I’ve been a mere two weeks off from work for paternity leave, and I missed it.
One thing I missed, but didn’t expect to? The utter banality of InDesign layout.
Many knowledge work jobs have their weeds—when you break out your finetooth comb and lose yourself in the details. The other way to consider this headspace is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow”—when time slips away from you as you work and you go…somewhere else.
Flow happens to me in InDesign.
Having looked at the same Where’s Waldo book with my toddler over and again the past two weeks, it struck me that reviewing InDesign layouts has the same oddball eye-wandering and -spotting quality—with the added challenge of having to explain what I’ve seen.
This image is misaligned by 0.002″ or this text box inset spacing at the top should be more like 0.1875″.
It turns out: after a two-week diet, I was hungry for some InDesign.
Taylor Coe 