It’s a long story, but I am known by many as Anne-Marie “Her Geekness” Concepción, a sobriquet given to me by a client’s staff years ago. I’m based in Chicago, Illinois and work with clients across the country and around the globe. Well about 1/4 of the globe, so far.
Two points for using “sobriquet”!
Essentially, I’m a digital publishing geek, specializing in Adobe InDesign and InDesign-centric workflows. Steeped in this world for more years than I care to mention, I love to talk, teach, demo, and consult on the best ways to put publications together. Whether you’re a designer, editor, production manager, or IT person who supports these folks, I’m here to help.
InDesign doesn’t live by itself, it’s always part of a team. That’s why I call what I specialize in as “InDesign-centric.” Other team members that, by necessity, I’ve become fairly geek-ish with, include Microsoft Word, Google Docs, WordPress, Acrobat, PDFs, Ebooks, and of course Creative Cloud utilities like Adobe fonts, CC Libraries, the Document Cloud (can’t have too many clouds can we Adobe), and those useful InDesign plug-ins, Photoshop and Illustrator.
I own Seneca Design & Training, a cross-media publication and production design studio. I and a small team provide publishers with InDesign templates, style sheets and object libraries for automated production; set up editorial and design collaboration for local and remote users, and help users publish ebooks and tablet apps from InDesign, Word, and PDF source files.
I’m a long-time, independent Adobe Certified instructor. I teach hands-on classes at client sites and conferences around the world, and do a fair amount of remote training and consulting too. My clients include the American Bar Association, Nike, Purdue University, Harvard Magazine, Harper Collins, Cornell University, Macmillan Publishing, Discover magazine, Penn State University, Kaiser Permanente, the Mayo Clinic, and Northwestern University Press. Contact me if you’d like to see an annotated list of recent projects including contact info for my clients.
One of my best friends is David Blatner — InDesign guru, Super-Dad, and all-around mensch. We founded a business together, him in Seattle and me in Chicago, many years ago, called the CreativePro Network. CPN produces a number of high-profile industry portals and events. Our flagship website is InDesignSecrets.com, “The World’s #1 Resource for Adobe InDesign,” with articles, podcasts, videocasts, and ebooks for every level of InDesign user. CPN also publishes InDesign Magazine, CreativePro.com, and multiple annual conferences back-to-back during CreativePro Week, attended by almost 1,000 creative pros from around the world.
I’ve published or co-written a few books, but these days I mainly write here and on social media. (Not to say another book is off the table! Who knows.) And I have a few clients who engage me to write their user documentation. Those are fun projects.
I do love developing and recording video tutorials for clients and for LinkedinLearning/lynda.com. I’ve recorded over twenty-five titles, including Creating InDesign Templates, InDesign to EPUB; Using InDesign and Word Together; Acrobat X Essential Training; and InDesign and InCopy Collaborative Workflows. My “Videos” section here has links to all of the most recent ones.
I’d love to hear from you. Contact me at amc@senecadesign.com, or follow me on Twitter at @amarie (I love Twitter), on Facebook at http://fb.com/amconcepcion, and on LinkedIn at @amconcepcion