Adobe InDesign CS4 One-On-One (CD-ROM)

~ (Author), David Futato (Contributor)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

With Adobe InDesign CS4 One-on-One, you'll quickly learn how to design professional layouts for print and digital publishing with this program. You get complete step-by-step instructions and hours of DVD-video demonstrations with Deke McClelland's unique and effective system. Learn techniques in the book, see how they're done in the video, and apply the knowledge to hands-on projects offered in every chapter.

Coauthor David Futato's Adobe InDesign CS4 One-on-One Top Ten New Features Roundup

David Futato is a full-time freelance designer and the design mastermind behind the One-on-One book series. Having worked in design and production in both publishing and advertising for the last fifteen years, he brings real-world experience to his projects—he's wrestled with nearly every kind of layout, file format, schedule, press issue, and client one can imagine. In addition to the One-on-One books, his credits include the interior book designs for the Animal and Digital Media series from O'Reilly Media. David holds a Bachelor of Science in writing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

10) Spread-view rotation. If you have landscape pages in your document, this feature will save you a trip to the chiropractor. Just rotate the spread view from the Pages palette, and like magic, InDesign suddenly rights itself.

9) New Style option in dialogs. This may seem like something trivial, but the amount of time saved adds up quickly. In CS4, whenever you are asked to specify a style (say, for a nested style or an automatic number), you now have the option of creating a new style from within the dialog. No more backing out, creating the new style separately, then heading back to the original dialog box.

8) The Preflight palette. Quite possibly the biggest new feature in the bunch. The plethora of options tucked away inside the Preflight palette may well have designers pulling at their hair (or ignoring the palette entirely), but prepress folks and standards-sticklers will fall in love. Real-time preflighting as you work? Awesome. No more surprises when your files go to the vendor? Even better.

7) GREP nested styles. This is InDesign's most obtuse new feature, hands down. GREP? Regular expressions? Still, if your eyes haven't glazed over yet, they're probably popping. Users with an understanding of regular expressions will love the power and flexibility of this feature—automatically styling any URL, or phone number, or anything else that can be found with a regex search, regardless of where it appears in the paragraph.

6) Contact-sheet cascade placement. Sure to be the new best friend of catalog-makers, asset managers, heck, just about anyone with more than a handful of images to keep track of. Take a stack of images loaded on the Place cursor, and drag a box on the page. InDesign automatically sizes and distributes the images in contact sheet form in the box you just drew.

5) The tabbed-window interface. This is a controversial feature for sure, and a couple of OS X users are crying foul. Early on, I was one of them—I'm a Mac guy through and through, using Boot Camp to run Windows when necessary—but I became a tabbed-window convert. You now have the option of docking every document in a tabbed window. Click a tab to switch documents. Drag a tab to reassign priority. Just like I could never give up my tabbed web browsing, I'm hooked on the tabbed-window interface in CS4.

4) Place-gun constrained frames. Even though it may sound dangerous, in actuality it's the best new image placement feature. With an image loaded onto the place cursor, click and drag—InDesign automatically constrains the frame to the proportions of the image. What's more, it displays the scale percentage of the image on the fly while you drag.

3) The Links palette. Rebuilt, retooled, and revamped in CS4, the Links palette is no longer just a place to check for red question marks or yellow triangles. Split into two panes, the first is the traditional list you know and love (though now it's customizable), and the second gives you more information than you can imagine about the selected image. Best feature? You can see the effective PPI directly from within InDesign—something I'm thrilled to finally see.

2) Smart Guides. The Smart Guides are an amazing collection of... well, it's hard to say exactly what they are. How they work, on the other hand, is straightforward and yet magical—InDesign compares the object you're working on to those around it on the page, and snaps into place. The Smart Guides work for aligning, scaling, cropping, distributing—you name it, they've got it covered. And the Smart Measure cursor puts the most relevant dimensions right at the same point as your mouse, so no more looking back and forth between what you're doing and what the control palette dimensions say.

1) Cross-references. Sure, it's not flashy (or visually stunning) like Photoshop CS4's OpenGL navigation, or even InDesign's Smart Guides. And some people may never use the feature—rarely do you need cross-references in print ads or other single page documents. But as an author, a book designer, a layout artist—whatever hat I'm wearing at the moment—my bread and butter are books, and a book without cross-references is little more than a doorstop. I've been waiting, no clamoring, for this feature for years. No more entering five-hundred-plus figure references by hand! The cross-reference formats are fully customizable and work beautifully across book documents. Best of all, they automatically translate to links when exported to PDF.

Product Description

Master the fundamentals of Adobe InDesign with One-on-One, Deke McClelland's unique and effective learning system. Adobe InDesign CS4 One-on-One includes step-by-step tutorials, more than four hours of DVD-video demonstrations, and hands-on projects to help you improve your knowledge and hone your skills. Once you read about a particular technique, you can see how it's done first-hand in the video. The combination is uniquely effective.

Whether you're new to InDesign or a creative professional interested in the groundbreaking features of CS4, Deke's conversational style and carefully structured lessons guide you easily through the program's fundamental and advanced concepts and techniques. More than 900 full-color photos, diagrams, and screen shots illustrate every key step. With this book, you will:

• Learn at your own speed with 12 self-paced tutorials
• Create professional-looking documents with InDesign's powerful text and graphic tools
• Discover how to create, import, and modify artwork
• Apply a sequence of style sheets to format an entire document in one operation
• Compose a fully interactive document with bookmarks, hyperlinks, buttons, sounds, and movies
• Test your knowledge with multiple-choice quizzes in each chapter

And more. Written and produced by a Photoshop expert with well over 20 years of experience, Adobe InDesign CS4 One-on-One simulates a classroom environment that provides one-on-one attention as you proceed from lesson to lesson. You'll learn to use InDesign faster, more creatively, and more efficiently than you thought possible.

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Product Details

• CD-ROM: 530 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; Pap/Dvdr edition (November 19, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 059652191X
• ISBN-13: 978-0596521912
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #38,721 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Designed Well, December 2, 2008

By	Brett Merkey (Palm Harbor, FL United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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Recently my employer bought me and team members the Adobe CS4 suite. Photoshop was the key product in the suite I had to focus on -- but I also set about exploring the other products. The one that interested me most was InDesign. In my days as a technical writer, I used Framemaker and wanted to compare how the tools functioned.

I decided I needed a bit of help and I immediately thought of the O'Reilly "one-on-one" series. The Deke McClelland books (packages, really) in that series for Photoshop really impressed me [ Adobe Photoshop CS4 One-on-One (Digital Media) ] and [ Adobe Photoshop CS3 One-On-One ] and as it turns out, he also did one for InDesign so I did not hesitate to get it.

McClelland and co-author David Futato used InDesign to produce their book and I cannot imagine a better proof of the abilities of the tool and the mastery of that tool by the authors. There is not even one page here without richly detailed color illustrations laid out in continually interesting ways.

The other key element that makes this a winning package is the accompanying DVD with megabytes of lesson example files and several hours of video instruction that is also entertaining. These aren't those 3 in. by 2 in. movies some books or sites have. The movies play at 1280 resolution so you don't need a magnifying glass to see all the controls being demonstrated.

The book is over 500 pages long but is not overwhelming. The 12 lessons are paced really well. The independent designer or graphics person will probably appreciate the self-paced hands-on approach. People in a classroom scenario, on the other hand, will go for the structured exercises and quizzes (with answers). *Everyone* will benefit from the extra tips and the way the videos are integrated into the content of the book.

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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars get Realworld InDesign CS4 instead, May 20, 2009

By	W. A. Lohaus (Berkeley, CA, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

i used quark as a magazine editor (at Mondo 2000), hated quark and swore to never use it again. i used Macromedia Freehand for my layout and design needs for periodicals and books after that (1997-2007) and became highly proficient with it. meanwhile, Pagemaker became InDesign, and kept getting better and better. finally in 2008, for a 3-400 page book, i became convinced of the need for InDesign, and got it.

InDesign has features 5 layers deep. i first got Deke McClelland's book, with DVD video tutorials, in order to get an overview. It was helpful in showing me, rapidly, many features i would have taken months to uncover. cool. but deke mcclelland, bless him, is like a spider monkey on crack: his voice and mannerism in the video are stressful just to listen to. the guy needs some good opiates, or at least a little loving THC. anyway, the book, InDesign CS4 One-on-One, does not balance the practical and the metaconceptual well enough for me. the exercises are directive but do not tell why we are doing what we are doing (just do this, then that, then this, and see, we have a cake!); i need more integration.

i got kvern and blatner's book, Realworld InDesign CS4, and it is the one i use easily and joyfully to plumb the depths of InDesign. it sits on my desk. and because of their knowledge (and wry humor), i enjoy it every time i open it.

mr.kvern has been writing great references for desktop publishing software for over a decade (i started with his Realworld Freehand 8 which is a better guide to the intricacies of freehand than many Freehand 9, 10 and MX books). mr.blatner is also a skilled technical writer (see his invaluable Realworld Scanning and Halftones); together they are unmatched.

get Realworld InDesign CS4, and discover this wonderful software and all it can do.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars With over 800 color photos and screen shots , March 13, 2009

By	Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

A video is paired with lessons and exercises to make for an excellent classroom-in-a-book format perfect for classrooms and self-learners alike in Adobe InDesign CS4 One-On-One. Here are all the basics for using InDesign more efficiently, from self-paced tutorials paired with real-world projects and applications to over four hours of new video instruction, multiple-choice quizzes for testing, and all backed by the expertise of an author with over 20 years of professional experience. With over 800 color photos and screen shots - what more could you want?