Need ideas for my class

[Creativepaintballer]

hey everyone,

I'm looking for teachers or non teachers to give me a little back up. Looking to find out what i should teach besides the basic stuff for an InDesign class. This is the first time for me teaching InDesign. thanks for the help and any ideas. :D

[TechnicalTerry]

I love the Ink Manager. (If I could, I would marry it.) I use it daily. Most of the time it saves my butt when I am sent a pdf and the wrong ink colors are used. Just a simple alias change and I make a new pdf to mail off to the client.
(One bummer though, you cannot alias "[Black]" to any other color. As a default in all the jobs I start my "black" color is actually a spot color so that if the client changes thier mind later, I can either alias MY "black" to another color, or simply trash it and specify a new color.)

Another great time saver is the "align" tools. It works on all objects AND guides! Great for distributing rules evenly across a form.

[Haeme Ulrich]

I show often anchored objects and footnotes (if there is CS2 installed). Or tables and interactively thins (buttons, roll-overs).

[grnofslt]

What is your background? Have you worked in the graphics field doing design work or pre-press? It is always great to teach new students all the wonderful tools they have to work with. But my experience of working in printing has shown me that most "designers" can make something look real pretty, but then the pre-ress guy has work for a couple hours fixing all of the designers mistakes. Things like not flattening the image when using transparency in both Illustrator and InDesign, traps were another of the pet peeves of our preps guy because the customer's files always had the colors of the traps reversed. Another thing I would focus on with a class in InDesign is the importantance of using master pages on the over all design of a multi-paged spread which would help to keep the layout consistant over multiple pages. There are so many things really. You might find that a trip to some local printers would be a treasure of information for you in the what do do and what not to do areas of real life InDesign use. I hope that I have given you some food for thought

Billy Jay

[tequillajane]

I for 1 recommend first, a basic understanding of the program and it's features.
then follow that with an in depth look at the different markets, what is good for laser printers, is not good for printers, and likewise anything that is great on the web, is probably not suitable for printing either. It depends on what the class is made of, people who want to learn the process, and program, or people who want to learn all aspects of it. A trip to a print shop might be a good idea, I know the shop I work in, hosts both interns and welcome's tours of kids and adults. and alot of the staff will work with you to educate the students. One teacher also arranged for us to print a flyer, and she had the students work on the project, so that they got an idea of the total process, from design to press to cutter.
Anyway - Good Luck to you.

[Creativepaintballer]

Hey you all rock... I come from a design background. Sorry Billy. I hear that a lot from some of my friends in the printing world. The printer tour is a great idea. The class is mostly for people that want an overview of InDesign. Thanks for the all the help and great ideas.