Sage Advice, LLC

Pip: Sage Advice, LLC — where the advice is occasionally about whether you still remember how to use software you abandoned three years ago.

Mara: Paul Sage – Marketing tackles exactly that this episode — returning to a tool left behind, rebuilding confidence, and what the whole experience says about how we actually learn things now.

Pip: Let's start with the InDesign comeback story.

Brushing Up on My InDesign

Pip: The question at the center of this post is one a lot of working creatives quietly dread — you step away from a professional tool for a few years, and you genuinely don't know if the muscle memory is still there.

Mara: The post frames it plainly from the start: "I had been away from Adobe InDesign for three years, and I was beginning to worry if I had lost my basic skill level in this industry-standard layout tool."

Pip: That word "worry" is doing real work there. This isn't casual rustiness — it's the specific anxiety of someone whose professional identity is partly tied to knowing this stuff.

Mara: And the recovery method is worth noting. YouTube videos, Perplexity for questions, and deliberate hands-on time with the platform. No course, no bootcamp, no certification. The conclusion drawn is direct: "If you want to learn something, the training is out there, and it's usually free."

Pip: Which is either very liberating or a quiet indictment of every expensive software training program ever sold.

Mara: The post lands somewhere genuinely encouraging, though. The result wasn't just returning to a prior baseline — the assessment is that the rebuilt skill level may actually exceed where things stood in 2022.

Pip: So the time away, combined with better free resources and more intentional practice, produced a net gain. That's not nothing.

Mara: The post also includes a finished InDesign page as proof of work — a tribute to a Navy SEAL veteran nephew. It's a personal piece, and it gives the abstract claim about skill recovery something concrete to point at.

Pip: Showing the output alongside the process is the right move. The argument lands harder when there's something to look at.

Mara: The throughline here is really about what it takes to stay current — and the answer turns out to be less intimidating than most people assume.

Pip: Free tools, a real question, and enough stubbornness to just get back in the pool. More of that next time.