having a great life in spite of everything

Overall, the seminar was really good. Trying to cover the entire Suite in one day obviously meant that many topics were skimmed very quickly, instructors RC Concepcion and Dave Cross resolved that by skipping the bare basics and covering new features and some best practices. InDesign is the CS app I’m most familiar with and most of that info I already knew, but even there I got some good tips about conditional text and interactivity. It’ll probably be that way for most professional designers, whichever apps you know very well you’re going to get the least new information out of those segments; but the segments for the apps you don’t use much should help you learn new ways to integrate and use them.

the general set-up for the seminar

A brief overview of topics by application

• Illustrator: smart guides, appearance palette, isolation mode, gradient editing, the blob brush, warp tool, multiple artboards, clipping masks
• InDesign: links palette, preflight, placing multiple files at once, GREP styles and nested styles, conditional text, interactivity (including movies) for pdfs and swfs from InDesign
• Photoshop: switching tools and brush editing, adjustment layers, new black and white and curves palette editing, layer mask editing and options, Kuler, layer comps, dodge and burn, cloning tool, Configurator, content aware scaling, photo merge, movie editing, 3D rendering, smart objects, smart filters, layer stacks

RC catches me taking a photo as he answers questions during a break, Dave is in the background.

For the tools mentioned above that have been around for a long time, such as the Photoshop cloning tool, they covered new features or techniques, not just a basic “how to”. The segment on Flash was the most basic, largely aimed at getting general CS users over their fear of it. They also threw in a lot of across-the-board tidbits like application frames, the “share my screen” feature, and AIR applications.

For $39, I’d say it was money well spent.