Customer Reviews

The InDesign Ideabook: Over 300 Ready-to-Use InDesign "PrePages" for Marketing Your Products, Your Services, and Your Organization

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

If you can get past that the entire book is in black and white you will still have to look for reasons to be impressed. Ya know, door hangers, table tents, newsletters.. Ok I get it. I didn't need a bunch of outdated templates and designs from the 90's.. ohhh a bunch of business card templates.. how exciting, I thought I was getting someting cool, colorful and some innovative design ideas for the kind of dough this cost. Honestly it's mostly crap. I am tempted to send it back. Not even close to being worth the cost. If you can find it used for under $5 give it a second thought.

This book will save you lot's of time with the basic layout set-ups. I would have given the fifth star if there were more instructions for each project as some people (like me) only occasionally use InDesign and hence forget some helpful commands that are relevant for a specific pre-designed project. Also some more richly designed templates with more graphic art would have been nice.

This book really isn't a "book". It is a CD of design templates and the book is just a catalog of what is on the disk. But that isn't a bad thing because the templates are well designed (nothing amateurish or tacky!) and cover most any piece you might need to create. When I'm at a loss of how to get started on a publication, I just browse through and find a template that comes close and start to work. It really helps to have the basic layout done so I can just start making changes to suit my needs. Absolutely worth the money!

To be fair, this review is based on the one template for which I bought the book: "Chapter Book". After stumbling with it for two weeks and having to pour over two InDesign how-to books to figure out what was wrong with it, I came to realize that the "book" template is anything but a book file (.indb). It is a skimpy, simple document file (.indd) that looks like it has the different parts of a book. The author's claim that users can "Start your next project with most of the work already done" is simply not true. The template is a single document that needs a major effort to convert it into a book with separate documents representing the different sections of a book, such as inside cover, acknowledgements, foreword, TOC, at least one real chapter (for purposes of the template, to which the user could add more), and index. And the different documents of such a template should already be "synchronized" so that the template's headings are defined in the template's TOC, and page numbering and headers/footers are working across the publication (template). None of this exists in the "chapter book" template. In the end, the only function the Ideabook had was to give me an example of the graphical layout and measurements (margin settings, etc.) to create the substance of my own real "chapter book" template. So far, the InDesign Ideabook has not saved me any time. I hope that the other templates are more complete for when I should need them to create marketing materials.

Once again, author/designer Chuck Green comes up with a stack of wonderful and well-designed projects, complete with templates for use in Adobe InDesign. A great jumping off point for beginning to intermediate designers, or for those just a little too lazy to create their own stuff (hello, anyone you know?).

If you are familiar with Indesign and need templates for a large variety of publications you won't find anything better than this. It is exactly that, a book showing a hard copy of over 300 templates of newsletters, brochures, certificates, and more, which are included on the CD. Book also gives an overview of good design. Excellent value for the money.

The InDesign Ideabook is a great book for students and business people alike. The only drawback I see in this book is the fonts used on the CD - if they are not resident on your computer you are going to have to find the fonts or substitute for fonts. This made for a lot of extra work that I wasn't expecting to have to do. Especially at this price. However the layouts and dimensions of the different documents were very good and did help me in my online design class.

This is my second one of these since I lost the book and still had the CD. Great value add for any InDesign user.

Well, granted I used this book some when I first got CS3 but overall it was not that valuable. The templates are VERY simplistic and I can't get over the black and white!!! Not to intentional I have to skim through the book each time I need something as the file names do NOT have keywords in their metadata, file name, nor are even they labeled intuitively this part drove me the craziest!

I bought this book over 18 monnths ago and I still often come back to it for basic print design ideas. I am not a expert user of Indesign, but this book has saved me a lot of time and frustration by have very professionally designed templates which I would consider perfect for your average business application. Some other reviews seem to be let down by the title, and may have expected something else, yes it is basically just a book of templates, but for time saving value my copy has paid for itself many times over.