Review: InDesign CS3 Visual Quickstart Guide
Resource for Beginner and Intermediate Software Training
Sep 6, 2008
Adobe InDesign CS3 Visual Quickstart Guide is another great title in the Peachpit Press software reference series. The benefit of using Visual Quickstart Guides is the short descriptions with a brief number of visuals to aid in learning. These books are excellent for beginners and intermediate users.
While other books can do a great job to help a user learn a software program via tutorials and sample projects, Visual Quickstart Guides focus on the functions of the various features and explain how to accomplish specific tasks.
InDesign CS3 Guide Content
Adobe InDesign CS3 Visual Quickstart Guide is set up in 21 chapters, covering different topics such as the program interface, drawing tools, typograpy, graphic effects, printing, and more.
Each chapter explains a number of features relevant to the topic and breaks them down into subtopics with explanations. Plenty of visual cues and diagrams are placed within the text to aid a reader in understanding a concept. Even though the examples shown are not going to be exactly what a user may be attempting to do in their current situation, the explanations are well-written and can be understood in the general context of a given situation. Each topic is given enough space to convey the instructions on how to understand it, and is usually explained in two or three pages.
Sidebar boxes are placed throughout the book to explain special features and tips, such as the “tool tips” which appear when you hover over a tool icon for a few moments, or what different typographic spacing widths are used to make typography more readable.
Helpful Groupings in Chapters
InDesign is a very feature-rich software application, and it’s easy to be intimidated by the depth of choices. Even an experienced QuarkXPress user can be confused by the amount of unfamiliarity in the program, even though the features are similar.
Fortunately, the author has arranged the chapters in a way to keep the subjects grouped with related subtopics. This is excellent for working through the depths of particular topic such as styles. The styles chapter covers paragraph, character, and object styles so that a user can look up individual topics to aid their situation, or learn how all the styling features used together can make a publication layout become very flexible for alterations and changes.
An InDesign CS3 Users Manual?
It’s too bad that this book doesn’t come bundled with InDesign because it would make a great user’s manual. InDesign CS3 Visual Quickstart Guide is an excellent reference tool with its simple explanations and diagrams. It’s an essential guide which allows users to find what they need to know, and get right back to work, saving them time and keeping the creative process rolling.
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