InfoD-Cafe: (event) Jared Spool Tonight 7/10 in Seattle on "The dawning of the age of experience" at Puget Sound SIGCHI

Experience Design is a centerpiece of boardroom discussions and quickly
becoming a key performance indicator for many businesses. 

At tonight's Puget Sound SIGCHI meeting, Jared Spool will tell us what it
takes to build a design team that meets today's needs. Spool, founder of
User Interface Engineering, will discuss designs from Apple's iPod, Netflix,
the Mayo Clinic, and Southwest Airlines, to name a few.

No registration is required for this free meeting of Puget Sound SIGCHI, the
Seattle-area association of user-centered design professionals. Please
forward this message.

Location:  The Boardroom in the One Union Square Building, 7th and Union in
downtown Seattle (Directions below)

Networking starts at 6 pm, with the presentation at 7 pm. Job
announcements will follow.

Experience design is no longer a nice-to-have luxury of a few
organizations with tons of money and exceptional visionary management.
It's become commonplace for organizations that build products and web
sites. 

However, you can't just hire a couple of "experience designers" and
tell them, "Go do that voodoo that you do so well." Today's business
environment forces us to build multi-disciplinary teams, compiling a
diverse group of skills and experiences to handle the many facets of
the technical, business, and user requirements.

In his talk, Spool will demonstrate how successful Experience Design:

InfoD-Cafe: InDesign woes

Hi everyone

I’m hoping maybe someone can give me more help than the InDesign 
documentation or online help manages to do. I feel like I am missing 
something important when I use it.

I need to create artwork for numerous single-sheet leaflets, with some 
very precise and usually asymmetric layout. I can do this very easily in 
Ventura, but the client eventually needs it as InDesign. Though I *can* 
make InDesign do what I want, simple basics are massively more fiddly 
and time-consuming than in Ventura. So I tend to leave the InDesign 
version until the end of the project, because I just don’t have time to 
mess around with it through the various test versions.

The main thing I want to do is create precisely-placed *guidelines*. 
Irregular, and equally precise, columns would be great too, but I can 
manage with just guidelines if I have to. In Ventura, I can achieve all 
this very quickly by opening a dialogue box and typing in the values (or 
I can do it interactively if I prefer, which I usually don’t). In 
InDesign, the only option seems to be creating guidelines interactively 
with the rulers, which are barely legible on my high-res screen. This 
takes ages, as I have to keep zooming in and out. Please tell me — is 
there a dialogue I am missing, which would give me a one-stop way to 
create all my guidelines by simply specifying, in figures, where I want 
them to be?

The other thing that annoys me is measurements. I need to measure the 
page, columns, etc. in millimetres. When I define paragraph styles, 
overrides, etc., I can specify the *intra*-paragraph leading in points; 
but, although I can type in the *inter*-paragraph leading (or space 

Re: InfoD-Cafe: InDesign woes

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Re: InfoD-Cafe: InDesign woes

On 17 Jul 2007, at 5:37, Jane Teather wrote:

>
>
> The main thing I want to do is create precisely-placed *guidelines*.
> Irregular, and equally precise, columns would be great too, but I can
> manage with just guidelines if I have to. In Ventura, I can achieve  
> all
> this very quickly by opening a dialogue box and typing in the  
> values (or
> I can do it interactively if I prefer, which I usually don’t). In
> InDesign, the only option seems to be creating guidelines  
> interactively
> with the rulers, which are barely legible on my high-res screen. This
> takes ages, as I have to keep zooming in and out. Please tell me — is
> there a dialogue I am missing, which would give me a one-stop way to
> create all my guidelines by simply specifying, in figures, where I  
> want
> them to be?

if you want an evenly specified set of guides you can do this by  
going to layout > create guides.

as dave said you can also select individual guides and type in the  
specific value for its positioning

>
> The other thing that annoys me is measurements. I need to measure the
> page, columns, etc. in millimetres. When I define paragraph styles,
> overrides, etc., I can specify the *intra*-paragraph leading in  
> points;
> but, although I can type in the *inter*-paragraph leading (or space
> above) in points, InDesign immediately converts it to mm, to four
> decimal points. Without some kind of quick-reference list to hand, I
> don’t know where I am when I need to adjust the leading to fit text  
> in.
> As far as I can see, the only way to stop this from happening is to  
> use
> points (or picas and points) for all of me page metrics, which I don’t
> want to do. Again, anyone know of a work-around? Even the dreaded Word
> doesn’t impose this particular tyranny!
>

in some ways indesign is being correct because when you select in  
preferences that you want vertical/horizontal measurements in mm it  
applies it to everything that is spaced or positioned vertically/ 
horizontally. which includes text. i know this frustrates me  
sometimes too.

the workaround? set your preferences to mm and do all your  
positioning of guides, grids and text frames first -- all the things  
you need to set in mm. then flick to the prefs and change to points  
(apple k lets you do this quickly). if you need to do a layout change  
just flick back. it really doesn't take long to do and you eventually  
either get used to remembering what 12pt is in mm or you end up doing  
vertical measurements in points!

matt

------------------------------------------------
Lift: creative communication design
phone: +44 (0)118 958 9209
mobile: +44 (0)7979 757983
aim/ichat: studiolift
web: http://www.studiolift.com

*This email is confidential and intended for the addressee only

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Re: InfoD-Cafe: InDesign woes

Matt Carey wrote:
>
>
> in some ways indesign is being correct because when you select in
> preferences that you want vertical/horizontal measurements in mm it
> applies it to everything that is spaced or positioned vertically/
> horizontally. which includes text. i know this frustrates me
> sometimes too.
>
> the workaround? set your preferences to mm and do all your
> positioning of guides, grids and text frames first -- all the things
> you need to set in mm. then flick to the prefs and change to points
> (apple k lets you do this quickly). if you need to do a layout change
> just flick back. it really doesn't take long to do and you eventually
> either get used to remembering what 12pt is in mm or you end up doing
> vertical measurements in points!
>

An easier thing to do. Set your default to what you want, say mm. If you want
points for a measure then type the value with "pt" on the end. InDesign will
calculate the relative value for you. You don't have to remember how many
points to a millimetre, especially since there are different values for the US
and the rest of the world.

Alan

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Re: InfoD-Cafe: InDesign woes

> you eventually either get used to
> remembering what 12pt is in mm
> or you end up doing  

You can, of course, always enter things into a dialog box using any units you want. Even if the default is mm,
you can type 72 pt or 1 in and it will convert that to 25.4 mm.

Gunnar
----------
Gunnar Swanson Design Office
1910 East 6th Street
Greenville, North Carolina 27858
USA

gunnar <at> gunnarswanson.com
+1 252 258 7006

http://www.gunnarswanson.com

at East Carolina University:
swansong <at> ecu.edu
+1 252 328 2839

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Re: InfoD-Cafe: InDesign woes

On 17 Jul 2007, at 10:06, Swanson, Gunnar wrote:

>> you eventually either get used to
>> remembering what 12pt is in mm
>> or you end up doing
>
> You can, of course, always enter things into a dialog box using any  
> units you want. Even if the default is mm, you can type 72 pt or 1  
> in and it will convert that to 25.4 mm.

indeed, which is what i do. i think jane's point was what to do once  
she had typed it in. she said that without a look-up table how would  
she know what 25.4mm was when she came back to the document.

matt

------------------------------------------------
Lift: creative communication design
phone: +44 (0)118 958 9209
mobile: +44 (0)7979 757983
aim/ichat: studiolift
web: http://www.studiolift.com

*This email is confidential and intended for the addressee only

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Re: InfoD-Cafe: InDesign woes

On 18/07/2007, at 10:07 AM, Matt Carey wrote:

>
> On 17 Jul 2007, at 10:06, Swanson, Gunnar wrote:
>
>>> you eventually either get used to
>>> remembering what 12pt is in mm
>>> or you end up doing
>>
>> You can, of course, always enter things into a dialog box using any
>> units you want. Even if the default is mm, you can type 72 pt or 1
>> in and it will convert that to 25.4 mm.
>
>
> indeed, which is what i do. i think jane's point was what to do once
> she had typed it in. she said that without a look-up table how would
> she know what 25.4mm was when she came back to the document.
>

I find paper and making notes on it with dimensions a good medium to  
work with. No problem with preferences, both portable and platform  
independent :)

Cheers
Alan
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Re: InfoD-Cafe: InDesign woes

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InfoD-Cafe: Thanks for your help

Thanks so much to Café members for generous help with InDesign — as 
ever, much more useful than what we get from the official documentation!

You have made my life a significant bit easier (even if expressing each 
0.1 point in mm is not exactly ideal).

-- 
Regards
Jane

_______________________________
Jane Teather
JET Documentation Services
54A Ferme Park Road
London
N4 4ED

tel: +44 (0) 20 8348 9213
fax: +44 (0) 20 8374 0342
mobile: +44 7967 366 252
teather <at> compuserve.com

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