About “Her Geekness,” 
Anne-Marie Concepción

Anne-Marie Concepción is a busy gal. She is the founder and president of Seneca Design & Training, which provides cross-media consulting, training, design, and publishing services for a variety of organizations across the United States. She is widely known as one of a very few digital publishing gurus, having worked and taught in this field for 25 years, since the early days of PageMaker and QuarkXPress.

Anne-Marie is now one of the nation’s premiere independent Adobe Certified Instructors, teaching hands-on classes at client sites around the world and helping publishers make smooth transitions to the latest software and workflows. As an industry expert, Anne-Marie enjoys sharing her real-world expertise via books, articles, and seminars. She’s the co-host of the InDesignSecrets.com blog and podcast with David Blatner, with whom she also co-authored Adobe InDesign CS/CS2 Breakthroughs (Peachpit Press, 2005).

For many years, one of Anne-Marie’s favorite creative outlets was DesignGeek, her free tips and techniques e-zine, which is enjoyed by more than 5,000 designers, publishers, and pre-press professionals around the world.

But what the heck is a “Her Geekness”?

Anne-Marie tells the story this way: “A number of years ago, a consulting client jokingly left a phone message requesting tech support from ‘Her Geekness,’ referring to yours truly. My office manager at the time thought it was the funniest thing she’d heard to date, and from then on referred to me as Her Geekness, or just ‘Geekness’ for short.”

“When I called the client back to see what was up, I mentioned that Susan was still chuckling over the phone message. He said he hoped I understood it to be complimentary — it was his design staff’s nickname for me in their office. The whole firm was on a tech support contract with me, and apparently I had been batting a thousand with their questions. They thought I was unstumpable.”

“As the world of electronic design got more complicated, I of course became highly stumpable like everyone else. But the nickname stuck, and transmogrofied into the inner cap style you see all over my site. Must be trendy don't you know. Anyway, I think it’s fun to use — I just trust that my clients take it with the humorous grain of salt that is implied.”