InDesign Night

The second InDesign User Group Meeting was held at The New School/Parsons School of Design, NYC on Tuesday, January 22nd from 6:30-9:00pm.

The NY User Group Meetings' main objectives are education, community building, and creation of a knowledge union that ventures into areas beyond one's field of expertise.

The main topic of discussion at the meeting was "InDesign and Typography." Type is the essence of design, and typography is an art not for the chosen few, but a powerful tool for anyone who has something to say and needs to say it in print. The panel for the evening were members of the Type Directors Club who, in their talk, captured this idea by defining not only the role of InDesign, but the revival of type as an art form.

Featured speakers included: Harold Grey, Adobe Systems; Josh Darden, Type Designer, The Hoefler Type Foundry; Ray Cruz, Type Director, Young & Rubicam; Simon Fairweather, Type Director.

The meeting commenced with an introduction to OpenType and its benefits to InDesign. Harold Grey delivered the most informative demonstration via WebEx from San Jose which was followed by a Q&A. The audience walked away with a good understanding of OpenType and its benefits in a cross media workflow. Simon Fairweather talked about his experiences as a Type Director and the importance of fine type in advertising. Josh Darden from the Hoefler Type Foundry summarized his experiences as a font developer. Wrapping things up, Ray Cruz highlighted the usage of Cyrillic fonts and foreign languages.

Below is some feedback from a few attendees:

"I thought the Indesign user group meeting was excellent last night, I got a lot out of it. The web x presentation from adobe was great. Open type format was something I had very little knowledge of before last night. It was a good topic and it was also nice to here from other professionals and get there point of view of the product. The format of the meeting was good, we could have used more time thou as it did get a little rushed towards the end. As for future topics, I would be interested in anything regarding Indesign. Maybe using the new print features, especially with OS X would be a good topic."
--Robert Montgomery

"Thanks for inviting me to the User Group. It was very interesting and I think it is important to continue this meetings regularly so that a real community can be created around InDesign. Something that would be great to do is to have more case history related to problems and solutions with InDesign, tips and tricks and so on. We need better typography in this world and this cannot be done if Quark survives."
--Matteo Bologna

"I wanted to thank you for last night's meeting of the InDesign User's Group. Not only was it very informative but (and what are the chances) I won a copy of the program. If I was having any doubts about switching from Quark to InDesign, they've evaporated. I would be grateful if you would put me on your e-mailing list for future meetings of the group. While I'm just a beginner, I suspect I'll learn a great deal from the other members and from your various presenters."
--Jeffery Rudell

Scott Citron, IDUGNY