Upcoming seminar series in Minneapolis: Digital Publishing with InDesign

In cooperation with the Twin Cities Creatives Group, I’m presenting a special January seminar series in Minneapolis about Digital Publishing with Adobe InDesign.

This is a low-cost 3-session seminar series for graphic designers, production artists, art directors, and other creatives and communicators who want to learn how to create multi-screen, digital output from InDesign CC. You can attend one, two, or all three sessions held on three consecutive Wednesday mornings in downtown Minneapolis.

The fee is $50 per session, or register for all 3 sessions for $130.

If you have any interest in learning how to create digital output for Web sites, Web apps, Mobile apps, or EPUB, be sure to check out the seminar descriptions. I’d love to see you in January!

Never stop learning

If you think you know everything you need to be a creative, efficient, effective graphic designer, art director, or production artist, think again. Even if you are totally on top of your game, there is certainly more you can learn about the tools you use everyday, such as Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, or Photoshop.

I want to be sure that you know about 2 exciting educational opportunities that are coming in 2 weeks to the Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota area.

First, July 10-13 is a rare opportunity to learn Illustrator and Photoshop techniques from pros such as Deke McClelland, Bert Monroy, Von Glitschka, and Sharon Steuer. The Creative Pro Conference is specifically for Creative Professionals who use Illustrator and Photoshop. You can choose to attend the entire conference, just the preconference, just the Illustrator sessions, or just the PhotoShop sessions. This is going to be a great conference!

Second, at 7pm on July 13, Anne-Marie Concepcion is going to be the featured speaker at the popular Twin Cities InDesign User Group meeting at Concordia University of St. Paul. Anne-Marie is co-founder of the Creative Publishing Network, owner of Seneca Design & Training in Chicago, popular Lynda.com author, and co-host with David Blatner of the popular InDesignSecrets podcast and Web site. Don't miss this opportunity to hear one of the best InDesign presenters around!

I hope to see you at one of these events!

Upcoming events

I’m going to be speaking at a number of events in the upcoming months. If you are a reader of this blog, and attend one of these events, please introduce yourself!

April 1, Brookings, SD: "Adobe Day" InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, and Creative Cloud tips and tricks.

April 11, Grand Rapids, MI: West Michigan Design Week Designing and Prototyping your Next App with Adobe XD and You Can Do Creative Work on Mobile Devices

April 13, St. Paul, MN: Twin Cities InDesign User Group 8 troubleshooting steps every InDesign user needs to know.

April 20, Portland, OR: AIGA Portland TypeFest How to Use Typography & Design to Stand Out in a Crowd

June 6-8, San Diego, CA: PePcon Getting Started with Tablet Apps

July 11-13, Minneapolis, MN: CreativePro conference Color, Resolution, and Other Image Essentials

Upcoming speaking engagements

It’s that time of year…conference season. I’m excited to be speaking at these upcoming events in the next couple of months:

May 14: AAF-CM InDesign seminar (St. Cloud, MN)

The American Advertising Federation of Central Minnesota runs a seminar series, and on May 14 I’ll be doing a half-day session on InDesign Tips and Tricks.

May 15: MMPA Summit & Expo (Minneapolis, MN)

I’ll be presenting 4 sessions at the annual Minnesota Magazine & Publishing Association annual Summit & Expo. My sessions are titled Creative Cloud paradise!, Troubleshooting - what to do when things go wrong, A Colorful Cloud, InDesign in Workgroups-sharing and syncing.

June 1-4: PePcon: The Print + ePublishing Conference (Philadelphia, PA)

PePcon is my absolute favorite conference every year. It is a total “love-fest” for designers creating digital OR print work. Conference hosts David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepcion work hard to foster a sense of community at this event, and the results are spectacular. It is so much fun to talk with attendees and other speakers between sessions and over meals. I’m presenting 3 sessions at PePcon: A Jargon-Free Guide to Compressing and Editing Video, Must-Know Interactive Effects for Tablet Apps (with Bob Levine), and Publishing Interactive Apps for Tablets. I can’t recommend PePcon enough. Use code SPK73W when registering for a $50 discount on your registration.

Webinar invite: The Publishing Process with DPS

Adobe has set up a free four-part webinar series covering some of the more technical aspects of Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, Enterprise Edition. On September 19 I'm presenting the second session, entitled The Publishing Process with DPS. These sessions will be tailored for people working in higher education, but open to all.

My session, applicable to both Professional and Enterprise customers of DPS, will focus on how to build build an app. In other words, beyond creating folio content, how to you build the actual app and submit it to an app store? We'll look at creating the required assets, optaining security certificates, entering marketing information, and much more.

Register for this free seminar here.

InDesign User Group Meeting May 29!

Finally, after a long winter break, I've scheduled another meeting of the Twin Cities InDesign User Group. Please join us on 5/29/2013 to learn more about Creative Cloud, and learn some InDesign tips!

You can learn more about the meeting topics, and register to attend HERE.

Photoshop workshop this Thursday!

This Thursday, May 16, from 2:00 - 5:00 pm in downtown Minneapolis I'll be presenting a "Photoshop Techniques for Architectural Photography" workshop. In the workshop, which is open to the public, I'll share Adobe Photoshop tips and techniques that are particularly helpful for editing and enhancing architectural photography. Techniques will be shown using Photoshop CS6 Extended, but many of the techniques will apply to earlier versions of Photoshop also.

Topics will include:

• How to swap the sky in one photo with the sky in another, how to create artificial sky, and how to change the color of the sky.
• How to easily remove unwanted objects such as date stamps, power lines, trash cans, exit signs, and security cameras.
• Easy techniques for color and tone correction.
• How to adjust for the distortion introduced by wide angle lenses.
• How to stitch multiple images together to create a larger image
• How to bring out details lost in the shadows.
• Two fantastic techniques to help you batch process multiple images at once.
• How and why you might want to paste from InDesign to Photoshop
• Why and when you should use Smart Objects.
• Advanced cropping techniques

...and much more!

You can register for the workshop here.

Upcoming speaking gigs

When it rains, it pours! I've got a full slate of conferences that I'm speaking at in the upcoming weeks. If you can get to any of these conferences, I highly recommend them!

 

AAF Central MN Event (St. Cloud, MN)

3/28/2013, 2:00 - 5:00 pm

Session: 5+4+3: 5 things every designer MUST know about InDesign, 4 about Photoshop, and 3 about Illustrator

 

MMPA Summit & Expo (Minneapolis, MN)

4/25/2013

Session: How to create "immersive reading experiences" in tablet publications

Session: 5 ways to add animation to Adobe DPS publications

 

PePcon: The Print + ePublishing Conference (Austin, TX)

4/28/2013 - 5/1/2013

Panel Session: Moving Your Publication from Print to Tablet

Tutorial: Publishing Your iPad app: The Hardest Step Explained

Use the code TXKG88 to save $25 off the registration cost.

 

Adobe MAX (Los Angeles, CA)

5/4/2013 - 5/8/2013

Hands-on Labs: L7939: Designing for iPad: A Step-by-Step Guide for Print Designers

 

Join me at PePcon!

I'll be speaking at PePcon, "The Print + ePublishing Conference" in Austin, TX on April 28-May 1, 2013. This will be my fourth year attending and speaking at this conference, and I can wholeheartedly recommend it! It is definitely the "InDesign event of the year". 

This conference is designed by David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepción for lots of personal interaction between you, the speakers, and other experts in the field of design and publishing. The conference tracks cover a wide variety of topics, including eBook publishing, creating iPad apps, interactive documents, print documents, and more.

I'll be participating in a panel on 4/29 with Diane Burns titled "Moving Your Publication from Print to Tablet", and then teaching a post-conference tutorial on 5/1 called "Publishing Your iPad App: The Hardest Step Explained".

Won't you join me at this conference? When you register, use the code TXKG88 to save $25 off the registration cost. 

"Ask a Pro" Webinar this Friday

This Friday, September 21, 2012, I'm doing an "Ask a Pro" Webinar for Adobe about the new Digital Publishing Suite, Single Edition workflow. In this free, one-hour session I'll show how to create an App in InDesign, add interactivity, preview it on an iPad, and then use the new DPS App Builder to prepare the app for submission to Apple's App Store. There will also be time for questions.

Registration is required. Details can be found here.

Don't miss the Minneapolis Creatives Group this Thursday

What is Adobe's Creative Cloud, and is it for me? -- with Keith Gilbert

Thursday, June 7
11:30 - 1:30
Open Book, Performance Hall
1011 Washington Ave. South, Minneapolis, MN
$10 per person at the door.
Reservations aren't required, but are helpful. email amy@kirkpatrickdesign.com to RSVP.

• Learn about the 2 ways to buy CS6 (a Perpetual License OR a monthly subscription to Adobe's Creative Cloud)
• Find out what's included in the Creative Cloud...it has many added benefits over just being a monthly way of paying for software
• Hear what Adobe plans to add to the Cloud within the year
• Learn a couple of Keith's favorite new CS6 features in Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign
• Plus -- time for questions

Creatives Group is an informal Google Group of Twin Cities designers, illustrators, copy writers and photographers. It's a chance for creatives from design and related fields to get together and share ideas, get feedback, relate stories only self-employed people can understand, and support each other. For more information, email Amy Kirkpatrick, amy@kirkpatrickdesign.com.

 

 

Join me in St. Cloud tomorrow!

Tomorrow (5-24-2012) from 12:00 - 1:00 p.m. I'll be speaking at an AAF (American Advertising Federation) Central Minnesota event. If you're in the St. Cloud area, come for lunch and a chance to learn more about Photoshop. My topic is "Five Things You MUST Know About Photoshop". I hope to see you there. Details and registration info here.

Come at see me at the MMPA Summit

If you're in the Twin Cities, MN area and are interested in publishing to tablets, don't miss the MMPA Summit & Expo on Thursday, April 26. I'll be presenting three workshops: Best Practices for iPad Publication Design; Adding Interactivity and Media to Adobe DPS Publications; and Adobe Muse. Hope to see you there!

Come to Duluth, learn about Adobe DPS!

If you are anywhere near the Duluth, MN area, come to this April 17 event put on by the Duluth/Superior AAF chapter. I'll be doing a one-hour presentation during lunch to help cut through some of the confusion about creating interactive content for tablets. Then, in a 3-hour workshop after lunch, I'll show how to use Adobe Digital Publishing Suite to create tablet apps. The event will be held at Grandma's Sports Garden. Registration begins at 11:30 with lunch being served at 11:45 and the presentation at 12:00. The workshop begins at 1:15. The registration deadline is Friday, April 13th. Sign up today at http://www.lakesuperioradfed.org/

The future of newspapers

If you're in the newspaper biz, whether a small-market weekly or a metro daily, you owe it to yourself to listen to InDesignSecrets Podcast 148. The main feature of the podcast is an interview with my friend Russell Viers. Russell is a trainer and consultant who has specialized in the newspaper market for many years. The interview is a riot, but beyond being entertaining, Russell has some pointed observations about where newspapers are headed and what they can do about it.

I'm looking forward to catching up with Russell in a couple of weeks. Both he and I are speakers at the InDesignSecrets 2011 Print & ePublishing Conference.

Twin Cities InDesign User Group meeting

I've scheduled another meeting of the Twin Cities InDesign User Group for Thursday, January 20, 7:00 p.m. in the large auditorium at MCAD. Click here for full details about the meeting.

If you've never been to one of these meetings, you should join us. Meetings happen whenever I get around to scheduling them (3-4 times/year). Between 100 and 200 people attend each meeting. We generally geek out about all things InDesign, and always conclude the evening with fabulous door prizes.

For this meeting we're bringing in my friend James Fritz from Milwaukee to show how to create interactive presentations in InDesign CS5, and I'm going to spend a few minutes talking about scripts and plug-ins to make linking and unlinking text frames in InDesign CS3-CS5 much easier.

Twin Cities InDesign User Group meetings are FREE and open to the public, thanks to generous support from MCAD and Central Coast Solutions, but pre-registration is required. If you're not yet a user group member, click here to sign up. If you're already an IDUG member, click here to register for the meeting.

2011 Minnesota Magazine Mingle

The Minnesota Magazine Mingle is a unique opportunity for professionals in the magazine world to come together in a casual setting.

“This event is good news for magazine professionals. It’s inspiration and the opportunity to network right in one room. What more could you want?” says Steve Schiffman, President of MMPA.

Bring your colleagues to this unique event. Generate ideas from magazines on display and from the people in the room with you.

Light refreshments, cash bar. Fabulous prizes, too.

Sign up early for reduced rates (including discounts for multiple registrations).

Sponsored by MMPA and The Loft Literary Center.

Click here for more information and to register online.