You've arrived at Chicago's top source for cross-media publication design, online marketing consulting, and certified Adobe InDesign, InCopy, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat training — welcome!
There's quite a bit of useful content here, which I've organized into four simple categories. Be sure to visit Cross-Media Design to see our portfolio of print, web site, online marketing, and PDF CD-ROM projects. The Training and Support section details our applied training in InDesign, InCopy, Acrobat, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, Illustrator, OS X and more. Software resource pages and our DesignGeek e-zine live in DesignGeek Central. Finally, you can learn all about me and Seneca in HerGeekness.
Tips, news, resources, and more:
• Follow me (Anne-Marie/HerGeekness) on Twitter!
• Keep up with Seneca events and webinars on Facebook
• Read my posts on InDesignSecrets.com and InCopySecrets.com
What's Happening at Seneca these days . . .
>> I'm back in the office after attending Publishing Secret's Print and ePublishing Conference, in Seattle, Washington. Our first conference was a HUGE success. Many thanks to everyone involved and for those kind people who listened to me stress out during the planning process. As you know, Publishing Secrets produces InDesignSecrets, the popular podcast I co-host with David Blatner.
>> InDesign CS5 New Features is available on lynda.com! My latest series has more than twenty-five detailed tutorials covering the features you need to know. 
The tutorial on InDesign's new Spanning & Splitting Columns feature is a favorite at the office. You don't need a paid subscription with lynda to watch it - it's available, as a free preview!
InDesign CS4 New Features is still available
from lynda.com. It contains over forty lessons (each 5 to 10 minutes long) covering every new feature in InDesign CS4, in depth. (For example, it took me five videos to completely cover the Conditional Text feature.)
>> My lynda.com title, Social Media Marketing with Facebook and Twitter is a fan favorite on our Facebook page. I'd like to thank everyone for their valuable feeback. This series is a depature from my traditional, geeky obsessions, but it has been worth the effort.
>> Acrobat 9 Pro Tips and Tricks, my video tutorial series for lynda.com, is available on their site. (Note: 85% of the content applies to Acrobat 8, too.) This title so much fun to record,
because it was essentially a "brain dump." My producer asked me, "What are your very favorite Acrobat tips and techniques, ones that hardly anyone knows?" The free-form aspect appealed to me. I threw everything in there, from beginner-level tips for modifying the toolbars to uber-geeky ones that involve creating an .htaccess file for your web server (it forces a PDF to download instead of opening in the browser window). And two great ones for making Acro 9's PDF Portfolios more backwards compatible!
>> Many undocumented tips and workarounds are included in each lesson. InCopy CS4 and InDesign CS4 Workflow Essentials is another title I recently recorded at Lynda.com Weighing in at over eighty videos; It's an introduction to InCopy and a comprehensive, in-depth guide to successfully integrating them into your production workflow. If you're already using the InCopy workflow, check out one of the free videos, "What's new in InCopy CS4" that I included in the title just for you. You can see a few of the videos for free on-line; but to see the rest of the videos and to download the sample files I use, you'll need to join up (for as little as $25 for a one-month subscription).
>> Not surprisingly, we're doing a lot of online training for clients. In this economy, travel budgets are incredibly restricted. But companies are being forced to do more with less staff, so of course, they need to ramp up people's skills. That's why a lot of out-of-town clients are opting for our "virtual classroom" instead of flying me or one of my trainers out there for a few days. It's convenient, flexible, and affordable; whether it's a one-on-one tutorial or doing a 2-day class for forty people at once. Email our training coordinator, Sherri Austin, to find out more or even try it out for yourself!
>> How does InCopy work with InDesign?
Adobe hired me to write their InCopy CS4 paper (a 38-page PDF) that describes the InCopy CS4/InDesign CS4 workflow, the paper they make available to prospective customers on their main InCopy product page. It includes lots of screenshots of an actual publication going through the steps in the workflow so you and your colleagues can get a good sense if it'll work in your situation. (If your editors give you Word files to flow into the layout, and then mark-up paper proofs with their changes, it's definitely worth considering.) You may download the 5MB PDF directly from my InCopySecrets.com blog: Adobe InCopy CS4 Hands-On Guide.
>> Miscellaneous designgeek-y projects: I'm working on new InDesign & InCopy CS5 tutorials and papers. We hope to release one of them within the next few weeks. In between the papers, I'm traveling the country conducting InDesign seminars for InDesignSecretsLive! I'm working on a major update to our website that will incorporate more CS4 and CS5 resources into the DesignGeek section.
