Digital Publishing

Adobe Max: CC Libraries

March 24, 2023

I was so very fortunate to attend the Adobe Max conference in Los Angeles last October. I could write at length about all the ways it was incredible, but I’ll keep it focused on what directly applied to the work that I do at the College of Medicine.

I attended hands-on lab sessions that went in depth on how to produce interactivity in InDesign, which is the layout program we use to create our Case-Based Learning ebooks and the online Neuroanatomy textbook for MS2 students (among others). We’ll incorporate these new skills even more into next year’s materials!

I also attended labs on using XD, which is a prototyping program that makes interactivity easy to integrate. It works in conjunction with other Adobe programs like Illustrator and Photoshop, so it’s seamless and efficient. We mostly use it right now for visually mapping out complex projects, but I’m just waiting for the right curricular project to come along so we can flex our little XD muscles.

Efficiency is very important to me in my work life—the College of Medicine moves at a fast pace, and fumbling around for details large and small wastes precious time and can lead to inconsistencies in our materials. Enter Creative Cloud Libraries, which let us gather all kinds of design elements—images, fonts, colors, styles, etc.—for any number of different projects, and then use them across all our Adobe programs.

For example, we use the WSU branding materials CC Library that our Marketing and Communications department was kind enough to share—they’re so delightfully generous and organized! It’s great because we can be certain we’re using the exact colors, etc., that WSU prescribes (and we didn’t have to set it up ourselves). We also have CC Libraries for the photos of patients that we use in CBL cases (so we don’t use the same image twice!), the interactive widgets that we create for the digital textbooks, and more.

Another incredible feature is the fact that it works across different Adobe programs, so we can mock up a design in XD using a library and not have to create all of the style sheets and object styles and then do it again in InDesign, so that eliminates the possibility for an error being introduced.

I love it: we’re staying efficient by only creating elements once, and we’re increasing consistency by eliminating the possibility for something to be done just a little differently in each iteration. Since we work on a lot of materials, keeping things cohesive in that was is vital! It’s been a real aid in productivity for our collaborative team.