Learning New Skills: Adobe InDesign & Lynda.com

I've been learning Adobe InDesign for the last week. Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing/page layout program. It's used for any sort of layout, magazines, catalogs, flyers, books, etc. It can be used to produce PDFs. for print on demand books, too.

It's a powerful program, but there's a tremendous amount to learn. I read through the Adobe InDesign CS3 Bible, but it's hard to get a feel for it while just reading. Then I found Lynda.com. Lynda's tutorials are great! It's much easier to follow along when you can see what is happening on screen. And the tutorials are much better than the generic youtube videos because they use a high resolution video, so you can actually read what's on screen.

Lynda is a pay site, but you can play the first hour of so of each title for free, which is quite useful in itself. It's $25 a month for access to everything. I think I'm going to end up signing up for a month or two, just to get through the forty-five hours of indesign videos they have. They have videos on everything from Outlook and Vista, to Photoshop and Maya.

I'm going to start redirecting my time spent reading fark.com to time spent learning on lynda.com. It's almost as interesting, and much more productive!

Northern California Publishers and Authors

I'm off towards Sacramento today. The Northern California Publishers and Authors 2008 Conference is this Saturday. Since one of my main interests is writing, I'm going to go hang around with some people who do it successfully, and see what I can learn.

I'm particularly interested in print on demand books. It's hard to get excited, for me, at the idea of working for a year on a book, taking a year to sell it, and another year to have it drift through the publisher's hands. It's much more interesting, and motivating, to realize that the day after I finish something, it can be available to anyone that's interested. Of course, finding the people that are interested is still an issue! :-)

But that's why I'm going to the conference, to listen to (and hopefully talk to) people who are doing this successfully already, like Dan Poynter.

Trip report in two days.

Changes

My life hit a speed bump a little while back, in the form of a layoff. That was my first one, not counting the dot com bust that took the whole company.

I suspect the reason I was laid off was that I lost my passion for what I was doing, and going through the motions doesn't really cut it at a fast paced start up.

I used to love to go to work, I enjoyed the technology for technologies sake, and lived for the new gadgets and releases that I played with in my spare time. But that was a while ago, and I think I have to face that as I've grown some things that were important to me no longer seem fascinating, and other things I used to avoid now fill me with joy.

For a few years now, I've been teaching a few classes a month, and that is always energizing and fun. And I've written for my own amusement for years, without seriously trying to publish. I think those are the places that I may start looking for my new vocation.

This should be interesting...