Interview with Julie Shaffer, Certified Marketing Pro

Julie Shaffer

As a an award-winning designer, instructor, and Certified Professional Services Marketer, Julie Shaffer knows a lot about creating successful long documents. We’re delighted to have her as one of the speakers at our upcoming online event, The InDesign + Long Documents Summit, being held online on Friday, April 5, 2024. We thought it would be fun to get to know her better with some Q&A.

What’s so different about a “long document” vs. a shorter one? (Besides more pages?)

Unlike a one-page ad or social post, a “long document” is a file that needs structural consistency in its overall design, organization, and navigation. InDesign’s tools, such as a table of contents, index, text variables, chapters, and sections, are absolutely essential for success in producing long documents.

What’s the biggest mistake designers often make when building long documents?

NOT USING STYLES! Styles (paragraph, character, object, table, and cell) offer the biggest bang-for-your-buck to keep your content visually consistent while allowing for layout efficiency.

Favorite feature in InDesign that you wouldn’t want to live without?

That’s easy – styles! I was not put on this earth to format content in a mind-numbing, manual way—and neither was anyone else. Using styles, we can quickly and efficiently format my layout to free up our time to be more strategic and creative.

Best suggestion or tip for anyone new to working with long documents and about to tackle their first project?

Spend the time at the beginning to create (or load) styles. Then, commit to using them throughout your production process, not only to keep everything neat and tidy, but also to leverage those enormously powerful long document features (TOCs, text variables, cross-references, etc.). In the end, the payoff is huge. InDesign rewards us for using styles by offering ways to automate content based on them.

What are you most excited to share in your upcoming session?

I love the many ways we can use Find/Change to clean up files. It goes so far beyond just finding and replacing text. We can use it to fix formatting, colors, objects, and so much more! And we can save our find/change searches for next time to be even more efficient!

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