InDesign assessment test

October 21, 2004 · Comments

I signed up with a creative staffing agency today. I have my clients, but with Eric’s job situation still on the fence (maybe something really good to report on this next week) I wanted to have the option of getting extra income. I first heard of this company years ago. They only place creative folks, have offices all over the place and generally have a decent reputation. The pay is far less per hour than I make on my own, but there are benefits and I don’t have to worry about invoicing or any of the other headaches that come with self-employment.

I sent in my application online soon after Eric lost his job in August. I finally made it in for an interview. I think they can keep me busy, as she said a lot of their calls are for “people with a design sense who are strong in production.” Sounds like me. The interview included a skills assessment test, which I chose to take in InDesign. I was nervous about this part, having never taken an application test before.

The test was interesting. If you have never worked in QuarkXPress or InDesign, you can stop reading now. I was given a sample newsletter layout and instructions on what was needed to duplicate it. I had one hour to complete the 4 page layout. Thankfully, they had a reasonably fast eMac running OS X and InDesign CS to do the test. The instructions were clear on what they were looking for, stuff like “make the page 6” × 9”, 1p3 margins, 2p gutter…body text is in file named bodytext.rtf, it should be Russell Square 9/10 with 4 points spacing between paragraphs… it’s a 5 color job, using PMS 2756 as a process color and PMS 272 as a spot color…” etc. etc. I am sure that I will never get an actual assignment that looks like that. But it was interesting to see exactly what they were testing. For example, the application was set to use picas as the measurement by default, but some measurements were given in inches or points (no problem, just enter the units and it will do a conversion to picas). The body copy had styling that had to be cleared in order to set a new style sheet, and there were misspellings and - - instead of em dashes. I corrected the problems whether I had been asked in the instructions to do so or not. The instructions said to start the page numbering at 17, obviously looking to see if I would do it correctly (through the Page Numbering… dialog) or would I number the pages by hand. I made some decisions simply based on the fact that I only had an hour to put this layout together. I used master pages to set up the columns and the footers, but I ran the actual text in entirely on the pages. I knew it would be faster that way for this one document, but if I was doing a newsletter or a chapter in a book I would make sure the titles and text were on a master page. The instructions were to take a TIF file and rotate it. Had I been doing this in a real job, I would have opened the original art in Photoshop, saved a copy and rotated that so I could bring it in to InDesign without rotation. And so on.

I did a reasonable duplication of the test layout, but it wasn’t exact. I didn’t try. The test page was produced in QuarkXPress, and therefore I couldn’t match the text formatting exactly and I wouldn’t want to. Type in InDesign looks so much better. I set hyphenation to avoid widows/orphans and funky hyphenation and left it at that.

I was told that the test would be graded on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being “perfect.” Most folks are sent out on jobs when they score between a 3 and 4. My score: “a very high 4.” She said it was clear that I only lost a few points due to the time constraint. Another 30 minutes so I could go back over the pages and I know I would have gotten a 5. Everything I know about InDesign is self-taught. The results of this test don’t change a thing, but it’s still nice to know. I hope this agency can keep me busy. I certainly know that if a company needs someone to do production in InDesign, my phone should be ringing.

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