Today I took work off and attended Terry White’s InDesign Productivity CS3 Seminar. For those whom are not familiar with InDesign; it is a professional text and image page layout program utilized primarily by print professionals to produce brochures, annual reports, business cards, and pretty much anything that is printed.

If you like my review of this seminar. Please do me a favor and link me in your blog or twitter or whatever you can to pass this along. That would be most appreciated!

My Thoughts about this seminar

I attended this seminar to improve my speed and effectiveness at InDesign CS3. In short, I was blown away and very impressed with Terry White’s Seminar.

Seminar Costs

The ticket costs $99. The ticket includes a full day of instruction by Terry White: 10am-5pm. There were 5 different sessions. Each session had a break and one session had an hour long lunch break. I’d say there was about 5 hours total of instruction. 30-45 minutes devoted to commercials and sponsor announcements. Unfortunately, lunch was not provided. Which probably was beneficial to keeping the costs low.

I’ll give you several reasons why to attend the seminar in the following sections:

Burton Manor, The Venue

The seminar was held at the Burton Manor in Livonia, Michigan. I have had been there previously for a polish wedding where I attended it with a friend a couple years back. It’s located right by the free way on Schoolcraft. From what I remember Burton manor is a very popular place for people around Livonia to hold wedding receptions so it seemed uncommon to me to goto Burton Manor for an InDesign seminar.

Arrival at Indesign Seminar, Tips & What to bring

I brought everything I needed: a laptop, my printed out ticket (which looked well laid out on a Creative Suite application). I made a last check to make sure I had my printed out ticket, a warm hooded sweatshirt and my power cable etc.

Make sure you print out your ticket! It is definitely helpful as in order to save yourself some time. I showed up at 930. The email mentioned that you should be there at 9am for registration. Honestly, I showed up and the doors just opened up at 945. So if you want a good spot to sit at show up 30 minutes after registration. Pretty much what I did. It worked out perfectly.

One disappointment I had with the venue was that there weren’t any power cables to plug my laptop into. The Venue is just one huge square; typical of wedding reception halls and bucket tungsten lights. The venue provided coffee and water. Nothing too sophisticated

They had catering for those who wanted to pay extra for the food that the Burton Manor provided. I was not sure of the costs. I went for on go cheap sandwich shop nearby. Which starts with sub and ends with way. I hope Subway sends me my promotional check now for endorsing their shops.
One tip of advice. If you are super impatient and abhor waiting you should grab fast food after the first 15 minute break. I’m very speedy and efficient and really dislike waiting in lines. So I quickly snuck out drove to the nearest subway grabbed my sandwich (with no one). I did this because if you wait till around noon you’ll have to wait for all the fun people to file out and it becomes super stressful and the risk of hitting someone is probably greater. That would make me a sad panda.

One more tip of advice. Don’t bring your laptop if you don’t need to. Terry moves fast and if you’re not paying attention you’ll probably get lost. So don’t play with your laptop. Do that on break to check emails and return calls and show the man some respect.

Final thoughts about the seminar

I thought the seminar was very worthwhile! It’s a great deal for $99. My only wish was that it was longer and possibly covered more advanced topics as well. But this doesn’t mean that you won’t learn lots of new things!

Terry is an excellent presenter. You can tell that he has extensive amounts of preparation into this presentation and he has done this many times before. His humor keeps you hooked on the instruction. He is very professional and does very well to make sure that he is on time. He uses a timer to make sure that he doesn’t go over breaks and lunches and makes sure hes answers every single question that would be brought up.

He does a great job setting expectations up by providing expert tips even when the subject is very rudimentary and seems very novice and for many different levels of skill. An example would be he would show techniques and even if you already know how to do it he’ll provide usually more than one way of doing it so that you’ll know of a more product way of doing one task. Like for example, Terry shows you how to move to a different page 4+ different ways.

Terry white is also very patient. He does an excellent job of moving fast but not to a pace where you get lost. Luckily with the cost of your ticket they provided you a workbook for you to follow at home in case you didn’t get to it or jot it down. Terry often always goes on tangents and provides bonus tips and techniques that aren’t covered in the book and are presented by questions from the audience which makes every event unique and worthwhile to attend. I don’t think Terry is doing another seminar tour in a different city but theres another indesign instructor listed. I couldn’t imagine the seminar being in any different format.

Mr. White is also very authoritative. He is very knowledgeable and knows almost all the insides and out of indesign. He also provides good reasons why Adobe designed their product a certain way.

All in all I strongly suggest you attend the InDesign Productivity Tour at a city near you whether you’re an amateur, a novice or an intermediate InDesign CS3 User.

You can learn more and sign up for their seminars at photoshopseminars.com