Three Smart Ways to Spot an Experienced Designer

If you'd like to know the experience of a designer, check their Adobe preference settings. No matter the software being used, most allow for the global preference changes that may be applied to every document. After literally 30 years of professional graphic design – from PageMaker, through QuarkXpress, to InDesign — I can tell you my preferences give away clues to my experience. If you know what to look for, you know what each change means, and what the real experience is of that designer.

Keyboard Increments

The first thing I change whenever I load InDesign to a new device is my Keyboard Increments. While at BBDO New York, a Creative Director would tell me, "Just give that M&M's lentil one click to the left..."

I replied, "Michael... my 'one click' is .0025 inch, not the default Cursor Key measurement of .0139 inch." He stared at me blankly. "Michael... my 'click' is about 18% of a normal click. I like the precision, but it's much smaller than the norm."

His eyes lit up. He liked that answer. And yet to my dismay, we still moved the M&M's lentil click-by-click despite my painfully incremental click rate.

Click. Print. Check.

Click. Print. Check.

But that's why the M&M's ads were so good. What the Cursor Key change did was make that huge jump in movement (when using arrow keys) much smaller. So instead of your item jumping to the next position (and possibly not aligning with other items as you need it to) adjusting your Cursor Keys will decrease the amount of space that your item moves per click. Your 'jump per click' is now smaller.

Kerning / Tracking

The same theory applies to "Kerning/Tracking," just within your text line. The default of Kerning/Tracking is 20. Mine is 5. Setting these two items smaller allows your design to be more precise. And when your item is designed with precision, it looks more professional. When it looks more professional, clients trust you more. More trust = more clients.

Typographer's Quotes

After adjusting increments, I head back up to the Type area, and I make sure "Use Typographer's Quotes" has been turned on. Typographer's quotes are those fancy, swirly little curly quote marks, whereas the non-typographer's quotes aren't actually quotes at all — they're inch marks. So as a seasoned designer, I can spot a non-seasoned (or lazy!) designer by their quote and apostrophe marks. Or lack thereof.

I can't imagine how difficult it must be for a company to interview designers and gauge how well they know not only design, but the software. And this process may not tell the entire story, but it's a next-level step into the process of really discovering if that designer – who's portfolio looks fantastic – is really the one who designed it. Just a bit to ponder, my friends. Happy Designing!