InDesign Newsletter - May 2022

Report · Jun 13, 2022

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Hello everyone,

We are almost through half this year, and I cannot imagine how quickly time has flown in this (almost) post-covid world. People in most parts of the the world are back to their offices, travel routines, and meeting friends and family.

And YES!, Adobe is celebrating pride month, so June just gets even better. We will also be celebrating fatherhood this month, and all you fathers and father figures, take a bow!

Movie fiction has eulogized the essence of paternal love through Mufasa in Lion King, King Triton in the Little Mermaid, Frederick Little in Stuart Little, and several such movies that we recommend for your playlist this month.If you aren't in traveling distance to meet your father this year, we suggest creating a photo book in InDesign as a gift to your father using Andrea's tutorial in this newsletter. What could be more heartwarming than a collection of your favourite moments with your favourite person?

If you want to stay tuned to similar updates, please follow our Adobe InDesign Newsletter Home page to receive notifications for our newsletter on monthly basis.

Adobe Community Professional Highlight

I'm honored to feature "Randy Hagan" as our community superstar for this month. Randy has been a part of our community for more than 12 years now. Randy is an expert in multiple Adobe products like InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat Photoshop, etc. Randy has contributed to over 1.5K posts 👍🏻. We are thankful for his contribution to our community.
Let's know more about him on the basis of information shared by him.

"Randy Hagan lives in sunny South Florida, working as an independent production artist, computer consultant, and trainer. The way he tells it, it’s been a long trip to get where he’s “gainfully unemployed” and working on a steady trickle of graphic design and production jobs, as well as training others how to do digital graphics work themselves.

Randy grew up in St. Louis, MO, where he attended Catholic grade schools and developed a love of drawing and the graphic arts. Though as he explains, one of his early influencers was a Jesuit art teacher “who told me I had a distorted perception of reality — and he didn’t mean it as a compliment.”

He then went to Southeast Missouri State University, a small teachers’ college. He started as a theatre major — go figure — but quickly realized he lacked the talent. “I saw some really talented people, and quickly recognized that I was nowhere near that league.”

From there, he moved into college debate and speech contests, traveling the country and competing for SEMO on a national level. Randy thought he may be a high school speech teacher until he did the class auditing portion of his teaching program. “I quickly realized that if I taught in high school, I would either kill or be killed because I didn’t really have the patience for it at the time.”

That’s when Randy fell into his journalism career. Due to his family constantly moving, he went to four different high schools in the greater St. Louis area. “I quickly learned that the quickest way to learn what was going on was to work at the school newspaper.” SEMO was just starting a mass communications program, and Randy graduated with its first class of graduates.

He then spent four years in the U.S. Air Force, where he helped turn a base newspaper that had its entire staff fired into the best paper in the U.S. Department of Defense in two years. From there, Randy was transferred to a major command to improve 11 base newspapers across the organization.

After he left the military, Randy was hired to start a local entertainment magazine as its managing editor. It was hard work to set up all the editorial systems, marketing collaterals and publication planning for the next year. “Once I put all that in place, the publisher promptly let me go and hired someone behind me to follow those plans at half the price,” Randy recalls. “Learning that happens often in publishing, I figured I needed to account for that, and price myself accordingly.”

Randy joined forces with a publishing consultant and specialized in publication startups, and reformatting troubled publications. “When some publisher would get ticked off and fire his entire staff, I’d go in and stabilize the operation, hire and train the replacement staff, then go to the next brush fire.” Randy had repaired and reformatted 13 flagging publications or started them from scratch in five years. It was profitable, but very hard and very tiring.

Which eventually took him to Maine, and surreptitiously turned him into a computer consultant. “That startup was the first newspaper in the country to use IBM PCs and PageMaker to produce the publication. One of our promotional efforts was to let computer dealers walk customers through our operation off deadline to see that you could actually use Windows PCs to do graphics and publishing work.” Randy recounts. “Then we’d get a chance to pitch them for advertising. It worked well for both of us.”

It also paid off handsomely when the paper was sold, and Randy had a non-compete clause precluding him from working with another publication in the state or as a publishing consultant for one year. “One of the computer dealers said I could work with them as a computer consultant and call on all my publishing contacts with them. And suddenly, I was in the computer graphics business.”

Randy has since worked for more than 35 years as a computer consultant and trainer for the publishing and digital graphics industry, including six years as a paid consultant and presenter for Adobe Systems. He does live and online training and support from his studio in sunny south Florida and has been part of the Adobe Community Professional program for more than a decade.

Reflecting on making this profile, Randy marvels at the long trip that took him where he is today. “I’m still amazed at how all the things I learned and thought I discarded along the way have magically rolled themselves into what I do today,” he reports. “I’m a big believer in a broad liberal arts education.”

To know more about our Adobe Community Professionals, click here.

Creative Inspiration

Are you looking for ways & places to find Creative inspiration then don't worry, Kristine Hamlett's new blog

brings to you interesting stories from different creatives which will definitely help you to trigger new creative ideas. For more information, please click here.

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Adobe InDesign update (17.3)

The May 2022 InDesign (17.3) update is now available for download from the Creative Cloud Desktop application consisting of Bug fixes & improved performance. For more information, please click this link.