The first InDesignSecretsLive Conference was last week in Seattle, Washington. Now that lynda.com authors Anne-Marie Concepcion and David Blatner are back from the conference and have had a day or two to unpack, I wanted to find out how the conference went for them.

With over 200 attendees from six different continents, seven lynda.com authors speaking, and lots of Adobe engineers, this Print and ePublishing conference was considered a success for David and Anne Marie, who joked on their podcast that since this was their first conference, they were only expecting about 15 attendees at one point.

David shared this inspired moment from the conference.

“Having one of the Adobe engineers who has been working on InDesign for many years give an impromptu lesson to some of us on behind-the-scenes features InDesign was eye-opening and exciting,” says David. “It led to another interaction with a third-party developer who quickly wrote a plug-in that solved a problem that had been bothering me. We’ll be writing that up in a blog post soon. That kind of real-life, real-time interaction was very exciting.”

View from the audience. Photo by John Cornicello.

One of the satisfying a-ha moments that Anne-Marie shared with me was regarding the Discussion Lounge at the conference.

“This was a smaller room with tables and chairs arranged for group conversations,” Anne-Marie explained. “It was a place to network, and for attendees to have more private one-on-one conversations with the speakers. I remember on Friday afternoon, I looked around the room and thought, It’s working! It’s working! because there were several discussion groups, each with one or two speakers and a few attendees engaged in very interesting conversations.”

To read through the Twitter comments on the conference activity, check out these #pepcon tagged posts. For more information, discounts, and upcoming events, there is a free InDesignSecrets newsletter available. Great job David and Anne-Marie!