College Sports Information Directors of America

CoSIDA Technology Committee member William Bright Jr., the Director of Media Relations at the Southwestern Athletic Conference, provides helpful hints in using Adobe InDesign to speed up your work process, while making things streamlined and efficient. While these tips may seem small to the intermediate user, I have found these can be useful for most beginners or people who have converted over from Quark.

• 1. Paragraph Styles – After struggling for over a year on keeping similar published items (statistics, bios, headers, sub-heads, etc.) the same, I decided to try to develop my paragraph styles.
• 2. AI files in publications – while some of us have already been made aware of this, the use of Illustrator files (logos, page headers, text images) are good ways to make the items really jump off the page.
• 3. Book files - A book file is a collection of documents that can share styles and swatches. You can sequentially number pages in booked documents, print selected documents in a book, or export them to PDF.   Setting up a book for your big publications has been a good tool for me.  It allows me to focus on that section.  Also, the book keeps individual file size down.
• 4. Picture drops – after you have inserted a picture into your publication, you must now decided how you want to proceed.  I have three base dealings with pictures:  rules, drop shadows and feathering.   Using the rule (or borders) give me a feel that the picture is complete.  It truly separates the image from the text of the copy.  Drop shadows provide an artistic lift to the image and gives it a more classy feel.  I am slowly beginning to use the feathering option which provides a different look – especially in black and white publications.  Listed below are the steps provided from Adobe in the feathering process:

  To feather the edges of an object:

  1. Select the object.
  2. Choose Object > Feather.
  3. Select Feather to activate the controls.
  4. To set the distance over which the object fades from opaque to transparent, enter a value in the Feather Width text box.
  5. Choose a corner option:
     1. Sharp The gradient exactly follows the outer edge of the shape, including sharp corners. Sharp is appropriate for star-like objects, or for a special effect on a rectangular shape.
     2. Rounded The corners are rounded by the feather radius; in effect, the shape is first inset, then outset, to form the two contours. Rounded creates a pleasing effect on rectangles.
     3. Diffused Uses the Adobe Illustrator method, which makes the edges of the object fade from opaque to transparent.
  6. Select Preview to display the results on-screen, and then click OK.

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