InDesign course for Magazine / Editorial layout?

Software
#1

Good day fellow designers.
I’m doing the layout for a MotoCross Magazine (I have been doing this for several years now 6-7) so I know what I’m doing.

But there are always ways to improve and now Im looking for a really in-depth course in InDesign focusing on magazine and editorial design. Not the design aspect more how to optimize InDesign to get faster and more accurate using the software.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Kindly, Micke @ HelGo Design

#2

InDesign has a lot offer under the hood.

I am fairly well seasoned and taught myself a lot over the years so I just want to find out more about what you need to do. Recently I started writing my own scripts which has sped up my process greatly.

When you say you’re looking to optimise, not design-wise, but in terms of speed and accuracy what areas are you thinking of? Are you already using things like:

GREP styles
Nested styles
Object styles
Data Merge or XML imports
Scripts
Libraries or Snippets
Conditional text and layers
Anchored objects
Book panel
Parent page tricks
Preflight profiles

Would love to hear how you currently tackle your layouts. What’s your workflow like from start to press-ready?

I can’t think of any independent course that covers these things - but I know lots of individual sources of content where you can learn these things.

Or if you are not sure ask here?

Happy to help.

#3

Yeah sounds like Im looking for most things you are listing here. :smiley:

I think there are many ways for me to optimize muy workflow (it is probably very basic atm). It works out in the end but could be better done.

Basically my workflow now goes as follows.

  1. The magazine is 100 pages long, with a few pages following the same layout every issue. So I have made documents 1, 2-3, 4-17, 18-33, 34-51, 52-67, 68-80, 81-99, 100.

And all they have are parent pages for like page number and (top of pages) and a baseline grid. Paragraph styles and colors.

For every issue I get a word document with all the text from reporters and pictures following each reportage.

#4

Yeh sounds similar enough to how I would approach it too.

A few handy scripts
Copy the text to a plain text editor and save it as .jsx file - like PrepText.JSX

Preptext is great - it creates the character styles from a placed word doc - so you run the script, and the character styles are generated, then you can apply the Paragraph Style and retain the formatting.

https://creativepro.com/how-to-install-scripts-in-indesign/

This one allows you to Show Options for a placed file (currently you’d have to File>Place and replace the file to get the options)
https://creativepro.com/script-show-options-files/

I have some useful GREPS especially after running the PrepText

^.+?$
Find Format
Bold

Change to
Paragraph Style>Heading/Subheading or whatever works

This add on is free - if you have a series of GREPS that you run regularly it can run multiple one after the other.

I run about 10 GREPs to clean up the document - last one I ran today made nearly 1000 changes - and I’ll be damned if I’m making those changes by hand.

I have a script I wrote myself for resizing tables - I can’t attach it so if you want it let me know.

It basically takes all the tables imported from Word - resizes them approximately to the width of the column - I could have a 100 tables in a word doc - I’m not resizing them all by hand - and it also sets the table minimum height and stroke widths

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