InDesign Project
Software Purpose: Create layout designs for digital and print publications.
Workshop Project: During the workshop, we learned how to create a magazine-style layout in InDesign.
I created a layout featuring the history and photos of one of my favorite places, Aurora, New York. I had my wedding at the beautiful Inns of Aurora and fell in love with the history of the village. All of the beautiful photos are from The Inns of Aurora website (being used for educational purposes only) and the text is my own summary that I provided for my wedding guests. I wish I used InDesign at the time of my wedding because this layout looks so much better than the simple printout that I created!
Below is a screenshot of my InDesign template for a 3-page magazine spread and here is a link to the PDF.
Favorite Features: During the workshop, I found the following tips and InDesign features helpful:
(1) Adobe Stock + Resources: Our Adobe mentors Jennie and Donna talked about looking at Adobe Stock and Adobe Education Exchange for InDesign template examples and teaching ideas. I also appreciate that they talked about the importance of Creative Commons and teaching students about the legal use of images, including some great sources for students to find images.
(2) File Management: Jennie and Donna also mentioned the importance of keeping all of the images used in a project in one folder because InDesign doesn't embed the image into the file; instead, it just links to where it is located on your computer. This was great to know and a good reminder for my students too!
(3) Extract from Image: I was so excited to see that the software has an option to use image recognition to suggest fonts based on a photograph of an article. I have spent so much time trying to match fonts for different projects, and this will save so much time!
(4) Placeholder + Wrap Text: I appreciate the InDesign feature that auto-fills the layout with text to see what it looks like without having to generate a lot of text on our own. This is simple and very helpful. The workshop chat also recommended the websites: https://lipsum.com/ and the humorous https://hipsum.co/. The automatic "text wrap" around the images is also so easy and helpful in InDesign.
Classroom Uses: I really enjoyed learning about this publishing software and I think my students could use InDesign in the following ways:
(1) Journal of Student Articles: During the workshop, Jennie talked about a teacher having each student write an academic summary and then creating their own "journal" for the class. I love this idea and plan on leveraging this in a few of my classes where students write summaries about emerging technologies, cybersecurity techniques, or project management methods/tools, as well as academic literature reviews. Then all student summaries can be consolidated into one digital journal for the entire class.
(2) Digital Entrepreneurship: In my digital entrepreneurship class, students must come up with an idea for an IT business. They could definitely use InDesign templates in a few ways: (a) Students can create a template for their business model canvas, and then update the content with each iteration of their model; (b) students can create a template for their "one-pager," which is a 1-page document that acts as a written elevator pitch and must be customized for each customer segment, partner, or investor group; and (c) students can create a poster/flyer to promote their new product or service (they could also use Illustrator for this too).