I can’t think of a better way for an InDesign trainer and consultant to get up to speed with Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite (DPS) than to use the software themselves to create their own tablet magazine – from writing to design to production, all the way to a listing on the Apple App Store.
That’s exactly what Cari Jansen has done with her new publication, Latitude3195, which debuted on the App Store today (free, for the initial 10-page teaser). Those who can, teach!
Hailing from Perth, Australia (guess which latitude that city is at), Cari Jansen is a world-renowned InDesign expert. She’s an Adobe Certified Instructor and an all-around Adobe guru. Way back in 2006, we interviewed Cari in our podcast (episode 32) where she enthusiastically talked about using XML in InDesign to whip up a winery guide. (Yes, I still remember that! “XML” and “wine” used together in the same story, it was great.) After a stint with Typefi, she’s back to training and consulting with some juicy publishing projects. And of course, Cari is one of our blog contributors, and will be presenting at our upcoming Print & ePublishing Conference in Washington, D.C. next month.
The tagline for Latitude3195 is “A magazine that brings you creative tips, tricks, product information and more . . . ” In the free teaser issue, Cari includes a letter from the editor (herself), a couple how-to articles (one on InDesign, one on Acrobat), a “Creative Suite 5 Showcase” of a packaging project from Perth-based graphic design studio Dessein, and in the User Community Spotlight article, a look at our friend Marijan Tompa (@tomaxxi, Inditip blog) and a couple of his free InDesign scripts.
Interactive effects possible with Adobe’s DPS are used sparingly but effectively in this teaser issue. For instance, in the article about “going green” by scanning and optimizing paper documents to PDFs, the little icons of a pointing finger invite you to tap on them to open an overlapping screen shot of the relevant dialog box in Acrobat Pro, as shown in the bottom screen shot. (Click the screen shots to enlarge). Tap on the icon again to close the extra artwork and continue reading.
There is no audio or video in this issue – I’m guessing Cari’s saving that for full issues, in what she says will be a quarterly publication. You will need an iPad to download and read Latitude3195 (here’s that iTunes Preview link again) but Cari says she’s working on rolling it out to other tablets using different operating systems in the near future.
This article was last modified on December 20, 2021
This article was first published on April 8, 2011
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