InDesign, tips and friends

I’m very stoked to have been asked to speak during this year’s CreativePro Week event (happening online again). This year I’ll be presenting 2 sessions on Adobe InDesign.

10 Essential InDesign productivity tips

Let’s kick off Day 2 with a fast-paced, fun-filled tip-a-palooza to boost your productivity! We’ll zip through a ton of handy tips and tricks that every InDesign user needs to know. Plus, you’ll get amped to soak up all the InDesign goodness the rest of the conference will bring.

• If you’re not customizing InDesign, you’re not doing it right
• Essential shortcuts
• What to do when something (inevitably) goes wrong

New InDesign features you should be using right now

You’ve been using InDesign for a long time, but why are you still using it the way you did 5 or 10 years ago?! Adobe has released a ton of new features, but most InDesign users don’t take advantage of them. Take this opportunity to get up to speed again and learn what you’ve been missing!

More information here.

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I’m super happy to announce that I’m speaking at CreativePro Week early June. Well, virtually at least since this year CreativePro Week has become an online event due to the quarantine. And because of these changed circumstances you’ll be able to follow all of my sessions online and rewatch the recordings later (which might be very valuable to some). Of course this is not the same as being able to say hi to myself and other speakers in person. But at least no one will have to miss out on great content this year. Here’s a quick rundown of my sessions.

InDesign+Photoshop+Illustrator

Tuesday, June 2, 10:30 am – 11:30 am Central

It’s the ultimate Adobe power-trio: InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator! But you’ll never be efficient with any one of them if you don’t understand how they work with the others!

Topics include:

• Why layers are such a big deal
• How to properly set up Photoshop and Illustrator files for InDesign
• Choosing between layers and artboards
• CC Libraries: the secret back door conduit
• Best practices for managing vectors and pixels
• And much more!

Managing Your Assets with Libraries

Tuesday, June 2, 3:45 pm – 4:30 pm Central

Working smarter-not-harder is possible when you leverage features in InDesign like native libraries and Creative Cloud libraries. Both offer a way to save, organize, and share your brand assets. In this session, you’ll explore the differences between InDesign native libraries and Creative Cloud libraries, and see how you can significantly speed up your daily workflow and help you push through global updates over multiple programs and projects.

Topics will include:

• The difference between InDesign libraries and Creative Cloud libraries
• How to create and manage Creative Cloud libraries
• How to store your assets in online folders
• How to use the web portal to manage your assets
• How to share your libraries and collaborate with others
• Best practices when re-using assets in multiple Adobe applications

XD for presentations

Thursday, June 4, 3:30 pm – 4:30 pm Central

Adobe XD is changing the way many think about designing and prototyping for the web and mobile applications, but it’s also found an unexpected use case. With its blazing fast performance and intuitive features like Auto-Animate, more and more users are starting to craft their presentations completely using XD. In this session, Bart will share their tips and tricks for how to get the most out of Adobe XD for presentations, how to build incredible animations to tell your story (without having to use a complicated timeline interface), how to collaborate with others to build your presentation, and how to share and present your final masterpiece.

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My top reasons for attending CreativePro Week

The people

First of all, it’s actually my first time speaking at CreativePro Week. I know I know, I’ve spoken at PePcon and the InDesign Conference before. But this is CreativePro Week, the all-in-one-super-awesome-graphic-design-conference, with a pickle on top. So this means I’ll get to talk to not only print designers but also photographers, illustrators and many other talented people. And then of course there are the speakers. I have to say it’s quite an impressive line up (for the record, not because I’ll be there myself ;-P). Mark Heaps, Julieanne Kost, Nigel French, Von Glitschka, Russel Brown … the list goes on and on. To me it’ll be a time of seeing old friends and hopefully making new ones.

The content

Because of this wide range of speakers and topics through out the week, there’s bound to be a few very juicy tips and tricks. And though I live and breath “Adobe” everyday I’d never go around claiming I know everything. I always like to compare this to cooking. It’s not because someone is a great chef that he can’t experience good food or learn a few new dishes using the same ingredients. So I hope I’ll have some extra time to attend a few sessions myself. And if I don’t learn any new tricks, I can always end up learning interesting presentation techniques (btw, did you know during CPro there’s the “Click” conference as well? Be sure to attend that if you want to beef up your own presentation skills).

I’ll be able to disclose more about my exact sessions pretty soon, so stay tuned!

The location

I’ve visited the U.S. many times now, on an average of 2 times a year. But I’ve never been New Orleans before and it looks so exciting and different. So I’m very much looking forward to just being a tourist. You know, try the food, stroll around, buy things I don’t need. And best of all, the conference is located downtown.

So as you can see it’s more than worth jumping on a plane and visiting New Orleans next June. And if you do, be sure to say hi when you see me. You can’t miss me, I’ll be the tall guy ;-).

More info here.

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Mastering Photoshop Smart Objects: Layer Comps

Mastering Photoshop Smart Objects: Applying and Editing Layer Filters

The post New Adobe Photoshop videos on using Smart Objects appeared first on Bart Van de Wiele.

Photoshop Video#1: Star Wars crawl

Now it’s easy to recreate this famous introduction, only using native Photoshop tools. Click here to visit CreativePro and learn more about this fun technique.

Why Smart Objects?

Especially since the Oct 2014 update of Creative Cloud, Smart Objects have become my favourite Photoshop feature. They allow you to do things that were impossible to accomplish before. They offer you flexibility, save you time and allow you to work non-destructively.

These videos for CreativePro will each focus on specific aspects of working with Smart Objects, just to get you started. With these videos I’m hoping to get you both excited and inspired the next time you launch Adobe Photoshop.

The post Photoshop video tutorial: create Star Wars intro using Smart Objects appeared first on Bart Van de Wiele.

My latest article on CreativePro shows you how to set up your project in Adobe Muse and proves that this new option allows you to use HD graphics for your projects on retina display devices.

Read the full article here.

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Read the full article here.

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You can read the full article here on the CreativePro website.

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