Teaching InDesign

InDesign InStructors share their stories from the classroom

When you stand alone in front of a group, or appear before an audience, one of several different things can happen. You might get applause. You might hear boos and hisses. You may elicit tears, or yawns. But your friendly local InDesign trainer is one of the lucky few who elicit spontaneous tears of joy… of excitement… of discovery… of freedom, perhaps—like the feeling you had when you first got the training wheels off of your bike and rode off down the street. So, InDesign trainers, this article is for you. Of course, learners—which is to say, all of us—are also welcome here for a peek behind the curtain of the all-knowing and all-powerful Trainers. We sent out a call to professional InDesign trainers, looking for enduring, fundamental truths about their chosen and noble vocation, or at least some good stories about Everybody’s Favorite Design Program. The response was terrific, with over 60 trainers from around the world writing in. Here’s what we learned from them.

Teaching Philosophies of InDesign Trainers

Our first few questions focused on the philosophy of teaching InDesign. That is, as an instructor, how do you approach something so multifaceted and wide-ranging as InDesign? Reading through the many responses reminded me of the story of the four blind men and the elephant. Approaching the beast at different spots, trying to figure it out, each man comes to a very different conclusion about what it is (or what it can do). Every trainer has their own approach, of course—feature-based, project-based, hands-on, demonstration, and so on. And it’s clear that good teachers understand that students have their own methods of learning as well. Many trainers have the luxury of tailoring their instruction to the specific

(or eccentric) needs of each client—though other trainers create one-size-fits-all curricula that are repeated time and again. The survey responses revealed that trainers truly come in all shapes and sizes. They work within companies or on their own; some travel, some don’t. Some create their own demo materials or use real-life projects as class materials and demos; some go by the book. Some have a curriculum dictated to them, or a particular set of skills they are tasked with imparting, and the trainer works with that (or else). They may teach one, or one hundred, students at a time. They may lecture, demonstrate, or supervise hands-on exercises. Or all three. They may be teaching InDesign in their own bubble—a very elegant, well-designed, highly-productive bubble, of course—or as part of a larger publication/production system. They may be Adobe Certified Trainers or they may just decide to hang out a shingle. Here are a few different ways we found instructors approach the daunting yet invigorating task of teaching InDesign:

• Start with the basics, and build from there. You can’t build a castle without a strong foundation. If there is time and ability, then move on to introduce increasingly complex (and important) features like master pages, styles, and more.
• Some teaching styles include hands-on sessions; others are lecture or seminar format, demonstrations with or without follow-up practice time.
• Trainers often use projects that may be designed with this class in mind, to highlight a specific set of features; or sometimes real-life projects that the students have specifically brought for this purpose (or which they are going to have to master for their jobs).
• Some use screencasts or other video training options to provide students with an at-your-own-pace way to familiarize themselves with features until they gain competence.
• Some trainers mentioned they like repeating material from previous lessons, for reinforcement and continuity.

Most importantly, a number of trainers say they go out of their way to keep things fun and light, on the principle that humor and informality are conducive to retention and openness.

Who Are These InDesign Trainers?

InDesign trainers are everywhere that InDesign itself needs to be… which is everywhere, of course. They work at universities, government offices, design firms, and private companies that are smart or lucky enough to have their own publication and design staff. Of course, other trainers are independent or work for training companies. Many lead or are involved in InDesign or other design-related user groups and are likely to be among the best proponents for the product. Among our respondents, we find the following:

• 45% are self-employed or consultants who own and run their own business.
• 72% of their students are adults, 22% college/university age, and just 6% teach students under 18.
• They are an experienced, dedicated bunch: 67% of them have been teaching for more than 10 years.

The Likes and Dislikes of InDesign Students

You never know what feature will be the one someone likes best, the one that changes everything for them and made the whole class worthwhile. It may be one that cuts repetitive, finicky tasks down to a quarter of their previous time. Or it may be something that’s a lot of fun, even if it isn’t relevant to your daily work. The Eyedropper, liquid layouts, the Scissors tool—there’s a favorite for everyone! So we asked trainers what their students like (and don’t like!). The most widely well-received InDesign functions are: styles, general efficiency tips, features for building interactivity, and the level of control for manipulating page elements compared to other programs, like Microsoft Word. Yet again, it appears that as many people fear styles as love them. I was surprised to learn that one of the most popular and powerful of InDesign’s features is also one that many people avoid. One instructor hypothesized that students’ dislike of styles stemmed from difficulties using them in Word. Sad!

What instructors avoid

Because time is scarce, trainers are forced to focus and prioritize. Here’s what trainers tell us they tend to leave out of their curriculum:

• Animation/interactivity
• Digital publishing features (and publish-to-web)
• Indexing (one trainer wrote, “it’s like chewing on barbed wire”)
• XML

Main trouble spots for students

What’s your weak spot in InDesign? Everyone has one. Trainers report the ones they see (dreaded) most often:

• Aspects of styles like nesting
• GREP
• Indexing (and all long-doc/book features)
• Frames and everything about them—text and images, resizing, selection, threading, placing into, text wrap, etc.
• Tables
• Color management

The things students like best

A list of favorite features in InDesign is probably almost as long as the list of InDesign users, but here are the ones trainers find most popular:

• Flexibility, ability to produce professional-looking results very quickly
• Having good control over creation and design
• Automation of repetitive tasks, making work faster, easier, and more consistent
• Styles and typography

Teaching InDesign to Younger Students

Only a small percentage of trainers reported that they are instructing high-school students. According to our field research[ers], the younger set has trouble with creating and managing styles, high-minded typography (trainers use descriptions such as “font overkill” and “abomination”), and some of the more sophisticated functions. Kids get excited about interactivity and being able to create professional-looking designs that may have seemed out of reach. Specifically, they love the program’s strength and flexibility, especially compared with Word. Instructors of high-school students tend to steer clear of teaching books, indexes, TOCs, and buttons, and I don’t blame them; such detail-oriented, complex functions may or may not become necessary to the users’ projects, but that need is likely to come much later than, say, the publication of the yearbook.

The Stories Trainers Tell

InDesign trainers—especially for those who’ve been at it a long time—love telling stories… the predictable newbie confusion… the mis-use of the mouse… the assumptions that the program will behave the same way other (less well-behaved) programs might… the interesting, often overly-literal, interpretations of instructions. Here are some of their anecdotes and observations: 

I remember teaching a woman years ago who built an InDesign file with 27 layers. Each item on the page was on its own layer. When I questioned her about why she used so many layers, she told me that this was how she learned to build files in Photoshop and assumed that the same principle applied in InDesign. —Scott Citron

It amazes me to this day how many people still have a hard time understanding the difference between paragraph and character styles. —Guy van der Kolk

I always include lots of tips, tricks, and secrets, because students love them. —Jeff Witchel

One client came for custom InDesign training to learn about creating interactive PDFs. They applied what they learned to revamp the company newsletter and became company superstars—people from all different departments flocked to them for some of their interactive magic. —Mira Rubin

I try to make it fun to learn, I use a lot of repetition, memorization of keywords, quick verbal quizzes. —Jandos Rothstein

A group had to manage with 3 or 4 different kinds of fonts and faces on a single line, repeated hundreds of times. And they were formatting locally! None of them wanted to do this job, of course… until I taught them nested styles… —Christophe Dhelin

I’ve been asked to teach InDesign to English-as-a-second-language groups in Kenya and Nigeria (first language Swahili and Hausa, respectively). In both cases, they said that one reason they selected me as a trainer was because I sounded like the newscasters on TV, meaning that my lack of accent made my English easy to understand. So much for worrying about my InDesign knowledge and credentials! —Keith Gilbert

A participant took his seat in my training class and picked up the mouse to test if everything was working fine on his workstation. Then he turned the mouse 180°, so the mouse buttons were on the opposite side and so was the cable! If he moved the mouse to the left, the mouse pointer moved to the right and vice versa… I thought that this was going to be… crazy…. But no problem: He was fast and had absolutely no problems to work this way… —Haeme Ulrich

At first stage (students) are excited, but at the second stage they are disappointed by the countless bugs and half-baked features. —Branislav Milic

When they see how they can get InDesign to work for them, and not the other way around, they become giddy with excitement. —Barb Binder

I’m one of the rare teachers who records the courses and gives the videos to the attendees after they paid the invoice. This is why they pay it fast. —Branislav Milic

I was teaching InDesign to a group at their office, but one of the attendees was calling in from an out-of-state location. I was explaining the triple-click trick (to quickly turn on or off the strokes in the Table Proxy), and suddenly the remote attendee piped up, yelling I LOVE YOU, CLAUDIA! Turns out he builds lots of tables, and this was life-changing for him. Moments like that can make teaching fun.  —Claudia McCue

The hardest thing for students is trying to find something when they don’t know what it is called. They’re, like, where is the thing that lets text go around a picture? —James Fritz

I always tease my students with the Ignore Text Wrap option, by letting them hunt for the solution why an image caption keeps disappearing. —Peter Villevoye

Students are surprised by stuff like Proportional Old Style figures and Alternative Glyphs. By showing such sophisticated OpenType features, they really start to grasp the typographical strength and beauty of fonts. At that stage, InDesign opens up such a wealth of craftsmanship, it makes them curious for more! —Peter Villevoye

A client brought in an existing magazine for me to look at. Each time I tried to select text, InDesign would choose the wrong line. Then I realized the baseline shift was more than three times larger than the leading. —Lukas Engqvist

Many years ago, right after the Nested Styles feature was first introduced, I was doing InDesign training for the advertising department of a regional newspaper. When I got through explaining the basics of Nested Styles, I noticed that one of the artists had tears rolling down his cheeks. When I asked him about it during the next break, he said, “I’m just so excited about how much time this amazing feature will save me—those were tears of joy.” —Jeff Witchel

Many students have difficulty grasping the concept of effective resolution. —Bill Bowman

After I demonstrated text on a path, a student shouted impulsively: I’m gonna buy that! It was the humble path text that excited her more than anything else. —Monika Gause

I tend to avoid features which no longer are useful or have very narrow utility—for example, alternate layouts, the Gap tool, clipping paths, etc. —Steve Werner

When I was doing corporate training, I sometimes taught people who developed complex but classified documents, like submarine warfare tactics manuals. It’s really frustrating to try to answer questions about documents I wasn’t allowed to look at! —Robert Currie

Surprisingly, one feature that really excites students is working away in Normal screen mode, then toggling to Preview. They can then visualize better what they are building. —Cari Jansen

On the afternoon of the second day of training, I noticed one person in my class was picking her mouse off the desk and was shaking it wildly in the air. She had accidentally clicked the out port of a story and had a loaded text cursor. So she was waving the mouse in the air with the hope that the story would sail off her cursor and return her to the Selection tool! —Barb Binder

This is my teaching method at the university: 1. Introduction in classroom. 2. Video guides at your own pace, at your own place. 3.  Laboratory work and seminars in classroom. 4. Individual project to get creative on your own. 5. Time-restricted tasks in classroom to test efficiency. —Tobias Trofast

If they are beginners, they are excited about styles. If they are advanced users, they are excited about the combination of things, like object styles with applied paragraph styles or GREP styles. —Kai Rübsamen

For my corporate training, my clients have a list of the things they would like to cover. If they want to learn general principles (for group training), I’ll bring stock assets and do a tutorial. But for individual training, the client provides their own assets and we’ll work through their questions that are specific to their documents and their workflows. —Kelly Vaughan

“Playing piano” on the keyboard is difficult to show and it never sticks. So whenever the function exists as a menu item or button I choose that. —Mattias Karlsson Sjöberg

I avoid data merge, prepress features, digital publishing tools, and interactivity—mostly because they are so advanced. I do discuss them, but I also explain you need to crawl before you can walk, let alone run. —Peter Bella

I try to do either project-based training (a cookbook works really well and covers many things a student needs to know) or I follow the Classroom in a Book (CIB) over four days, at four chapters a day. —John Snape

I had a “friendly argument” with an art director for a major housewares catalog who insisted that character styles (which she used extensively, for everything) are better than paragraph styles (of which she had maybe two). I tried to show how she didn’t need to select all the text because formatting applies to the entire paragraph, and how nested styles would be a huge asset to her production team. She wasn’t buying it. Her team loved paragraph styles, but she still uses character styles for everything. —Laurie Ruhlin

I provide unlimited follow-up tech support to all private clients. —Claudia McCue

Things I avoid: Liquid Layout—because it sucks. The Content Grabber—because it’s irrelevant. XML—because it never works for me. —Nigel French

A client was very grateful to me because she was creating a furniture catalogue with Illustrator CS2 (which, at that time, didn’t have multiple artboards)… page by page, with tables that she [had] drawn line-by-line manually—a real waste of time for a catalogue of 110 pages. Now she uses InDesign, and I haven’t heard from her in years! I think she saved so much time that now she’s always on holiday! —Michela Di Stefano

I’m rarely asked to teach interactive features; hardly anyone wants to publish online or create expensive digital apps. —Claudia McCue

I had one client who loved effects with type so much that I nearly screamed when I saw their jobs come in. It was ghastly! —Barbara Hutter 

At training centers, I use Classroom in a Book. For my own clients, I deconstruct their own files and use them in tailored exercises for the group. —Claudia McCue

Finding out some repetitive or boring task… can be automated… [is] actually what excites me the most, but I think I pass on that excitement to my students. I love seeing their eyes light up when they learn an automation feature or a shortcut/tip that will make their job easier and better. —Erica Gamet

We [had] set up a [corporate] training room and scheduled four 2-hour long Quark to ID classes in a row…. By the end of the day my head was spinning and I couldn’t remember if I covered certain features since I was repeating myself every two hours. After that day I vowed to never again teach the same class multiple times in the same day. —James Fritz

Here’s to the Trainers!

Hearing from the trainers themselves, we confirmed what we’d suspected all along: that InDesign training usually exceeds students’ expectations. They get more knowledge than they came for, with the added benefit of learning and working with others whether on similar or different projects, and, perhaps even more importantly, being inspired by and connected to a great human resource, their trainer. Hug your trainer today!

A special thanks to the 65 InDesign trainers who contributed to this article by responding to our survey!

—The InDesign Magazine Staff