Another Way I Use InDesign

Those of you who know me know that I'm an InDesign evangelist at heart, singing its praises to anyone who will listen (photographers—that's YOU!). Not only do I use InDesign to build all of my contracts, pricing guides, and wedding albums, but I use it to build my presentations too.

Say what?

That's right. I use it to build my presentations. Whether for a webinar or a platform class at WPPI (coming this February!), I build all my slide decks in InDesign.

Why not Power Point or Keynote? If you're familiar with InDesign, you know nothing compares to the speed and efficiency you get for quickly building and editing layouts. And since slide decks are nothing more than a collection of horizontal layouts, I use InDesign just as I would for laying out a wedding album.

Most of the time, I export the finished presentation to PDF and then present from the PDF itself (if you press cmd+L on a mac it makes the PDF full screen), using the same arrow keys, mouse clicks, or remote to advance the slides. But if I want to take advantage of Keynote's "presenter mode" where I can see a preview of the next slide before it appears, then... well... I have to use Keynote.

Messing around in Keynote for the first time, I found it frustrating, so I swore I'd figure out a better way, and I'm happy to say—I did. And here's how: I build my presentation in InDesign as usual, but instead of exporting to pdf, I export each page (slide) to jpg, and batch import them into Keynote. That's it.

Here's a quick video to demonstrate. :) PS: Obviously, if you want to embed videos and other special effects, your keynote presentation will require additional tweaking. But for the simple and clean presentations I do most the time, this works like a charm!

PSS: Curious about learning to use InDesign for your own photographer related purposes? Check out my InDesign tutorial video and save 10% with the code CRAZYFAST