Our first InDesign workshop taught us a few lessons, the most important of which is this: technology takes time. Part of your homework for this class includes working through online tutorials, getting comfortable with new software programs, and finding answers to your technology questions. If you’re falling behind on this aspect of the course, please catch up this weekend. If you’re looking for computer labs on campus that have InDesign, you can find a list on the IT website (scroll down until you see “Adobe Creative Suite 5”).

By now, you should be finished with the first InDesign workshop (we won’t spend any more time in class on this) and moving forward with your own poster designs for Unit #1. Next week, we will turn our attention to typography, then conduct a peer critique session to help you with your posters. Here’s how we’ll accomplish those goals:

• On Tuesday, we will discuss some basic principles of typography, then try to incorporate those principles into your poster designs. We will also briefly discuss how to find appropriate images to use in your posters. Before you come to class, please read Chapter 6 in Document Design and make sure that you have created InDesign files for your three posters.
• On Thursday, we will continue our discussion of typography, so please read pages 7–47 in Thinking with Type before class. We will spend most of class working in small groups to critique your posters, so you will need to come to class with PDF versions of your three posters. It’s fine if your posters are “drafty,” but you should have three separate posters at this point, and they should be complete enough that your classmates can recognize which poster is which. UPDATE: Based on what I saw in class on Tuesday, I have decided to turn Thursday’s class into a workshop session. We will postpone the reading assignment and the peer critique session until next Tuesday. Instead, please come to class ready to conduct focused work on your posters.

One final note: I added a page to the website containing links to the two video tutorials I created on Wednesday, so please let me know if you’d like me to cover other topics using this approach.

Good luck with your posters — I can’t wait to see what you come up with when we meet next week!