The InDesign Ideabook: Over 300 Ready-to-Use InDesign "PrePages" for Marketing Your Products, Your Services, and Your Organization

You want it WHEN? Ever heard those words? Who hasn't. Whether you're a seasoned pro with hundreds of projects under your belt or a new user just learning the ropes, a strong suite of templates provides the type of quick, intelligent solutions you need to navigate the real world of graphic design and production. In short, The InDesign Ideabook gets you back to making money--it frees you to spend more of your time doing the important tasks and less of it re-inventing the wheel. Instead of spending 15 minutes to create a simple layout, you'll spend 15 seconds. For the complex stuff--books, newsletters, catalogs, reports--you'll save hours. All the information elements are in position: placeholders for text and graphics (a great reminder of what to include); page sizes, folds, margins, columns, gutters, and guides are set; styles palettes are configured, ready for you to insert your text. Whether you use a template as-is or as a framework for your own design, the Ideabook helps you produce good-looking, marketing materials, better and faster than ever before. Are you a designer? Be sure to read this: The reason some designers shy away from using templates is they assume all templates are "finished" designs: boilerplate layouts complete with photographs of people shaking hands. You add a phone number and address and send it to the printer. I wouldn't use those any more than you would--they make a feeble attempt to remove you and I, the designers, from the equation. They miss the point that clients need what we bring to the table--they want something unique! Imagine going to all the trouble and expense of writing, producing, and printing a brochure and finding out a competitor is using the exact same boilerplate design--man, would that be embarrassing. The Ideabook templates are something else entirely. They offer a detailed framework for finishing, not a rigid layout--big difference. As a designer, I'm sensitive to a designer's needs and when I create a template I do my best to keep it clean and simple. That, to my way of thinking, is the ideal form for another designer to pick up and run with. Re-inventing the wheel every time you start a project is a waste of billable time! Why spend valuable time setting page sizes, folds, margins, columns, gutters, and guides; determining headline and text sizes; experimenting with positioning; creating styles and so on, when one of the Ideabook templates provides it all for you? Just learning to design? Read this: If you're just getting started using InDesign you're really going to appreciate the Ideabooks. Lots of folks use them to get started with projects they don't feel confident in creating from scratch. I have even heard from educators who use them as a teaching tool! Here's a tip: If you are not using the "styles" feature of your desktop publishing program, take half an hour to learn how. (Styles are explained in your program's guide and help menu.) They will cut the time it takes to create a document in half--or more. AND, all the Ideabook templates are formatted using comprehensive style palettes that equip you to format entire pages of text with a few clicks of the mouse. If you just used the Ideabook layouts as-is, you'd miss out on half the potential horsepower. Chuck Green System requirements? There are none. If you're using InDesign 2, 2.1, CS, or CS2 you already have everything you need. There's no program to install and nothing new to learn; you open the files just like the documents you create yourself. A complete, illustrated catalog of the templates and a comprehensive index helps you find exactly the layout you need when you need it.

Chuck Green is a veteran designer and the author of The Desktop Publisher’s Idea Book (published by Random House), Clip Art Crazy (published by Peachpit Press), and Design-It-Yourself: Graphic Workshop, Design it Yourself: Newsletters, and Design it Yourself: Logos, Letterheads, & Business Cards (published by Rockport Publishers). He is a contributor, past and present, to many publications including: Before & After Magazine, Dynamic Graphics Magazine, Home Office Computing, Microsoft’s Business Advantage web site, Okidata’s Small Business Resource Center, and others.