DTP Training in Bay Area

August 8, 2006 11:05 AM

Can anyone reccomend evening or weekend Desktop Publishing Training in the Bay Area (bonus for weekend in San Francisco), general courses would be preferred, but specfic would be good too, e.g. InDesign, Quark, etc.

Otherwise if there is self-led online courses that are good - this may work also. I am looking for basic courses that I can offer to employees, simple as that! Thanks!

posted by clarkie666 to education (4 comments total)

Please consider leaving the "Desktop Publishing" to the Graphic Designers. Unless your employees are designers of one kind or another, you should really look for three year community college programs in Graphic Design to bring them up to speed.

It's been my experience that the short crash courses in InDesign, Quark, etc. are ineffective.

Bad feelings about non-designers feeling they're designers because they "know Quark" aside, you might find the online software training tutorials at Lynda.com useful.
posted by ChuckLeChuck at 12:49 PM on August 8, 2006

I believe MediaBistro offers some weekend and evening seminars/classes on that type of thing.
posted by faunafrailty at 1:00 PM on August 8, 2006

Check around at your nearest community college. For instance, City College of SF lists 3 different sections of fall night class for "COMP 9899 Desktop Publishing - Beginner" using InDesign.
posted by nakedcodemonkey at 4:00 PM on August 8, 2006

Thanks for the answer folks. CLC - as regards "leaving the "desktop publishing" to the Graphic Designers" localization DTP does not require graphic design per se, since the layout person follows the previous design rather than creating a new one. Also this is more so Project Coordinators can resolve basic problems and advise clients without resorting to our team of Graphic Designers and Layout Artists.

Sorry for being defensive on this - I also subscribe to leaving things to the experts but also in cross-training so the Project Managers know what information the experts need and how to interpret the information that they are getting. But I appreciate the help anyways....
posted by clarkie666 at 6:12 PM on August 10, 2006