Learning is hard; unlearning is harder.
As I’ve paged through Real World Adobe InDesign CC, I’ve had a painful realization: I need to unlearn lots of what I thought I knew.
The specifics are both boring and embarrassing, so I’ll leave them aside.
What I will speak to is one (now evident) downside of my unstructured and self-guided learning, at least as it applied to InDesign.
I encountered InDesign for the first time in the office of my college newspaper. At a college without a journalism major and with a mere 1,800 students, the newspaper was a pretty informal affair—published once a week by a very part-time staff of 15-20 students.
I sat with Lily, the senior Arts & Entertainment editor, as she walked me through the basics—as she understood them.
InDesign, in the experience of this small newspaper staff, was a miserable affair. We worked on ancient layouts—iterations of iterations, saved-as over and again to the point of degradation, filled with odd formatting issues that none of us understood.
Text frames and graphics ignored my commands, jumping to locations without my consent. Text fought me, spacing out in ways I couldn’t control. Strokes and fills had a mind of their own.
I was glad to get away from InDesign when I graduated.
And then—three years later—it reentered my life when I started a new job at an architecture firm.
But here was the catch: I was to work alongside three full-time graphic designers.
Who knew their way around InDesign.
Their templates were clean and open—the best ones were even beautiful in their sense of order. I felt good working in these templates, because they were easy to use: my colleagues had learned the basics of the program that I had rushed past and brushed aside in my earlier journalistic endeavor.
I had a lot to unlearn.
Taylor Coe 