The Shortlist Episode 76: InDesign Rumble, Part 2

Season 5 of The Shortlist kicks off with a fan-favorite: InDesign Rumble (Part 2). Wendy Simmons, Becky Ellison, and Lauren Jane Peterson continue their spirited conversation on how AEC marketers actually use Adobe InDesign, workarounds and all.

This episode explores how even seasoned designers evolve their skills in a tool most learned on the fly. The MO6 team dives into efficiency-boosters like automation, AI features, data merge, CC Libraries, and paragraph styles. They also call out "common pitfalls" found in inherited files, from hand-built tables to overbuilt parent pages, and discuss when a quick workaround becomes a project liability.

The takeaway? There’s rarely one "right" way to work. Whether you’re an InDesign expert or a self-proclaimed "level 6," this episode will spark new ideas to streamline your next pursuit. Listen in to unlock major gains in efficiency and clarity.

CPSM CEU Credits: 0.5 | Domain: 4

Podcast Transcript

Welcome to season five of 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 Becky Ellison and Lauren Jane Peterson for part two of our conversation about references, tips, perspectives, all about InDesign, which we live in every day as marketers.

And I was told by a client yesterday that, man, I sure am fast at InDesign, which made me feel really good because I'm talking to the fastest InDesign people that I know, Becky and Lauren Jane.

No, it was a little gold star for me, but I was talking to president of a construction company, so maybe it's not really the best gauge of who's fast at InDesign or not. This is part two, like I said, part two of the Rumble.

The last time we rumbled was just last season, season four, episode 66. We hit on some topics. I am sure I said, because I say this at the end of every podcast, man, we could have talked about this forever, but we're going to wrap it up.

So here we are. We're coming back to talk about InDesign and how we use it, what's the right way to use it, because there is no right way to use it in most cases.

Just go through some of our favorite stuff and see if I can get Becky and Lauren Jane to arm wrestle for us here.

Our favorite activity.

I don't like my chances. Lauren Jane does cross it.

Hello to you both. Thanks for being on the podcast. Our extraordinary designers who make the work at Middle of Six just look amazing.

That's so kind.

We try.

Yes, exactly. Becky, Lauren Jane, say hi to our listeners out there. Either one of you want to say why we think this is an important topic.

I feel like that's a nice place to start.

Yeah, for sure.

Hi, listeners. Becky here. I feel your pain.

If you are someone who uses InDesign or any Adobe creative applications, to be fair, there is a significant amount of pain that comes with it. There's growing pains. There's being grown up pains.

There's starting pains. It's just a painful thing, but pain is growth. Pain is good.

I think it's important because this is what we do, and we may be the only industry left AEC marketing that uses InDesign because nobody is creating documents anymore. Maybe we're not the only, but we're...

Editorial?

I know.

Maybe. Mm-hmm.

These are some bold statements come out of Becky.

Right. First of all, they're just...

Everyone in publishing is rolling over and they're just...

I didn't realize, and Adobe is like, wait a second, hold on here.

There goes my sponsorship.

No, we are one of the few remaining industries that works every day, all day in InDesign, and so it is so important that what we do is fast, efficient, easy, makes you feel like you're doing your best work in the fastest and most efficient way.

And that is why I love sharing tips and tricks with our clients and with our listeners, because there's always a moment that comes where you think, oh my God, I can do it like that, and it's so much easier and faster than what I've been doing, and I

live for that sort of thing. live for that sort of thing.

Well, as you were sharing that, it made me wonder, and I feel like we probably talked about this in episode 66 too, but just like for people listening this time, like let's raid ourselves.

Where are we on the spectrum of InDesign expertise? Because, spoiler alert, I am not a 10 out of 10 in this area.

So Becky, you might be a power user, but there's also other people in our world, at AEC, who, I don't know, what would I give myself, a six?

Interesting.

Do I not know what I don't know kind of thing? So I'm sure I'm gonna pick up some tips in this conversation, too. How would you rate yourselves?

Gosh, picking a 10 is dangerous.

I feel like that's a dangerous rating. So I don't know. I would give myself maybe a nine.

There are some days where I'm like, oh, I really had to Google something today. But like you said, Wendy, the more I know, the more I'm like, gosh, InDesign is such a powerful, incredible tool.

There are people out there, we're going to talk about this later, but building automations and workflows in InDesign that are insane and incredibly powerful. I have only barely scratched the surface of things like that.

Compared to the general public or general population, I would definitely call myself a power user, but absolutely acknowledge that there are so many things in InDesign that I don't know.

100 percent. Yeah, I feel the same. I would also give myself maybe a 9.5.

I think it's such a thing where if you know very well what you do with it, you can get to a very high level of expertise and then you realize there's some things that are so advanced and so complicated that require such a mathematical engineering

brain that I don't necessarily have, but someone's out there doing it. The cool thing is you find different people who have different pieces of the puzzle, and you'll meet someone who does something a different way, and they know something you didn't

and you can exchange, and it's very wild west. I feel like giving oneself a number is very strange thing to do, but I'm that jaded veteran who's sitting in the corner like, I'll tell you some stories, but I always want to hear if someone else has

Where are you getting the exposure or the experience from people who are doing some really amazing things, or where are you picking that up since probably a lot of times at Middle of Six, you're sitting in the seat of a 9.5 InDesign user.

Well, there used to be a website called InDesign Secrets.

I'm sure a lot of people know about this. It's no longer called that. I can't remember where it lives now, but essentially a blog or like a forum where there's a lot of content.

If you even just Google InDesign Secrets, that comes up. But YouTube is a friend. There's also like an InDesign subreddit where I live a lot.

A lot is probably an exaggeration, but where I live when I'm trying to understand really complex formatting or nesting things or just parts of InDesign that I don't use very often due to the nature of the type of work that we're doing.

Those are my go-to resources when I'm really trying to solve a problem.

Yeah, those are great. I think we learn from each other as well too, because I do a lot of proposal templates and things like that, or just proposals in general. We hand files back and forth with clients.

Sometimes, we'll get somebody who's got just such a built-out template that I'm like, why did you do this? What does this mean?

I dig through what they've done and it's like, okay, well, you're doing six things over here that are incredibly inefficient, but you've got this one thing over here that's like, woo, cool secret, and that's when you, I think, can trade.

Yeah, YouTube is very good. Also, Adobe themselves, they always do a conference every year called Adobe Max, and they have sessions where they kind of explain new features and things like that.

That's a great way for anybody of any skill level to kind of tune in and see not only what are different ways to do things, but what are the new things that are coming out.

Right. Get inspired.

I've been to Adobe Max in person and done the online stuff and haven't done it for a while, so I don't know what kind of latest and greatest is, but just the pure inspiration and that eye-opening experience like, oh, that can be done, is exciting for

someone who gets to live in that space. How long have you both been using InDesign? Did you start with PageMaker or something way back in the day or some other, I don't know, some other doing?

I'm way too young for that. I know.

You are too young. I'm dating myself.

Approximately a 100 years. Yeah. No, I personally, I'm self-taught, very proud of it.

I started using Illustrator first. When I was in college, I just downloaded a trial and I would practice on one of the computers in the computer lab at school. That's how old I am.

That was maybe, I think, Creative Suite had maybe just come out, so it was like Creative Suite 0.

Yeah.

That's how I started and then I just transitioned from Illustrator into InDesign because it was just something you needed to know going into the workplace and then I didn't know much of anything, and then I just did some kind of training and

Lauren Jane, what about you?

What was your intro?

I had some limited in design exposure in my graphic design course in college, so learned a little bit there, but it's one of the many, many, many things that you learn throughout the semester.

So I had a tiny bit of exposure there and then used it again here and there with my limited knowledge, but really my first in-house AEC job, there's a senior graphic designer, Julia, shout out to Julia, who's incredible, incredible in design and was

really like, nope, here's the best way to do this. I'll show you and really was very patient with me and taught me a lot and gave me a really great foundation for all the principles of using InDesign. That was my springboard into being an expert.

Well, I hear that from a lot of people. It's my story too that I just learned it on the job. I can't actually really recall what my first introduction to InDesign was because my first Adobe product was Photoshop.

That was something that I got to learn in high school, so that's cool and it made me realize that, oh, you could be creative and have a creative job that felt like not just being a painter or ceramicist or something like that, not just.

I don't want to say just, no judgment there, but I thought you have to also pay the bills.

Those are the things I was thinking about in high school, so I got that introduction to Photoshop and then my career going into graphic design, it just kind of naturally evolved, but I did use PageMaker in college, Becky.

That does tell you my age there.

I apologize.

That was probably where I know.

That's not old.

That's what we had. I was in the student newspaper or whatever and working on that and I immediately took to it. I was like, well, this is incredible.

Look at all this layout. I know that I have, oh, I'm not going to share this with the world, but I have it in a file, my first piece of graphic design laid out in PageMaker. It was like a brochure, I know, college projects.

I'm going to tell Grace, this is going on the Instagram.

Stay tuned, everybody.

No, maybe some very safe, private moment. I can share it with the team to show you what my work looks like. I mean, this is like cut and paste days, literally not control V, cut and paste.

It was like cut out with scissors and pasted on a piece of paper. So that's where, you know, but getting into the design layout programs, I was like, oh, there's so much we can do. And obviously I was a college student.

I was learning lots of people were using this way before me. This was just my experience. But then getting into AEC, I just, I think it was sort of assumed this is the program that we use and, you know, let's go.

And the reason why I say all of that is because with all of our stories and even Kyle, who's listening on the headphones, but not on the mic, we all learn, picked it up, you know, picked up.

So doing some self-taught things, got the tips, did some googling. I know I've googled things in InDesign. Like, I don't even know what to Google because I don't know what the thing is that I need it to do.

Yeah, that's so real.

Is this possible?

I know, like, I wanted to do this. Googling a paragraph description of what we need. And, of course, now AI would probably actually understand what that is.

But, you know, back in the day, that was something that was really hard to figure out what you needed to do. But that, to me, says actually how approachable InDesign is. It can be daunting.

It can feel like a lot. You can feel a little bit lost if you don't have those basics. But we all figured it out.

And most AEC marketers I know, that's also how they got their training. They figured it out. So I don't know, where do we want to go from here?

Do you have some stories to share? Like, you know, is there something that you've recently learned that was really exciting, keeping on that learning path?

You know, actually, this isn't actually a design plan. In Photoshop, for those Adobe users who use all the programs, which is all of us, you can actually generative upscale now photos in Photoshop.

And as you know, I have strong opinions on AI and its use in creative applications. But I think this is suitably, you know, monotonous work that used to be done. I mean, I used to upscale photos by hand.

I would, you know, image size, you know, resampling, sharpen. I mean, there's so many little things that you used to have to do step by step.

And then Lauren Jane found an AI based upscaler that you had to then take the photo to another application, run it through there.

You can now just with a click of a button in Photoshop, generative upscale your photo, meaning like, you know, blow it up twice the size, four times the size, whatever.

And it will scale it up the best it can using generative AI to make it look actually pretty decent, pretty sharp. I've had good results with that.

Also, another thing I recently learned in here, this is another thing that happens all the time at Middle of Six. Me and Lauren Jane are always like texting each other, like, oh my God, you're never gonna believe what I just figured out.

I still remember the day that Lauren Jane messaged me about this. This was a trick in Adobe Illustrator that she was like, Becky, did you know when you're exporting logo files, you can set it up. I don't remember exactly what it was.

I can't explain it. Maybe you should, but it was mind-blowing because it's something that used to take hours and hours and hours that you could just do so fast. And she's like, I never knew about this and I didn't either.

And it was exciting.

Yeah. So what Becky's referring to is the export panel in Adobe Illustrator. Pretty sure it's called the export panel.

You can just drag your elements directly into the panel that you want to export. So let's say it's a logo and you can set what kind of exports you want to, like what kind of file outputs you want.

So I could say one JPEG at 100% size, one JPEG at 200% size, one PNG transparent, one PDF, whatever, right?

So you set all the files that you want to export, and then you literally just click a button and it exports everything for you and you can decide what the naming structure is and where you want them to live, and if you want them in separate folders.

I was like, oh my gosh, I've wasted so much time. It was like, we'll cut. It was like kind of heartbreaking, but also exciting to know that I could work faster and smarter moving forward.

Well, it's good to have the foundation.

We should all know how to do the thing, the hard way, and then you can appreciate it when you can take the easy path.

Totally. Totally.

We didn't even talk about InDesign. Have you learned anything in InDesign specifically?

Wait a second.

This is the InDesign Rumble.

Yeah, I know. Well, I will say, Becky introduced me to a lot of automations that I had not previously done before Middle of Six.

Table of Contents automation is one of the more staple automations that Becky, I think, I don't want to speak for her, but Becky uses a lot and talks about a lot. And I had never done that before.

So learning how to actually just automate your Table of Contents based on the way that you set up your paragraph styling and have them linked.

That was a big game changer for me, especially with really long pursuits or really long form documents like employee handbooks, things like that.

And I also did not come from a place or a space that used keyboard shortcuts, and that's like not my go-to necessarily.

And it's interesting because at Middle of Six, because we are on the essentially the consultant side, it doesn't always really work because you're in client files that are set up differently.

But if you get the opportunity to set up files, like maybe building a proposal template for a client, you can build in the keyboard shortcuts for them.

So whenever you're actually working in one of their files, you can be like, oh yeah, I mean, Becky, I don't even know which ones you use, but you could quick bold something or put something in italics or use, you know, a keyboard shortcut for

different paragraph styles. So I would definitely recommend people looking into that, particularly people who are in in-house roles, because that could absolutely save a lot of time. And I wish that I had that.

And then the other thing that I have learned lately is the data merge from Excel with business card population. So it doesn't necessarily have to be business cards, but it's a good example.

So if you're building out a business card for 50 people at your firm, you can tie the cells to different text boxes essentially, and just do a quick data merge and click a button, and it populates all of your business cards for you instantly, right,

like within a minute. And that was another one of those, like, oh my gosh, this would have been so handy. So things like that. Those are some big automation tricks that are new to me since being in Middle of Six.

On that topic of the Becky's Table of Contents part, right, like the automation, I just want to say, this is like proof I'm a six or a seven.

I don't know, maybe I'll go that far, because Becky is so kindly, puts a little note there that says to update the Table of Contents, go to, you know, layout and then go the instructions. Thank you.

We all thank you for those instructions, because I don't use it enough to remember how am I supposed to do that? And it's super handy.

So maybe that is a good tip in general, that if you're working in documents, or maybe you have lots of things that you go to again and again, business card files, whatever it might be, like leave yourself some notes.

That could be a reason to use the pace board. It's certainly handy, or it makes sure the person who's coming behind you a little bit more efficient. And I thank you both for helping me out in that way.

Well, Becky gets a gold star for that.

Always leaving little breadcrumbs of how to use things. And there's nothing, truly nothing more frustrating than going into an InDesign document and thinking, what the heck? I don't even know, like, why is this here?

Or I can't click on this thing, or I don't understand what's happening. Like, that can feel very, very, very, very difficult. Something I just learned, actually, was on one of our client files.

One of our other colleagues sent me a message, and she was like, hey, I don't know what's happening in InDesign. Can you drop on a call with me? So we got on a call.

A lot of her text was highlighted a color, and she was like, I cannot get the highlight to go away. I don't know what it is. Is it an underline that's moved up?

Like, what is going on?

Was it overheads?

Yes. I at first thought it was maybe missing typeface, but it wasn't and didn't make sense based on where the highlighting was, and we figured it out. But I had never used the Paragraph Styling override highlight function.

Oh, sure.

And I learned about that.

And now this particular colleague, this was Katie, she was like, oh, I really like it. I turned it on. So I know where I've overridden styles, so I can kind of keep track of it.

So that's also another great example of just things that we learn on the fly and things that we receive from client proposal examples that we have to do a little bit of problem-solving on, but then we can learn some really cool new tricks.

Yeah, I forget about that often, but when I toggle it on or go and use it, I was like, oh, that actually is really helpful. Especially, again, sitting in our seat, when we're handing something back to a client, I want it to be as perfect as possible.

So that's like a check that you can do to make sure, is this going to function really well for them? And I feel like Lauren Jane, remind me, you like to have it turned on where you can see the paragraph, text markers. What is that actually called?

I never use that, but when I...

Hidden character styles or hidden something.

Hidden characters, but when it is turned on, I'm actually like, oh, I'm kind of obsessed with this, because again, it goes to like, I can make this perfect.

I can see every little thing and you better have some time on your hands because you might end up getting obsessed over every...

I think we talked about that last time where you're like, that's really handy and I see it more and more when you're handing something back to me, I was like, oh, yeah, let's look at it this way.

And that's kind of the bonus of getting to share files with other users to see what they did, how they solved a problem, learning something new.

I mean, I think I'm learning from you all and also learning like, how can I be a better steward of this file? So I'm handing it back in a way that is not a frickin nightmare because I'm not going to get...

Close up your text boxes, America. And in fact, the world, if you're listening, for the love of God, close them up. Double click, you know, Ctrl, Alt, C, whatever it is you do to close those text boxes, close them.

What does that mean?

It's like leaving your front door open.

I can't, like, first of all, I cannot handle hidden characters. I cannot handle a paragraph, marks, hidden threads, show this. I don't, just minimal.

I don't even want guides. I don't want margins, columns, anything. I want a blank sheet.

That's just me. It could be ADHD, but I got to focus. So the text boxes, whenever you have text in an InDesign file, it's in a text box.

And you can make that text box as big as you want. And the text stays the same size, right? And you could just leave those huge text boxes all over the place and not close them up and just have them overlapping everything.

And a lot of people do do that, but I am maybe weirdly obsessed with closing them up. I got to have them just fit to the text so that it's nice and neat and clean and boxed in and I don't know, just like working with another file.

It's just so like, it's difficult to pick up if they're not.

Well, that's another very much a preference. I like having all of my boundary boxes turned on. I like seeing everything.

I want to see them. Yes, I know. Becky and I work so differently.

I want to see exactly where the box is. I line it up even if it's like extra text. I'm like, oh, that's lined up because it goes to the column.

Like everything is very kind of like nitpicky, nitty gritty in the alignment in the boxes. So I like seeing bounding boxes.

When I don't see them, I'm like, I feel like I'm flying blind or like I'm doing surgery blind, like I need to see the insides, the structure to align to that grid, right?

Like that's the way that my brain works, but I can totally appreciate that Becky needs it different.

Everyone's different. We all, whenever I get these files, if I get a file from Katie, who we mentioned before, who likes the show and the overrides, she does, she shows all the stuff. Always the overrides.

Every time I get a file from her, I'm just like turn off, turn off, turn off. I just turn off everything, do my thing, hand it back and she turns it all back on. That's what we do, it doesn't hurt the file.

Everybody's different. It's just choices and that's the point. There's so many different ways to do things.

As long as it's good and efficient and the best way for you, then it can't be wrong.

Well, I like that I get to see both, work in InDesign files from both of you because I learn a lot. And it doesn't, I want to speak for the rest of the world since Becky already yelled at us about closing up our text boxes.

Which, by the way, I do, I use the double click. I just didn't realize what I was doing. That's how I closed mine up.

But it doesn't bother me at all. I think that same boat that Katie's in, like great, open up the file. I'm very used to rolling with it.

There probably are some times when we run into something that's not just a preference thing, but it's like, why the heck is this built this way?

And you're questioning your life and career decisions and maybe if you just need to start a new blank document.

So maybe we can go into that world when, you know, whether you're sharing files back and forth with folks or you, I don't know, in a situation where you're getting InDesign files, like what are the things that you maybe have found that make working

in InDesign super inefficient or that you would just say never do this or anything in those realms? Like the thing that's putting you on the edge should be like, we got to start over. I can't handle.

This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately because I have been working with a lot of client provided files starting with package proposal files that they've given us.

Something that I'm seeing a lot of people doing that I would love to lovingly help them not do is placing text boxes on top of other boxes.

What I mean by this is when you have maybe like a call out or any like box that's like filled in with a color or something, let's say, and then text on top of it, a lot of people who don't know that there's another way to do this, will just take the

text box, put it on top of a square shape that's filled in, align it up the best they can, good to go. It's actually, I think, a much more efficient and better way to do it in the long run for your own sanity and for future use by yourself and others

to place the text into the box and then set the padding, the inset spacing around the text box so that you can then fill that with whatever color you need. Your text is in there. It has the padding built in.

You don't have no two objects stacked on top of each other. It's just the one. So to what I mean by that, if you're not sure, is like, you know, make yourself a little text box and then click on it and hit Ctrl B or Command B.

It's been a long time since I've worked on a Mac, but that will open up the text box options dialog. And you can set a whole lot of things in there that you can explore. But one of them is, you know, inset spacing.

That'll give you that sort of padding so that you don't then have to place one thing on top of another thing. Another thing I see a lot is people are hand pasting footers and headers on every page. You really don't have to do that.

I know like changing page numbers is a whole thing. Believe me, I do. But you can automate those page numbers on your parent pages, where you can put in, you know, inserting a variable that will fill in the page.

You can even, I'd be happy to show you this. Contact me, people. There's a way to automatically pull into the footer, like the section name that you're in, it will automatically populate.

There's so many things that will just automatically do that. Then if you run into page numbering difficulties, like, oh, tabs don't count. What about blank pages?

You can then accomplish that at the end by changing sections, which is too long to explain. But just trust me that you don't have to paste footers on every page or page numbers or any of that stuff.

You can have a fully unoverridden footer and header in your life. I would very much support that.

Other things, if people aren't using margins and columns, that's really tough if you've got a page that you're just, there's no margins and columns set up and you're just trying to make your own layout or one big text box.

Check out layout, margins, and columns and watch your life change. Paragraph rules, that's how you can put lines above or underneath text and you don't have to make a line and paste it in there or anything like that.

You can just click on the text and go up to the text menu and select paragraph rules, which is hilarious because it's like rules. I don't know what that means. Rule meaning line, but whatever, let's not be dorks about it.

But it'll create a line that you can then do a bunch of settings and it's like, attach the text, that's really fun. What else? Yeah, table of contents.

I'm telling you, automate your table of contents. It'll change your whole outlook on life.

You have a lot of opinions.

I'm guilty of the text box on a regular box, but it's not A. It was one of the things I didn't realize it was bothering you, so now I know.

That's good.

It's not personal. As you were talking about, I was like, oh, I think that's just like old habits die hard type of thing, because I absolutely prefer the method that you're talking about. It's like kind of just an old way of doing it, right?

So yeah, that's good. Having some awareness of where we are.

Sometimes you do have to do that, to be fair. I think for me, the only time I have found where you absolutely must do that is if you are producing something where you have to outline the text for print, where you can't give them like live fonts.

Because if you do that with a text box with padding, it will it will throw your whole thing off. But anyway, never mind.

There you go. There's like little booby traps everywhere.

Can I also make a point, which is when Becky, here's something else I learned. When Becky first was like, don't put text over a solid object or in a box, like you put it in a text box and add padding.

I had thought, well, sometimes I want my box to be transparent, but I don't want my text to be transparent.

I did not know that in the transparency, essentially settings, you can control which parts of the object are transparent, so you can choose background transparency versus text. That also was a huge mind for me working with Becky.

I'm like, oh, I don't have to do this workaround of separating the text out, then putting a box on top.

There is a solution that's already been thought through in InDesign, and spoiler alert, most of the time, InDesign actually just has a solution to do something that you're trying to do some weird workaround. That's actually better.

Yeah. If you can Google it and figure it out. Yeah, totally.

Yeah.

That makes me wonder, I think, and Becky alluded to this a bit ago in the early part of the podcast, where you're like, sometimes we get into InDesign files that are overly complicated, and how do you strike that balance between making something that

people can get into and use and not making them get into it, and like, I don't even know how to click on this thing. How do I change that?

They're like, where there could be inefficiencies just because they aren't operating at an eight or a nine in InDesign. I don't know if you have any thoughts about that right balance. What's too much?

For sure.

Something I see a lot of is people, what I would say, overusing parent pages, putting every possible layout that exists in the document on a parent page that someone then has to unlock and override and recreate, and you just lose track of what's even

happening. For me, I have two, three, maybe four parent pages, and there's nothing on them. It's just a footer. I just make them different sizes with different columns, and that's it.

I don't put any content on there of any kind other than the footer, because I like everything to be really minimal. I like minimal styles.

I don't think you need 100,000 styles for everything in a million different folders, because styles are meant to be... I mean, everything should be styled, but I think overrides are okay when you have things that are not repeated.

If only your org chart has this kind of text, that doesn't need to be a style necessarily, because it's only in that one page. That will save you a lot of space. Then for the parent pages, put that content somewhere else.

Maybe have a template file that has all your little parts and pieces, your little grab and go snack counter of little items that go in proposal. You can just go grab those, paste them in.

You can make a library, an InDesign library or a creative cloud library, which is much more high-tech and can be shared among people. Don't stuff those in your parent pages. It's only going to cause you heartache.

I think minimal is the way to go for me. What do you think, Lauren Jane? We're not fighting at all.

No, we're not fighting.

I agree, minimal is the way to go. And in the instances where I have felt like, you know, I actually need to start a new document, like this is, I actually cannot work in here. It's one of two things usually.

One, something is actually wrong with the file. Like there is an actual problem that I simply cannot fix because one, either I cannot even tell what's going on, it's just behaving really weirdly.

Or two, in order to fix it, it would take so much time that I have to, essentially you're triaging, right? Like we need to use our time wisely and our clients time wisely.

And in order to sometimes fix something, you're like, oh, I think that this would be this like weird manual thing because everything had been built manually, so you got to go through and fix a lot of it. Like that's not the best use of the time.

So that would be an instance which I would start over.

And then on the total opposite flip side, sometimes I go in and so many settings have been played with in the file where everything is completely custom and I'm like, okay, either somebody really, really, really, really, really, really advanced was

in this file or somebody who is kind of advanced but like only did things their own certain way and it's not really super best practice was in this file and set it up. And I actually like can't navigate through here and there are settings here that I

like don't even know what this is. Like that does happen where I have to start a new file. I'm like, you know what? It's going to be better and faster.

And I'm sure I could probably problem solve.

But when you're on a, you know, five page or 10 page quick proposal turn, you're like, this is not worth my time or the client's time to try to actually figure out what in the world is going on in this document.

So those are instances in which I would create a new file. But we try to avoid that.

Yeah, it does feel like you're starting from scratch, and that's not what we're trying to do there. Yeah.

Well, good examples. You know, what about if you guys are up for it, can we talk a little bit about InDesign Books? Because not that we weren't talking about it previously, we could have been talking about it.

But I would say most of the time when we're working in InDesign, it's just going to be a pretty simple document. Maybe it's like 30 pages or something like that. That's average for us.

But sometimes, we need something more robust. And so, I don't know, I'll hand that over. What are your thoughts?

Can we rumble a little bit about InDesign Books?

Yes. Yeah, I would say, Becky, jump in. I would say we used to rumble about this, but now we're aligned.

Would you say the same thing? Yeah, I came from an in-house firm that used books all the time. We were pretty large teams.

Not every proposal, but we definitely lived in books, and I saw the benefit of doing that. But I didn't realize that not as many people use them. So I came to Middle of Six, and Becky was like, no, I don't want to work in books.

Becky, what was your opposition to books? You had to tell me.

I had books trauma. I think I tried using books as a solution a long time ago before I learned a lot of automated things that I know now, I guess if that makes sense. I thought, why on earth would you do this?

Because then you can't A, B, C, D, I mean, what do you do about page numbering? What about table of contents? What about this?

And now that I know how those things are done, it's awesome. The only drawback I've found so far using books has been if you have a OneDrive system like we do, there's a lot of file version issues that can happen.

But we did find workarounds because I worked on a couple of proposal teams just recently that used books for our first time here at Middle of Six, a lot of us.

But we found some great ways to collaborate without overwriting one another's work and that sort of thing.

Yeah, I will acknowledge that using books can feel finicky or it can feel a little daunting. But there's, you know, again, like always some good guidance on the Internet of really how to try to set it up in your favor.

And I will say we're like, OK, we're synchronizing the book. Nobody touch it, right? There's kind of like this like internal synchronization that needs to happen.

But the benefit of being able to work simultaneously is just really outweighs the restriction that we would have if we're working on, you know, 60 page one single InDesign document.

So that's been a, I would say, middle of six wide topic in the last couple of months.

You know, as we were working on some pretty large proposals that they, you know, in the last several months, that was kind of pushing us in that direction.

Like I said, most of our work, you know, these like kind of, I would say shorter form proposals. We don't do a lot of infrastructure proposals that could be like multiple volumes in binders, right?

That's another level you, that kind of maybe a no-brainer that you might need a book or just multiple InDesign files for that. But, you know, the average kind of quick stuff, easy.

What are some of the things that we learned and took away from working in the book? Or, you know, if you're listening and considering, I don't know, maybe I should use that.

I mean, Becky, Lauren Jane, sell our listeners on what we experienced and how they might benefit from it.

I would say if you're a team of, honestly, even two, it could benefit you.

But if you're a team of three, and you're working at a pace in which you will need to both need to be working at the same time, or all three of you will need to be working at the same time on a larger pursuit, there is a pretty big benefit, right?

Because one person can be QC-ing a document, one person can be writing, one person can be designing, and you can kind of trail behind one another. That's my biggest case for using that is efficiency. For sure.

Yeah.

If you can control your styles, it's very important that you have your style source set in the book, and that's where you kind of have all the various paragraph and character styles, object styles that you're going to need throughout, and then

everybody sticks to that source and doesn't change anything too wacky. I mean, overrides happen. I am guilty of overrides. I love them.

I override everything. Feel however you feel, but that's what I do. But as long as you're not making like major style changes, adding new ones that don't end up in the source, that sort of thing, you can control it very well.

Parent pages are important when you have a book that you've got the same header and footer going on in that page numbering again, which you can then go back in.

I mean, I think people have page number anxiety, and I understand that this is a safe place. My heart goes out to you. I get it, especially with what we do where some pages don't count.

Some people like to number pages right up front. So we have people... This is a fight.

This is truly something we rumble about here. We have some people who insist on numbering the pages up front so that the client knows the whole way through. These are the pages.

These ones don't count. We have to number it first.

I feel very passionately that that cannot happen, because for me, I've got to number the pages at the end because I do that when some pages don't count via section numbering, which is a very focused, repetitive, but you have to be in the zone and do

it all at one time kind of process. So I like that to be the very last thing we do.

But then with books, you have a similar workflow where you can be all over the map in your different files, and then when you bring them together as the book, then you sew up the page numbering and it all comes together in the end. So I do like that.

I think I'm probably more on the opposite end, Becky, where I want to have each page number there to know what counts and what doesn't, because I have anxiety that I'm going to add a page.

So I do think that we have started internally doing another thing, which is just adding a pink callout box and hand...

I do yellow, but whatever...

. right, a yellow callout box and just hand numbering things, which is a pain in the butt. And it kind of is like we don't get the automation, but then we can say we can make a comment.

You know, one of 22, two of 22, three of 22, and then, you know, whatever.

So it's a little bit of an extra step, but then you're not going back and trying to be like, add a section or take a section away and try to fight some of that automation, but you still get those page numbers written on each page for peace of mind.

So it's a little bit of a standard practice almost now at Middle of Six that we do. Yeah, it's evolved somehow on its own.

The anxiety is real. We need to be able to see that right there and with confidence. When we're talking to the client, that we know how many pages we have and how many, what's going to happen.

No surprises at the end of the number polls. Oh, look at that. We're over one.

Quick, Becky, make some space. That's what we need.

MacGyver moment. Yeah.

Well, even with our new found enjoyment in books, I used to work in books when I was working in house, and I just kind of was suddenly that went away again because of like, well, what are we faced with?

But I will say, we're not, it's not like we're doing that on every proposal. It's not like we've converted to that. So there are some reasons why or why not.

And I guess maybe in a year, when we come back and rumble for Part 3, we can decide if we've moved all the way to InDesign Books or is it still kind of a gray area?

But yeah, definitely something that's useful, like Lauren Jane said, for those larger teams, is just make more efficiency, more guarantee that you're not having to trade off as much. And time is so important, especially on a proposal.

We need every day, every minute, very handy. So things count.

We do have a huge list, by the way, of topics that we wanted to cover, that we can definitely, we've got three or four more episodes of these in us, I think InDesign is just gonna become a running theme.

It's such a big topic for us, right?

Of course.

And we have been recording for a while now, and these are meant to be a little bit more bite-sized, like commute-sized, I guess, not bite-sized per se.

But so, in the interest of wrapping it up, is there anything that you had on your wish list that you wanted to say today, and we hadn't asked about, what's the last things about InDesign that you might want to share with our listeners?

I mean, we got to save something for next time, but oh man, I already freaked out about text boxes.

I might add that I have been building an Adobe Creative Cloud Library for every client that I am working in a file for them now.

It's not adopted full across Middle of Six, but I've been doing that and I've really been thanking myself every single time.

Because you know what, even when I'm not working on proposals, even if I'm doing a design project brochure or something like that, I'm like, I could open up my file structure, go to the client, find their marketing folder, look at their brand guide,

pull it up, go through all those steps to find which typeface they use, and their logos, and their colors, or I could literally just click on the CC libraries, and I have set up everything for myself. Whenever I'm in their work, I just automatically

put that in the folder, and I'm just like, dang, I'm so grateful that I set that up for myself. So if you haven't worked with your Creative Cloud libraries, try that. We made one for Middle of Six, and we put in our standard paragraph styles.

So typical header, main header, second header, body, etc, caption, those are all in that Creative Cloud library. So those can change from document to document, but there's something to start with.

There's a great base, and it all lives in one place, and a good example for Middle of Six is whenever I make something for, who knows, again, some other document, like this is a great new asset that I can use probably across other files, or that

Becky might want to use, or Wendy might want to use, I just pop it into the Creative Cloud library, and it lives there, and it's just a quick access folder. So I'm a Stan, I'm a Creative Cloud library Stan.

Yeah, good tip. We like the thing, the tips that, or anything at Middle of Six, where you can do yourself a favor, and later on, like you say, Lauren Jane, oh, thank you, you're welcome, okay. That's so fun, and do the thing.

That always makes everybody feel a lot better. Like, that was worth it. All right, Becky, what are your final words on InDesign?

Here is my plea, apart from closing your text boxes.

You do not need to have a header on every page of your proposal. Some of you are gasping in shock right now. Here's why.

If you have a footer that is automated, such as the one I would be very happy to show you how to make, it will pull in the section name to the footer, and you will have in your footer your tiny little version of your logo, maybe the name of the

project, the name of the section, the page number. You never have to mess with that ever again, as long as you've set up your styles correctly.

So not only do you have to not deal with that as you're building out your proposal, but I find that when you include a header as well as a footer, and I don't know anybody who just does a header, but that would also be wild, I find that takes up more

space on the page, which we cannot afford in this industry. Millimeters count.

So if you're putting something at the top of the document, it's eating into your space before you've even started down the page, whereas a footer is kind of, it's always in the same place.

You tend to have more ragged space at the bottom of the page versus the top meaning, like when you have paragraphs of text or whatever, like they don't create sort of a line visually, the design, the way that the things at the top tend to go in a

straight line across. So if I could just impart one last tip, and it won't be the last because I've got a million more for the next episode, but definitely look into footer only wayfinding and navigation in your proposals.

Like put that header, when the section starts, you know, 2.5 key personnel, bam, and there it is. And then don't do it again the rest of the section, let the footer do the work. And watch your life change.

I keep saying that. It's efficiency, space, less time spent doing things. And it's just, I think it's something that people do because this is how we've always done it, but it's not really needed for wayfinding.

I think it's my two cents.

Well, I'll take them. Thank you, Becky. And since you started off this episode saying that we're the only ones using InDesign, that it's not as an antiquated tool, we don't even really need to publish this episode.

So thanks for the time today and for sharing, dropping those hot tips because I learned them every time I talk to you. And I love that you offered up to show anyone how to set up their parent pages, table contents, all this stuff.

So email Becky, she'll help you out. Oh, God. I'm torturing you.

I know that they can do that. But anyways, thank you both. Thanks for sharing all of your good tips.

It's so fun to talk to you. I love it. And we'll see you on the next InDesign Rumble and probably 10 episodes in between now and then.

Thanks.

Sounds good. Bye.

Hooray. Thanks, Wendy.

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.

Bye.

See ya.

Close your text boxes.

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.