The Shortlist Episode 66: InDesign Rumble

Adobe InDesign is a must-have tool for AEC marketers, but let’s be honest—many of us honed our proposal design skills on the job, often under a deadline. Even experienced users sometimes wonder: Am I using the best approach?

In this episode of The Shortlist, host Wendy Simmons sits down with some of Middle of Six's InDesign "power users" Allison Tivnon, Becky Ellison, and Lauren Jane Peterson to explore the many ways designers approach InDesign for proposals and marketing collateral.

From file setup and text layout to graphics and formatting, every designer has their own techniques—but is there really a "right" way? The discussion covers key differences in workflow, including parent pages, grids, pagination, text styling, and shortcuts. They also rumble over linking vs. embedding graphics, managing color palettes, table styles, and columns vs. threaded text.

With so many ways to get the job done, sharing insights can lead to game-changing discoveries. Whether you're a meticulous organizer or a creative risk-taker, this episode will challenge the way you think about design workflows.

CPSM CEU Credits: 0.5 | Domain: 4

Podcast Transcript

Welcome to The Shortlist.

We're exploring all things AEC marketing to help your firm win The Shortlist.

I'm Wendy Simmons, and today we're talking with Allison Tivnon, Becky Ellison and Lauren Jane Peterson to discuss preferences and the differences on how we use graphic design apps like InDesign.

And who knows, maybe we'll get into some other goodies there.

But you know, this is a hot topic in the huddle.

That's our daily meeting at Middle of Six.

And we always learn something from each other about how we do certain tricks and tips in InDesign and our other favorite Adobe products.

So thank you all for being here.

We're calling this the InDesign Rumble.

And we're going to rumble.

This is going to be a really, really fun conversation because even just amongst our whole group, we've often asked each other, how do you do this?

Do you use a special technique?

Am I doing this differently than you?

We've learned a lot as a team.

And now we might as well open it up and share it with our listeners.

So I'm going to skip our typical little warm up intro question because I feel like there's, might as well just get right into this.

What are the applications you're using most of the time in our work?

And I'm also curious, what percentage of your time are you in these products?

I'll start.

So I spend most of my time in InDesign and Illustrator, but probably my split is around 70% InDesign, 25% Illustrator, and 5% other programs, such as Photoshop or Canva for certain clients, or Adobe Express or any of the other various Adobe programs.

I use Adobe InDesign and Illustrator and Photoshop quite a bit.

I'd say 99% of my day is spent using some sort of Adobe program, but it's by and large massively mostly InDesign.

I don't know what the percentage split would be.

If I was good at math, I'd do something lucrative like finance, but I'm a graphic designer.

Therefore, yeah, I'm mostly in InDesign.

Every day, I'll use Illustrator at least once, sometimes more if I'm doing like a logo design type thing or something visual.

And then, yeah, Photoshop just comes in here and there to sort of sprinkle throughout, if that makes sense.

Yeah, the nature of my work this year has, there's been a whole lot of training going on.

So I've been in PowerPoint land more than any other software these days, it seems.

And but when I am working on proposals, especially upwards of all of my day might be spent in InDesign, depending on where we're at with the proposal.

But on any given day, I do dip in and out of it.

But primarily, it's when I'm working on proposals.

So you heard from our two senior creative strategists first.

So their numbers probably don't surprise you at all, that it's very high in the InDesign and then Illustrator world.

And of course, you know, Allison, you're you're probably like a lot of marketers out there.

We're wearing many hats, not only in the design programs all the time, but maybe finding other places that you have to be creative about bringing that design sense into something like PowerPoint or even even a Word document.

All right, well, let's go around the table again.

Where did you learn to use these programs?

What were they called when you first started learning to use these programs?

And, you know, how much have you learned just actually on the job?

Oh, boy.

So I am I am self-taught.

Yowza, I started using.

Oh, God, I'm dating myself.

But when I first approached an Adobe application, a creative suite had just been launched like the original, original creative suite, which was, I don't know, 2003, maybe.

So I I just started.

I was in college, actually, and I wanted to get into graphic design as a career.

And so I went into the computer lab.

That's how old I am and downloaded like the free trial of like Adobe creative suite.

What is this?

And just started messing around doing tutorials.

Fast forward a bazillion years.

And now I'm I would say a power user of just about all of those programs we mentioned.

I'd agree with that.

Yeah, I didn't I didn't touch InDesign until I've about 10, 10, 11 years.

No, whenever I started in the AEC industry, actually, I had nothing to do with it until I started working in construction marketing.

Was it pretty easy to pick up since you were familiar with other kind of similar design programs?

Yeah, but it took a long time to get to like an expert level that does not happen in a short amount of time.

And there's still things that I'm learning every single day, but it's not for the faint of heart, yeah.

My journey into InDesign started all the way back in my junior year of high school, when I served on the yearbook committee and had to learn PageMaker, which is an ancestor of InDesign.

And when I very first got into learning about the desktop publishing world, Quark was the very beginning of that.

That was quickly replaced by Adobe InDesign, which definitely took the graphic design industry by storm when it came out, along with Photoshop and Illustrator, and then combining those three things into the triad of design.

But where I really got introduced to InDesign was when I was at Portland State University, getting my grad degree in writing and general trade book publishing.

We took courses on it in terms of book layout and design.

So that's where my entire education in it came from.

I've never taken a class in Illustrator.

I get lost in Photoshop.

It's dangerous because the tools look the same and are not the same.

So I have learned over the years to defer to actual graphic designers like Becky and Lauren Jane when it comes to those two softwares, but feel pretty comfortable navigating my way around InDesign.

I started dabbling in Adobe products in high school.

Well, Allison, or I guess InDesign products in high school as well, and continued my Adobe education, should I say, during my undergraduate, but didn't do very much in InDesign.

I lived mostly in Illustrator and Photoshop during my undergraduate education, and then started out at my first AEC job and very much jumped right into InDesign, and found it to be exactly the tool that I had felt like was missing and other projects that I had worked on before.

And it's obviously intentionally built for publishing and for print.

And I felt like, oh, wait, this is so much easier in InDesign, right?

Because I'd been trying to do things in Illustrator that I shouldn't have been.

Same.

Well, I hear little bits of my story and your stories too, so I won't repeat that.

But similar experience of using the evolution of programs through school.

And then with every internship and job, I got to dig into a tool more and learn different things.

And here we are today using all of them.

Although I think I sit closer to Allison's seat in that InDesign is the space that I feel most comfortable.

And then I love playing around in Photoshop, but I don't feel like I'm a master of that by any means, or even would have the eye for the photography piece of it.

So it's more of a playing area.

And then I defer all my illustrator requests to our awesome team.

But I think that's a nice segue into, we all work in these programs at different levels, have different comfort levels personally about, you know, what we think we know and understand and have been exposed to different things.

So, you know, where do we want to start on what it's like to work in shared documents with lots of different people at different skill levels?

Personally, I like to avoid that at all costs when it comes to InDesign.

Word.

It's not like Adobe Share for Review or Microsoft products where you can have multiple editors in the program at the same time, and you can see things being up to in real time.

InDesign doesn't work that way.

I have been in that situation where two people are unknowingly in the same document, but it saves a separate version, and then you have to go back and manually put in other people's changes.

And then also, I think we're going to get into this, but there's never just one way to get anything done in InDesign, and everyone has their special little mix of tools and approaches that they use.

And I go into someone else's InDesign document, and of course, my judgy, judgy comes out, because I think all of us who work in InDesign are also like, oh no, I have the best way of doing something, whether it's right or wrong.

And I'll go, oh, I don't know where to begin in this.

And I feel like a stranger in a strange land in some ways, and I don't want to touch in because I might break it, or they might have a method to their madness that I don't quite understand, or I'm kind of a perfectionist with my neat and tidy nature when I'm in InDesign.

So somebody else is in my document, I feel almost like they're in my bedroom, and they're moving stuff around.

And so there is a little bit of a proprietorship or a sense of ownership that I tend to get around my documents.

So I choose to, if at all possible, be the main driver of an InDesign document.

For better or worse, I'm learning to loosen my grip a little bit because collaboration is also a beautiful thing.

More minds in all of that on a document.

Let's see what you had to think about it, Becky.

I'm with you on that.

I never had to hand files back and forth before because when I worked in house, there'd be one set of hands on the InDesign document and that was it.

Everything else came in to me and I put it together.

And then now, you know, handing files back and forth with clients, with other designers, like there's four different opinions going on in the document.

There's a million different styles that make no sense.

Things are all over the place.

Swatches, pages, there's 100,000 parent pages and two of them are being used.

There's all of that sort of thing.

But the thing is, doing this job, you have to meet the deadline, right?

So you have to learn to be very fast.

We work incredibly fast.

That means you can't take time to undo all the things that they did and do it the way you like it.

You've just got to make it work, you know?

So there's a lot of that sort of just duct tape and stuff together.

And here we go.

And like whatever, just get it out the door.

So I think that that creates that mess over the time when you have like multiple people, you know, sort of Frankensteining stuff together to just like get it done.

Hearing the both of you talk made me realize that I too have two hats that I wear when I'm in an InDesign document.

One is I was able to create the document from scratch from the beginning myself and I got to set it up the way I wanted to.

And I think the hat that I wear in that scenario is much more rigid and structured.

And like Allison was saying, like everything neat and tidy in the bedroom, right?

Like everything's just in its place.

And then there's also this hat that we have to throw on when we're coming in and out of a document that six people potentially or more have worked on.

And that hat is a nimble one.

And essentially all the rules go out the window and you're triaging, right?

Like you're definitely, what are the biggest things that I need to deal with?

And the hope is that, okay, when this is all done, maybe we can go and stream line some things again.

Or on the next proposal, we can start from scratch and stream line things, right?

So very two different mindsets.

Well, and our seat is probably different than a lot of the listeners out there, unless you work in distributed marketing where all of the locations do their own thing, right?

But for us, we're receiving client files and they could be anywhere on the spectrum from non-existent.

So we're creating it from scratch and it looks great to, you know, Frankenstein Together or many people touching it.

And there's all that stuff set up like you talked about, but nothing's really being used.

So we come into that.

We're very rarely starting with just the perfect fresh template, unless we happen to have just created it ourselves.

And so there's a little untangling that happens.

But I like to assume good intentions on everyone's part that they're all trying the best.

And maybe the thing that's driving Allison nuts over on the pace board is exactly the way Lauren Jane would want to do it to create space for creativity.

So why don't we talk a little bit about file setup and what you all think is the best way, the right way to do it.

And we'll learn if there's some differences there.

Well, since you mentioned the pace board.

I actually tend to not put almost anything in the pace board if I can help it, if it's a piece of content coming directly in and out that I am working on, it will go on the pace board for a very temporary, short amount of time, right?

Maybe I'm reformatting a paragraph or I'm swapping out a photo or I'm doing a little bit of an edit and comparing the two, which, maybe which layout, which design looks better, it will live on the pace board.

When I am done, it gets deleted, it goes away.

It does not live in the pace board, it is extra stuff.

I have found that a bunch of content living in the pace board feels overwhelming when I'm looking at links to make sure everything is linked correctly.

It makes the file size really huge.

It can really impact exporting when we're exporting to PDF, especially if we're on a deadline.

So I like a pace board very, very neat and tidy.

I do, however, have experience working with like people and styles of of individuals really liking using the pace board because then they don't have to go and open another document and find the thing that they were looking for just to put something back in that was already in before, right?

And it becomes this nice like secondary information space.

So that's a big, that's a big, it's not a point of contention, but a big difference that I have noticed in working with other people before.

I am with you on that.

I've got to have a clean pace board.

I can feel it even if I can't see it.

Like even in preview mode, I know it's there and it'll drive me insane.

Like you come in, you do what you got to do, you delete it, you get out.

We definitely have a co-worker who loves to just put stuff all over the faceboard and I love them dearly.

And it's always good stuff and I get it, but I can't, it just gives me hives.

I've got to, yeah, I keep a clean pace board.

I can't have stuff going on.

Minimal is going to be the theme of most of my arguments, I think, today, not that we're arguing.

I always have this feeling at the beginning of a proposal where I'm like, this is never going to happen.

This is all impossible.

I feel like at the beginning of every project, and I think it's almost a mental exercise for me to gear up for all the different little itty bitty puzzle pieces that have to come together.

Sometimes you're making the puzzle pieces as you go.

I definitely will use that pasteboard to put in reminders to myself of things that I know are going to go on that page, or need to find the caption for this, or maybe there's three different photos that I might want to use on that page, or an org chart I'm working on, but I don't want the team to see it yet because it's not done yet.

And so it'll be a mess.

But as the whole thing starts coming together and that picture starts to really come clear in that puzzle that's getting pulled together, I go back and I'll delete things out.

And for me, it's almost this visual of nearing completion.

And so by the end of it, there's nothing left on the pasteboard.

And I find something, it's almost like a checklist, like checking things off.

And I will definitely go back through as you're checking pagination and you're checking those final things at the very end, is make sure my pasteboard is nice and tidy at the very end of it.

Because we also hand the files back over to the clients.

And I always want to make sure that what I'm handing back to them on the back end looks as good as it does on the front end.

I think that that's probably a perfectionist tendency, but at the same time, it's also a reflection of they might need to use it in the future.

And so I'm trying to give them over something that that's usable and doesn't have my thoughts literally splashed all over the edges of whatever the proposal ended up being.

I'm so glad we had this conversation.

We need to bring it to the full team now to really understand where everyone is on the subject because I learned that I am Becky's co-worker that puts everything on the pasteboard.

It's not you.

It is me.

I have the same strategy as Allison.

It is kind of like my desktop.

I'm putting all those things out there, but I will never hand over a document at the end that has anything on the pasteboard because that is all done.

It's cleaned up.

We've put it in the recycle bin and it's gone.

So funny that our two designers are the super neat and tidy.

And then Allison and I are just hair on fire getting the proposal done, and we need every square inch.

Sometimes I think, why doesn't this pasteboard go any further?

I need more room, but.

You should see our illustrator artboards though.

You think we're neat and tidy.

Oh my God.

There you go.

Yeah.

So it's just wherever we need that mess to be around.

All right.

Well, what else do you guys want to rumble about related to getting your document set up so that you can feel successful?

What are your tricks?

What do you guys think in terms of workspace?

Like I always I've always set a custom workspace.

I give it my name, you know, so it knows where all of my panels are and everything.

And I for me, I like every panel out that I could possibly use.

And I I actually like so I've got two monitors.

The monitor on the left is just full screen and design, you know, the working window, whatever you want to call it.

And then the monitor on the right has like three panels worth of just every possible panel open and ready to go.

And like, that's how I just have to have it.

I can't be like hitting buttons, opening, closing.

Like it's got to be all out.

I'm a modified Essentials Classic girly.

Wow.

Oh, interesting.

Is that a mic drop moment?

Because I don't know what that means.

It's just one of the presets and InDesign, and I find that it has mostly everything that I need.

And if I ever get my preferences wiped or if I'm in a different computer or if I'm at another station or if I'm helping somebody else, it's a standard that comes in the program, and it's a really easy way for me to click a setting and navigate in a way that I'm really familiar with.

And it doesn't go away because it's one of the presets from InDesign.

So I usually, I guess, hot tip for anybody else, if you go to Essentials Classic, it has most of what we're looking for when we use InDesign, and then usually I'll pop in styles because character and paragraph styles aren't included as part of the Essentials Classic.

Yeah, as we're having this conversation, I'm starting to realize I'm actually a very controlling person.

Really?

Some people, you know, to find their happy place, they might work out, they might do yoga, they might meditate.

I love almost nothing more than sitting down first thing in the morning.

I know I've got a lot of work to do in InDesign.

I'm starting a fresh document.

I get my cup of coffee.

I open it up and assuming it's not a template that I'm jumping into, the very basics of it, control and set it to inches because I'm an inches type of girl.

Oh, I know.

I think we'll get into that one in more detail.

I turn off facing pages.

I turn off hyphenation.

Those are the very first things I do.

Then I go into like windows and I get the different styles that I want.

Now, of course, I do have my workspace too.

I'll set it to my workspace.

For some reason, my workspace goes a little screwy every once in a while.

But in there, there's always paragraph styles, character styles, stroke lines, align tool, tables, swatches.

I've got that list going down the side.

In the order I want them to be in, from the ones I use the most at the top to the ones I use the least at the bottom.

And then I go into the swatch panel and I will make a character style that will turn the text pink.

So, and then I give it a shortcut key because I live and die by the shortcut keys.

My left hand is always resting on my keyboard.

And I use those things religiously when I'm working.

And so having that shortcut key to automatically turn something pink, because I think most of us in Middle of Six will use that coloration distinct, to help make text pop out to our technical staff that we're working with so that they zone in on that instead of getting hung up on other things.

And I've just found that to be one of my favorite little shortcut keys as I'm going along, especially, especially as it relates to the, I don't know if this is going to change or maybe this word should be different and I don't know how else to reflect that.

I'll just highlight it really quickly.

So those are the very first things that I do when I'll get into an InDesign document.

It's very controlling.

Hot tip for anyone else who's having coffee and then turning off hyphenation.

If you open up InDesign, but don't open a document and then set settings and then close it, it'll keep those settings as a default.

So like for me, I also, I hate hyphenation.

I'd rather die than hyphenate.

So like you just open InDesign, no document, go to like, you know, the hyphenate box, uncheck that and then hit your like basic paragraph or whatever the default style is called and redefine that.

And you'll throw that out there.

Angel singing down, I'm doing that as soon as we are recording.

Becky, I thought you were going to jump in there, though, and then go to battle with Allison over the increments.

You know, yeah, that did that just...

Oh, god, Allison, I...

So we've discussed this a lot at Middle of Six.

So the measurement units of the document where you got your rulers, you know, do you have it set to pixels?

Do you have it set to inches?

Do you have it set to picca?

Pica, am I pronouncing that correctly?

I don't even know.

It's pica.

Is it pica?

Excellent.

Okay, so we'll just edit that out, Kyle.

So for me, the one that I use is picas, apparently, because you can get so much precise control with picas because it's such a tiny little hair length unit of measurement, whereas with inches, you're doing like 0.0000 to get like tiny little lines.

And that is just too much math for me.

But with picas, it's like 1p is like the tiniest little thing.

So if you want precise control, I would say definitely set your measurement units to picas and join the pica revolution.

Well, and then I'll give the inches pitch here, and then Lauren Jane can break the tie here.

So with inches, the thing that I'm most concerned about isn't necessarily the ultimate precision of things.

It's the spacing between things.

And I use that tool a lot, especially as it relates to like, if I've got several different objects on the page and I want to have the perfect space in between all of them and create that balance across everything on the page, there's something that's just quicker about it.

Like if I've got the Align Toolbox open and that little space below, that kind of a thing, if I hit that and I'm in PICA's, it's so, so slow to get the spacing to open up and open up, and I don't know the exact PICA's widths that I want.

So instead of going through that, I do like 1 eighth an inch or 0.625 or 0325.

There's ones that I'm now familiar with through inches, and it's just a little bit more, a little bit more.

So I think it's more about it speeds up things for me, which I always feel like a lot of proposal coordinators do in a rush to get things to look right as fast as possible, and that's why I default to inches.

And I'm familiar with them, you know, we use inches in our everyday life.

So I think in inches, I don't normally think in points, and I think that's also a reason why.

And then the last thing is that the main teacher that I had in InDesign was kind of like, eh, it's up to you.

So I never had anyone who was, you know, really, really strong one way or the other.

So I just, I chose my own adventure and it's taken me down the inches path.

Valid points, but Lauren Jane, you are wearing the crown that gets to decide.

Go pixels.

This is, this is almost a non-answer.

I don't care, really.

I don't have that strong of an opinion about this, particularly.

I have lots of strong opinions about other things, but this one I don't really care that much about.

I think that typically when I set up documents is in inches because we do have requirements and RFPs that say 0.75 inch margins or one inch margins.

And so that's why I set it up and then it's just in there.

And then I use it.

But I don't look at that very much.

I have all of my, like, snap to PICA's pixels and like to guides turned on.

I do turn all of those on, but I don't look at the measurements as much.

It's not like what I like part of my design flow.

So I don't know if that's probably a non-answer or maybe inches.

I think that's fair.

We're fully well-rounded in this topic.

So that's great.

Then, Lauren Jane, what is something related to either how you're setting up the file or how you're working on it throughout that you feel like is an absolute must?

Okay.

Well, Becky and I have a point of contention.

Uh-oh.

More rumbling.

More rumbling.

Becky and I have a point of contention.

This is not related to file setup.

So I'm going to veer off of your question just a little bit, Wendy, but this is a space after paragraph conversation.

Oh, man.

Oh, yes.

Let's have this conversation.

Okay.

So I work with all hidden characters turned on almost all the time.

I have hidden characters on all the time because I can, in one instant, spot double spaces after sentences, which we get a lot, especially when working with SMEs.

I can spot where there's a weird tab.

It's all of the information.

It's a little bit of an overload if you're not used to seeing hidden characters turned on, but I love it.

That's how I learned how to work.

I much prefer using a paragraph style that has a designated return gap after the paragraph, after you press Enter to go into the next paragraph.

There are some people, Becky, who like to use-

Wow.

who don't have a return.

It's the same amount of return as if it were to go to the next line, right, as kind of like you're letting.

But instead, press Enter again one more time.

So there's a paragraph symbol in between your paragraphs instead of, like there's a fake paragraph that's empty, that's just sitting there, and that's what causes the return between the paragraphs and the spacing.

And I have found if I really want to hyper control the spacing in my paragraph styling, that it's a lot more annoying and inaccurate if I continue to use the extra space in there.

Like I can manipulate the spacing in the paragraph return better when I don't have the extra space.

That's my argument.

I think that's very fair.

Well, here's the thing about that.

Becky, the response.

I think we're all used to, you know, having you write a paragraph, you hit Enter, you hit Enter again.

There's a space between the paragraphs.

That's just how it was always done since the dawn of time.

I like my text to be boring.

I want the design around the text to be exciting, but not the text.

So like for me, I don't change a lot of stuff with typeface.

I don't, I don't kern it to death.

I don't mess with the letting.

I want the letting to be auto because, oh my God, if you change the size of anything, then it goes crazy and you have to mess with the letting and like, nah, I keep it just super simple.

So for me, like just hitting that space is the same workflow that I would just write it, you know, if I was just typing something out and then if you're cutting and pasting, you're not getting something that's just one big long running million miles of text.

And yes, I know Word has the ability to do this too now, but you never know when you're going to use that text or what you're going to use it and pasting it into an email, you never know.

So for me, I like to keep those spaces in there.

And what just absolutely just like burns me to ashes every time I open a new document that someone else has created and they've done the Lauren Jane method of just running it all together.

And then I'm trying to adjust the styles and whatever.

I don't know where the paragraph breaks are because it all runs together, but we've got to stop that.

So, you know, you got to turn on your hidden characters.

Yeah.

Well, that's another thing I can't understand.

I can't do the hidden characters.

I cannot believe some of the stuff people will leave in a document, the grid lines, a million different guides just all over the page and just like hidden characters and like all the little extra, like how do you even think like that for me?

I want nothing.

I want no guides.

I want no grid lines.

I want no characters.

Just give me a blank sheet of paper.

I can see the things that you have the hidden characters showing you for me.

I just eyeball it.

It's an art, man.

Like you just begin to feel it after a while.

I like simplicity.

I like a clean shape.

Well, I can speak that both of your work is excellent.

So there's no issue on how you get through it to the end result.

But I can imagine your eyes get tuned to seeing things a certain way.

It just definitely gets way more complicated when you think about that we may be getting into 60 or 80 InDesign documents that were authored by a totally different person.

That's not what most people are doing, but that's kind of an everyday occurrence.

So unintended stress happening, I think, every time we're opening these documents now.

I think one thing also to note here is I was thinking about my son Jack, 15-year-old Jack, and his question in all this would be, what's a carriage return?

And one of the things I do when I get into someone else's InDesign template, they send it and we're building out a proposal, is I'll immediately Ctrl F and I will select remove extra spaces and remove the extra carriage returns out of it.

I'm definitely in the Lauren Jane camp of, I love that little extra space below that I can manipulate and make it just the length that I want it to be or height that I want it to be.

But that extra space, everyone here remembers trying to drill that out of our technical staff of hitting that extra space bar, because that was for typewriters back in the day that was done, because there was only one font on your typewriter and you needed that extra space after the period for some of the letters so that the letter wouldn't clash with the last letter in the sentence.

Because of the evolutions and font choices and you have so many at your disposal, we don't need that extra space anymore.

It's kind of like the same thing with the carriage return, but it's muscle memory.

Again, there's no one way to do things in InDesign, which is I think part of the beauty of the software.

That and it's fairly intuitive once you learn the basics of it because a lot of proposal coordinators didn't get formally trained in it.

They got thrown in the deep end on day one and have been figuring it out ever since.

I think that's why it's probably one of the most popular sessions that's offered throughout any SNPS chapter throughout their year of educational programming as well as at the conferences.

Everyone wants to know more about how to harness InDesign.

How about parent pages?

Becky, you mentioned that at the beginning that sometimes you get into a document and there are 100 parent pages and one has been used or none has been used somehow.

What are your thoughts on that?

How can they be best used and other components related to setting up the document on that side?

Once again, for me, I like a simple document.

I like minimal, as few styles as possible, as few parent pages as possible.

Keep it really simple.

For me, I usually have about two to four parent pages max.

That will be a single page layout, a facing page layout, a spread, maybe a spread with no page numbers because that's easy, and then like an 11 by 17.

What else could you possibly need?

I only put on the parent pages the footer information.

That's it.

No other stuff, no guides, no images, no nothing.

It's literally just a footer so that when I get to the document, I'm creating everything else in the document.

I like that because then you are not having to go back and unlock and change and base one parent on another parent.

It becomes such a mess for me.

So I like to keep that super, super simple.

Not even a guide.

That one stopped me in my tracks.

I always need to...

I'm probably messing up your parent pages every time.

I just need to throw one guide.

Where is the top of my content starting on every page?

I do that with margins, interestingly enough.

Like if you've got a half inch margin going around, I set the margin to not be just half an inch.

I think about, okay, where's the footer and where does the text stop in relation to the footer?

Because I want to use that margin for text and content layout.

So for me, I will then set the margin to be a little bit shorter on the bottom side so that it doesn't run into the footer, so that it's not...

then you don't have to create guides because you've made it with the margins and columns and all that.

Yeah.

So you're accounting for that one inch page limit and then adding in your additional whatever, however much you need.

One inch is insane, by the way.

We got to stop doing that, but okay, I get it.

It's painful.

Yeah.

All right, Lauren Jane, you were not in your head to do.

Where do you want to expand?

Something I really like doing and feels helpful in my parent pages is columning.

And that's, I think, another difference between generally how Becky and I like start a document.

But I don't mind if it doesn't have it, it just feels like a little extra bonus.

And I'll create one parent page that has four columns.

But you know that you can actually just make it too, because you can just create your box that spans two columns.

So I'll have a four column, and then I'll have a three column.

And that's something I really like doing.

It helps stay on grid if you want to create asymmetrical layouts.

I'm a big asymmetrical girl.

One small column on the left, and maybe it's a callout box or something like that.

And then the three columns on the right, it's text and a photo or all text running down the side, et cetera.

So I also like to create columns in the parent pages, but can totally function without them.

It's not a necessity.

I do that too.

Columns, three columns, four columns, whatever, usually two.

So I'll typically have a very minimalist approach as well to parent pages and styles.

But as it relates to the parent pages, have that body text, one that's probably going to be the most used out of all of them, maybe one that's just for resumes, to make that really easy to pull those in, maybe a project page layout, just again simplify, make things more efficient.

But I will set up my column text box on the parent page with the body text already loaded into it.

So when I flow text into InDesign, into the pages that I'm putting into it, it will automatically, like I can just unlock, click, and the text box is there, and then I can paste very, very quickly.

But I do not have that one thing set where it automatically adds pages, so it flows it in all the way.

I think it's called smart text.

I don't like that.

I'd rather see that little red plus sign at the bottom than I can decide when it's gonna go on the next page.

Again, a little controlling, but there's something about those extra pages getting out of it that gives me heartburn if I've got a 10 page proposal and all of a sudden it's 18.

I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

And even if it is gonna go over, I will click the text, the little red plus and draw it on my pace board to see how much text is left over.

And so I'm in the driver's seat to make decisions on what's gonna happen with that text.

I don't know if that's just a pet peeve of mine or others share it.

No, I agree.

If you want to have the best of both worlds on that, there's a keyboard shortcut you can do, where if you have your text box with the little red plus sign, add a couple of pages, like go add more pages than you think you'll need.

And then when you do your next text thread, hold down the shift key and then press it in like the corner of the column and it will sort it into columns and add pages as needed up until the pages that you've set.

That way it's not running it into God knows what that you've already created because you made those empty extra pages.

This is not easy to explain, but trust me.

I love it.

Everyone pause and go and try that tip so that you get it burning your brain.

Because you'll probably use it.

Lauren Jane, are you a fan of threaded text boxes or what's the right balance of having that in a document?

I'm a big fan of threaded text boxes up into a certain point.

They can feel a little chaotic and really impactful when you have something threaded through a really long section of like a requirement of an RFP.

So I might thread the main narrative for that one section together.

But it becomes a little more difficult when you thread two separate sections together, particularly because we are so controlled about what pages things need to go on, how many pages, etc.

What I don't want is to delete a box later on and then have everything get squished up into one section on accident when actually it belongs in page three and not page five or whichever.

So I really like threaded text for the most part.

I have to exercise some self-control there.

I also don't like threaded text when I'm making any type of infographic or graphic.

So that's also an exception.

I agree.

Yeah.

What about on resumes?

I don't know if that's like splitting that difference a little bit where we see it both ways, where every little bit of information is in its own box, even sometimes like headers, I don't really understand that part of it, or it can be all flowed almost like in a master resume style.

Either way is good, but it can make people nervous.

What's missing off the page or did you lose something?

I wouldn't thread text on a resume.

Not something that's sorted into sections like that.

That doesn't make sense to me.

Nor would I.

Yeah, it did take some of the control out of your hands and usually the resumes, you're in a hurry when you're working on them.

I like to have as much free rein as possible when I'm working in them.

Yeah, it seems like it is asking, the threaded text box and resumes is asking for something to get cut off.

There's just too many spots for it to get cut off, but I don't know, I think we still see it all the time.

So it's just an interesting way to do it.

What about other text preferences?

I'm sure you got some strong opinions.

How do we feel about balanced ragged lines and a left aligned document?

First of all, left aligned versus justified.

I hope no one's doing justified anymore.

We're all doing left aligned obviously, but balanced ragged lines, are we pro, are we against?

I'm pro and I'll say it and I'm not ashamed.

I like it.

It's nice and balanced, it's symmetrical, it fixes problems that you usually have to go in and hard return yourself.

I love it.

I use it incredibly sparingly, so I actually have it turned off most of the time.

And then if I have a really weird shaped paragraph, I'll flip it on to see if that fixed it.

And otherwise, I leave it off or I'll hand return and do the typographic tweaks myself.

The type setting myself.

I have in the past worked with clients who have said, why is there so much space?

Like we don't we have more space for the text?

If you just widen the box, we could fit more when the balance ragged lines is turned on.

And I have to explain to them, oh, it's because balance ragged lines is turned on.

There's actually not that much more space.

You would just have one weird like a widow or an orphan at the end of your paragraph, right?

Like there's kind of some weird issue.

So that's a little bit of a snafu or a snag that I run into when I use it for the whole document.

I don't know.

Anybody else have that experience?

I keep it off.

I Googled, how do I turn this off?

And I think part of it is that it can get you, it can paint you into a corner sometimes.

I don't know how to fix this.

It's not visually working for me right now.

And I do tend to like to just go in and be able to MacGyver it myself and adjust the leading or adjust the kerning to get it just so to make it right.

But yeah, that is definitely a philosophical, that's like serial comma or no serial comma.

There's certain things in InDesign that kind of feel like, you can go one way or you can go the other way, but it's hard to go kind of halfway with it.

And so I tend to just turn that sucker off when I get into a document, but not one of your documents, so thank you.

We've never missed one of your balance raked lines.

It scares some people.

I've had clients be very freaked out by it.

So I mean, I get it.

It's not for the faint of heart.

Yeah, I feel like sometimes it leaves a white space that I have a hard time settling with.

I don't know why, because you would think most of the time it's right on.

And then I just end up turning it off for one paragraph.

That's my work around.

But I'll take anything that will make a document more readable.

And that's the point, right?

So that it's flowing nicely and your eyes can follow the lines well.

And that's a bonus.

All right, more text tips.

What is optical versus metric?

Do you ever see, where's the change happening?

Optical, all the way.

Metric, boo.

Optical, baby.

I agree with that.

Unless you're desperate.

If you're absolutely desperate and you need that extra bazillionth of an inch of space, then go metrics because it will be slightly more condensed.

But yeah, optical all the way looks better.

Does it default to optical?

No.

No.

You have to change it.

OK, then I've always worked in metrics.

This was new to me.

I don't know what that is.

I feel like I toggle with it and I'm like, I see nothing different.

So I don't know, maybe I'm not using it in the right space or place.

Oh, I notice it's so hard.

It adjusts the kerning for you.

So depending on the shapes of the letters, right, like let's say you have a capital A next to a capital T.

Sometimes because of the shape of the T in the white space underneath the stroke of the top of the T and where the slant of the capital A is, it looks like the letters are really far apart.

And so with the optical setting for kerning, it adjusts, it's like a, almost like AI, right?

It's like a smart tool and it knows that there can be a gap between those letters in the kerning.

So it actually adjusts the kerning closer versus metrics.

It will use the exact same kerning spacing between every single letter.

Oh, interesting.

So that's the difference.

Huh, I had no idea.

Well, I'm just gonna have to do a side by side comparison.

Check it out.

That's great.

All right.

Well, we haven't hit on graphics really in any meaningful way.

Should we move on from text and talk about graphics?

Let's do it.

We hit on linking versus embedding in one conversation, or maybe this was just a huddle, but it was a hot topic.

And I don't know, who wants to stick their neck out there and decide which one is more appropriate?

I put that on the list because I think when it comes to photos, linking always, never embed a photo.

Why would you ever do that?

I think there's one instance out of a bazillion when you would ever want to do that, and that's maybe if you're handing off the file to someone who's never going to be able to track down the links, but 99.9% of the time, you're always going to link photos.

Where the question mark was for me was with vector graphics, that sort of thing, AI files, I mean, Illustrator files, AI, RPS artwork.

For me, I like to have the art in the InDesign file, so I will go into Illustrator, make the graphic, copy it, paste it into InDesign, and then that way I have it.

So if I need to edit it, I can kind of change it a little bit.

I can change the color of this.

I can change the stroke of that.

I like having that vector graphic in InDesign, but I know that for a lot of people, they would obviously, Lauren Jane's making the, I would not do that that way face right now, but like the other way to do it is obviously to make the file in Illustrator and then save it and then link it just like you would a photograph so that when you do have to go back and edit it, you have to go into Illustrator to make those edits.

So you've convinced me a little bit.

Ooh, that's a surprise.

If the shape is pretty simple and I'm anticipating making a color change or something like that, absolutely.

Now I'm like, yes, it makes sense to embed it because I have that tool at my disposal in InDesign and otherwise, I'd have to open the Illustrator document, save it and then go back into the InDesign document and refresh the link.

If it's more of a complex graphic, let's say a site plan or a map graphic or any funky shape.

I don't feel like I have the illustration tools in InDesign that I want.

Then if I embed it, I have to go make the edits, export the file, replace it, instead of just saving it and updating the link.

I actually I think that makes a lot of sense, Becky.

I'm with you there.

As a non-user of Illustrator, like I said, I'm just trouble when I get in there.

But we use icons occasionally inside of our proposals, and icons typically live in Illustrator files.

So I'll pop into there, I'll grab the ones I need, paste them directly in, and that way I can update the colors.

It's typically around the colors.

I think a lot of proposal coordinators out there, probably that's the most interface they have with Illustrator is popping in to grab an icon or something along those lines to take it in.

So I guess I had never thought of this before, but I embed so that I have the ability, right?

That's it's embedding is basically pasting it in versus the placing it in.

Embedders unite.

Yes, I'm an embedder.

Something to watch out for, I suppose, would be file size.

So if you are concerned about the document performing quickly or being really, really large, just the InDesign document itself, if you embed something, it will be pretty big.

So that's, I think, the only hot tip or thing that I want people to pay attention to as well.

As when you embed, it becomes part of the file and it can make things go slowly.

Yeah, I got to watch those file sizes and you don't want to have to be in a pinch at the very end.

Like, I cannot get this compressed or condensed enough for that to be looking out before the due date.

Yeah, all right.

Well, other things, graphic designers, tell us what things just drive you nuts when you get into an InDesign document.

Align to baseline grid.

Grids at all.

I can't stand the grid.

Get out of here with the grids.

Guides, grids, yeah, any extras.

Get out of here.

Why?

Because you don't like seeing them or you don't need their help?

You've already said this.

You can see without that.

I always have like the auto-align thing on.

I don't know what specifically it's called because there's so many of these with very similar names.

But when you put an object next to another object and it wants to align, I have that.

So I don't need those guides, you know?

And yeah, I don't mess with a grid because I just I have such an innate sense of like balance and symmetry that I'm obsessed with it anyway, you know?

So like snapping it to an actual grid is just going to take up time.

But yeah, I don't I don't like clutter.

It's visual clutter for me.

Yeah.

I don't mind seeing the grid, but I don't want it to align to the baseline grid.

When the text is aligned to the baseline grid, it can be really nice because when you have, let's say, two text boxes next to each other, their baseline is the same across text boxes, which is really nice.

So it's not like, oh, this looks like it's a little bit higher based on, you know, whatever the, okay, if you have auto letting turned on, right?

It could actually be misaligned a little bit.

But then if you have a line to baseline grid on, there's all sorts of stuff that happens.

If you haven't divided, it's a little complex.

But if you haven't divided everything by this formula, like when you return, it goes to weird, funky spacing.

And it just like feels way overly complex.

And I'm sure there is an absolute need for that in certain scenarios.

But it is feels very frustrating to work with if you don't really need it.

The only thing I should say that I am an absolute stickler about, I can be flexible across the board.

I really can.

But the one thing, and it's probably my favorite shortcut key, is Ctrl Alt C to pull the bounding box so that it is exactly the bounding box.

It needs to be around text, around imagery, around anything within the document.

I'm constantly correcting for that.

And I will toggle the W to turn on and off your view.

If you can see the pace board or what the final product is going to look like.

Because of that spacing issue between things, I love the harmony of all, and I call them objects on the page, even if it's a text box or not, because at a certain point it is an object on the page.

And how is it presenting in concert with everything else on the page?

And if you have that bounding box that's just arbitrarily pulled out, so you could add more text or something else into it.

If you go to use the Smart Guides to give you that information between them of how far apart they are and when the space is balanced between everything, it's going to throw you.

It's not going to be the right amount of space because it's using the bounding box as its guide, not the content that's within it.

And that does drive me a little batty when I get into someone else's and I'm just seeing all these boxes of burying sizes and chaos.

How do people live like that?

I'm so glad you said that.

Like that, I can't even imagine.

I mean, that would just get, I don't know.

Oh my God.

Can you imagine?

Get your house in order.

It's like you don't you have to close it up.

It's like leaving your front door open.

You've got frames all over the place.

You have to close it up.

It is.

Oh, soul sister.

This would have been a great episode to actually take you on because the hand movements, the nodding, the shaking of the head.

This is very entertaining to watch.

Oh man.

Well, we hit on paragraph styles, but we didn't take that into or paragraph and character styles, but we didn't take it out into like table styles and nested styles and other kinds of things.

Do you, I don't know, is that too much of a veering off to hit on that?

Because it feels like I think some people scratch their heads about nested styles and table styles.

Some of it feels very next level to me.

So if you work at a publication, like say you work at a magazine and you have the same template every single time, I can see going to the next level, the nested styles and really getting it dialed in.

Because again, I remember a firm I worked at, our motto, I think every marketing department should have a motto.

Our motto was reduce mouse clicks because we did so much of our work in InDesign.

It was like, how can we get this done faster?

And with the same results were better.

And for me, this kind of falls into that category of, if the nested style of setting it up and using it is actually costing time and you can achieve it in a different way.

And it's in a proposal that you're never going to see again.

And with a style that you might not ever use again, it to me, it's time that I could be spending doing something else.

So I tend to take a very simplified approach.

I like a body text style.

I like headers one, two, three, and four.

I like a first bullet.

I can go either way on the last bullet and having a little extra space under it or not.

That's about it for me.

I don't have a whole lot beyond that style-wise that I'll typically use.

If I need to bold something, I'll go and highlight it, bold it really quickly.

But again, just given the nature of our work and just the vacillation between proposals and different looks and feels, I like to stay a little fast and loose with that kind of stuff.

But I'm also nowhere near as talented and InDesign as these two, so I'd love to hear what they have to say.

Well, we're actually very similar in that regard.

I like to keep very simple styles, just a few of them.

If you're scrolling through the styles panel, it's not my document.

I've got to have body text, I've got to have section headers, sub header, sub sub header, bullets, caption, question text.

That's about it for me.

I might add in a couple of things for resume labels or whatever, if I'm really doing something interesting or setting up a template, but I keep that super, super simple.

Then character styles, I'll have one or two things, and it'll just be body text bold, and I'll set that with a shortcut, which for me is Ctrl-0, it always is, so that I can quickly apply that.

Then I do color bullets for bullets, and then that's it.

That's all I'm doing.

I don't do table styles at all.

I like one or two object styles, and it's usually just a caption box maybe, or an org chart box, but nothing else.

Tables, I will design the heck out of them and just go through and do all kinds of alternating fills and columns and rows and whatever, but I think the table styles set up was just so convoluted and made things worse for me that I just abandoned it was like, F this, I'm out.

Because I like styles in principle, but man, table styles were counterproductive, I thought.

Agreed.

Lauren Jane, do you have any opinions about table styles?

Because so far we're not using them, is the answer.

I'm going to say no.

I think that there are probably scenarios in which they're really helpful.

I think setting up styles and tables can be very laborious.

And if you know, like, if you're an engineering client and you use a certain type of table all the time, all the time, I could see that.

I could also see, like, make one table and copy and paste it in and change the content.

I don't know.

I don't use table styles very often.

I feel like Allison set this whole last piece up pretty well in saying that if you are working in the same type of document or for one brand again and again every day, there can be efficiencies to taking a deeper dive into InDesign and setting more things up until it hits, it bumps up against your personal preference for tidiness, you know, streamline.

So we all get to choose that piece of it.

And then you're hearing the inside version of what it's like at Middle of Six, that we're just seeing such a variety of user preferences, styles, knowledge, all of that bit, and even amongst ourselves, you know.

You've heard a couple of things that we didn't know, you know, compared to each other, but that's the reality of it, right?

Working with a variety of marketers or maybe being on a design build team and sharing documents unexpectedly.

Just know there's a lot of ways to do it, not necessarily right or wrong.

I feel like awesome conversation today, we have to cut it off at some point and this is probably going to be it.

So, Allison, do you mind wrapping us up for today?

Yeah, sure.

One of the mythological figures that gets mentioned a lot in our industry is Sisyphus, the fellow who has to roll the boulder up the mountain, get it all the way to the top just to watch it roll back down again.

That's how proposals can feel after doing many and many of them.

But the way I think about it with InDesign is there are so many different ways of working within that software, so many tools that kind of do the same thing.

There's just different ways in which we use it.

It's just like there's different ways to climb a mountain, to get to the top.

Just because one path works for you does not mean that everyone else is going to follow in your footsteps.

But on the other hand, sometimes we might be taking the toughest route and we don't even know it.

And I have learned that like even today, Becky's like, you know, don't hit Control N first, just open up InDesign, you can set things.

I feel like I learned that a long time ago and I forgot it over time.

And it's such an important thing to remember.

And there's a lot of things like that.

So I'd say the fact that we all have these different perspectives and approaches in InDesign is a good thing.

We can learn from each other.

It's all about sharing your experiences and yeah, hold tight this stuff that really works well for you.

But remember that you might end up with a game changing nugget if you just talk to your coworkers and colleagues in the industry about how they're using it.

Game changers for sure.

Well, thanks everyone for rumbling on this topic.

I had a lot of fun, a lot of laughing.

We'll have to see how much gets cut because there was a lot to this conversation, but it was awesome.

Thank you for being honest too about where you are or what your preferences are.

That's pretty great.

So until next time, see y'all later.

Yeah, bye.

Great talking about InDesign.

Bye-bye.

Close your frames.

Control Alt C.

The Shortlist is presented by Middle of Six.

Our producer is Kyle Davis with digital marketing support by the team at Middle of Six.

If you're looking for past episodes or more info, check out our podcast page at middleofsix.com/theshortlist.

You can follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram at Middle of Six.

Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode.

Until next time, keep on hustling.

The Shortlist is a podcast that explores all things AEC marketing. Hosted by Middle of Six Principal, Wendy Simmons, each episode features members of the MOS team, where we take a deep dive on a wide range of topics related to AEC marketing including: proposal development, strategy, team building, business development, branding, digital marketing, and more. You can listen to our full archive of episodes here.