Structured Writing + Design = Stylish Docs

Writing & The Design of Instruction…They go hand-in-hand.

At least within these early stages of my career, yes! The better I have become at technical and professional writing, the better I have become at instructional design.

When studying those particular forms of writing, a lot of learned typography, formatting, and layout techniques brightened up my dreary world of plain, gray-scale unstructured text. This has truly transitioned my skill and understanding of Document Design.

Now my instructional documents and eLearning modules (even my blah blah surveys) have a new spice to them!

It excites me…puts a lil’ spark in my instructional document design tasks.

De Anna L Fench
eduTech gEEk writer

Letting the Work Flow with InDesign CS3 (Pt. 1)

InDesign vs FrameMaker…What is the difference?

Since they both are used for DTP needs, that was my question. This morning, I viewed a really good tutorial that  answered that question. To give credit and thanks, it was created by the people over at Lynda.com (YouTube ID: “lyndapodcast”).

This InDesign CS3 Tutorial focuses on workflow and showing how efficient InDesign3 is for these tasks:

• Creating a layout
• Creating text and image frames
• Importing text and images from non-ID files
• Editing  imported frames
• Working with multiple layers
• Working in between multiple Adobe programs (as I do daily).

…Know of any other good tutorials out there that cover Adobe products?

If so, Please comment to this post with the URL.

***More information on InDesign CS3 found here!

Adobe FrameMaker8: The Answer to My Technical Writing & Layout Prayers!

I was thinking of doing a whole ‘page’ dedicated to Adobe Products and their role in Educational Technology. Specifically, for the instructional designers responsible or interested in Desktop Publishing (DTP). But, for the sake of time…one post will have to do for now.

For my current position as an instructional designer, I was asked to have some knowledge of Adobe FrameMaker8 (FM for the purposes of creating structured templates for documents to be accessed by students in an online learning environment. Another eye opening moment in the Instructional Technology Design job search! Previously, MS applications such as Word and Publisher are what I preferred to utilize for my technical writing documentation. A new application just meant more time dedicated to a program that the next job wouldn’t even consider. So I thought!

Since working with FM 8 over the past few months, I learned there is a huge advantage to using this authoring/publishing software. As with just about all of the products created by Adobe, FM 8 takes into consideration the needs of (instructional) designers with varying levels of talent in document layout and use of white space. For a person who used to own a Coogi Sweater Dress, tasteful layout was not necessarily my best skill.

Therefore, I honor Adobe and the FM 8 Team for making my job a bit more enjoyable. Here are some of the features of FM 8 that I enjoy most:

1. Typical word processing/publishing projects can be combined with XML to create more visually stimulating templates for books, newsletters, reports, data sheets, etc.
2. When converted to a pdf, FM 8 will automatically create bookmarks based upon the layout and hierarchy of the document. Such a time saver when you have a 10+ page document to map/bookmark.
3. Ability to include rich, multimedia from Adobe Flash and Adobe Captivate (both of which I use heavily for the creation of learning objects and assessments)
4. MS Excel Graphs and MS Word Documents are easily integrated into the FM 8 templates.
5. There are a fair amount of structured and unstructured templates that I have used to lay the foundation for creating templates that fit my needs.
6. Top 5 Templates: FAQ, Index, Graduate Thesis Paper, Newsletter, and Harvard Outline…all of which can be time consuming when developing from ’scratch’
7. Picks up where InDesign leaves us hanging…FM 8 is made specifically for the creation of looooong, exhausting template-based textual documents (i.e. eBooks or eContent for an online course).

Obviously, these are the opinions of a fairly new Instructional Designer. For more info on Adobe FM 8, check the following resources:

• FrameMaker FAQs
• FrameMaker Tutorials & Training
• InDesign vs FrameMaker
• FrameMaker vs Word

De Anna L Fench
eduTech gEEk writer