layers magazine.

This Personal Seminar comes with a video DVD and small booklet. What's nice is that the exercises in the book are different than what's covered in the video. This way you can get the basics from the video and do more afterwards using the book. I love Terry's teaching style. He makes it easy to understand. The DVD seems to be best optimized for TV. It works fine in the computer too, but it can be blurry if you view it on a large monitor at full screen. Best to keep the DVD window at 640x480 for optimal viewing.