Tutor: Nuala Naughton
Dates: One night a week for ten weeks starting 18th September 2008
Location: Glasgow Metropolitan College, North Hanover Street, Glasgow (opposite Queen Street Station) from 6.30pm -9.00pm
Cost: £100.00 per person
Who should attend:
Again, like the QuarkXPress course, this course is for anyone working in, or planning to work in, newspaper and magazine production as a sub-editor or editor. It is another good weapon to have in the armoury, especially for anyone working as a freelance.
Content:
Like the QuarkXPress course, it covers the fundamentals of the programme applied to newspaper and magazine production and again, artistic and typographic principles of page design and layout are outwith its scope.
InDesign is taking off in Scotland now and it is hard not to see it making inroads as firms start to replant and the bean counters look at the huge savings made where it has been introduced - Australia's ACP's prepress costs were halved when almost 50 magazines (including Cosmopolitan) switched from QXP to InDesign. Our own magazine, The Journalist, is now done using InDesign!
Qualifications:
It is assumed that students will have little or no knowledge of InDesign. However, it is accepted that some people are well up in QuarkXPress and the course takes this into account, pointing out the major differences between the programs.
We will use InDesign 2 for Macintosh. The programme does come in a Windows version, but the Mac Operating System (Mac OS) is more widely used in the publishing and design industries. Nevertheless, it is not necessary to be familiar with Apple Macs.
We will be running InDesign 2 in Mac OS X, an operating system not all that widely adopted in the industry. However, InDesign 2 also works with the more common Mac OS 9. The new InDesign CS works only with Mac OS X but its improvements will be picked up easily by anyone familiar with InDesign 2 who goes to work for a firm that has upgraded to OS X.
Students should have a working knowledge of general computer skills like basic typing, using a mouse, pointing-and-clicking, dragging-and-dropping knowing how to select text and cut, copy and paste.
Expected learning outcomes:
Students will be able to draw up pages for publication, apply their sub-editing wordcrafting skills using QXP and import and manipulate images.
Skills covered:
Moving around within text, keyboard shortcuts, drawing picture and text boxes, colouring boxes, backgrounds, texts and frames.
Indenting, modifying text and creating style sheets.
White (or tints) on black, tracking, kerning, baseline shift and using all the major tools within the software to enhance stories on the page.
Wraprounds, linking columns, drop caps, shadows and other text manipulation techniques.
Getting pictures, sizing them, fitting them in frame, cropping etc.
Creating master pages, templates and libraries.
Further courses to consider
Newspaper Text Handing (Subbing) - Your beautiful InDesign pages won't be much use if your content and headings are garbage. Learn how to get the words into a fit state for publication.
QuarkXPress - at the moment, QXP is still the most widely-used page layout programme and it will be for some time.
If you are interested in attending this course please contact Angela Austin, NUJ Assistant Organiser - email angelaa@nuj.org.uk or tel: 0141 248 6648.
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