I look forward to teaching you all the cool things that InDesign has to offer. So stay tuned and get ready to learn. If you're enjoying these videos, please like, and subscribe. If you want to earn certificates and digital badges, Please become a member of our Patreon. The link is in our video description. If you have any questions you want answered by one of our instructors, please join our off site community. The link is in the description as well. And as I mentioned, this course does have exercise files, and you'll find them in the video description below. Let's begin by first understanding what InDesign actually is..
Technically speaking, InDesign is known as a layout program. So we can lay out text and images and graphics, uh, to make books, to make magazines, posters, newsletters, brochures, proposals, annual reports. So we can see here as an example, just everything's just kind of laid out with all of our content that we may be using other programs. To create the collateral to put into this. So in other words, we have InDesign that takes all of the content that we may have created in Photoshop, that we may have created a logo inside of illustrator and we brought it into InDesign to create our books, to create our magazines..
Okay. Where illustrator is designed for illustration for creating graphics. Using vector based technology to draw out a logo, draw out some animations and things like that. So if we go over to here to any of these here, you can see some of these images were doctored up inside of Photoshop and then brought into InDesign. Okay. And you can see how I can make a nice little magazine. But a lot of these things were done inside of another program.
And then brought into InDesign. Okay, so again, could be a book, could be a magazine, could be a poster, you know, things like that. But a lot of the work was done in Photoshop. Now, that said, InDesign does have a lot of tools that Photoshop has, has a lot of the tools that Illustrator has. Not as many, But there is some kind of Venn diagram, sort of overlap between all three programs. So we could do some things to this photograph if we wanted to, to make it, you know, like have a special effect on there, have a shadow on it. You know, we can put a shape around it and all that good stuff..
Least in this beginner's class. It will be an advanced class after this, but we're gonna be exploring kind of what those differences are, what the benefits are, what the power of InDesign is as well. But I want to just at least kind of get some definitions out of the way. You understand kind of what's what, what's not what and what tools are used to accomplish what goals. All right, so stay tuned and we will start our first lesson. Let's begin by understanding the interface and the workspace.
That InDesign provides for us. So we can really sort of understand what we're looking at, what things are called, how we can customize things, move them around, and kind of take ownership over the program. Now, this is probably going to change for you as you move throughout the program, as you start to develop more learning. But let's just see what we're looking at it first. First. Now you'll notice over here in the upper right, I have something that says essentials. This is the name of the workspace that I am currently in..
This is what InDesign has given to me, right? As a workspace I can work with. So I'm going to go ahead and click on this and you can see, I have a number of different workspaces I can go through depending on what projects I'm working on. And these are all just things that InDesign has given me. Okay. Now, if you're in essentials and yours does not look like mine. Go ahead and click on the drop down and choose reset essentials. So then everything looks like how mine is looking at. So you're going to see here, we're going to do this because I want everybody to more or less be on the same page for the rest of our lessons..
Now, what we're going to do next is we're going to start customizing this. Some of these things we want, some of these things we don't, some of these things we want to look a little bit different. We want to have them someplace else. So what I'm going to teach you next is really going to help you. Really understand how you can take ownership of this program. But also, guess what? When you start working with Photoshop, Illustrator and some of the other Adobe programs, you'll see that manipulating and taking ownership of the workspaces is essentially going to be the same process. So the first thing I'm going to work with Is this guy over here, which is my tools panel. And I'm going to find that little dude right there, that.
Little double sided arrow. And I'm just going to go in and click on it. Why? Cause I'd rather have this to be instead of one column, two columns, we're going to be exploring a whole chunk of these here. So hang tight with that. Next thing we're going to do is we're going to come over here to the right hand side where we have these other panels. We have our properties panel. We have our pages panel. We have our CC library. And you know, nothing much, frankly, after that. So I need to add on some more, need to take away some other things on here. So let's say, for example, I don't want the CC libraries. Okay..
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Not really relevant for me right now. So very simply, all I do is right click on it and you'll notice a
Whole bunch of options comes up. I'm going to click on close because I don't need that. Hey, I'm going to show you how we can get it back. So don't worry about it. And you'll notice here, I only have pages and I have properties. Okay. Click on that activates that click on that, that activates that. All right. So very straightforward. Those are all the panels I currently have, but I know I want to use a lot more than this in the future..So where do all my panels live? They live inside of the window window. Okay. You can see here is window up on top. All right. And when I click on window, you will see all of the panel options I have available. You can see it's nicely organized in alphabetical order, love that, and you will see that a lot of these have little submenus here. So like color has a lot of extra things in there. You'll see also so does object and layout..
So does styles, a big thing that we're going to be talking about here. You'll see that type and table also have a lot of things in there. So keep an eye out for these because in case you're not seeing what you want. There's a good chance it's kind of hiding here. All right. So what are some things that I may want to bring up? So I definitely are going to be working with styles. I'm going to click on styles and I'm going to choose paragraph styles. And this pops up for me and it's just kind of floating there. All right. That's pretty cool. That's fine. I'm going to deal with that later. Over here to window. And let's say I want to work with color later on..
I'm going to click on color. Oh, and that does something interesting. You'll notice here is now a new. Set of panels, right? So it's docking here is like little icons. So we'll deal with that in just a second. And maybe let's do some more here. Let's go back to our window, and I'm going to bring up links. And guess what? That docks that over here as well. All right, so I'm going to go to minimize this by clicking on this double arrow. And let's see now how we can do that. Now customize this. How can we kind of make this our own?.
So for example, this is just kind of floating here, not really practical for me. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag this whole grouping over here. Cause notice how, when I brought in paragraph style, it also brought in character style, which I definitely want. So watch what I do when I drag this up on top and I'm just going to move it. And look for this little blue halo. See, get a blue halo here, maybe blue halo here. Maybe when I dock it with these guys here, maybe I can go way to the bottom. Look for another one. See very subtle. See, there's that blue halo there. I'm just going to go to that first set..
I saw with the square and drop it and there it is. Very cool. All right. Next thing I'm going to do is bring pages over here to the left. Just drag that over. All right. Super easy to do. No problem. All right. So let's just say, for example, I want to bring my links over there next to properties. I can very easily do that. Drop it in there. Wait for my blue halo. Great. Bring that back to layers..
Okay. Bring layers back over to here and you'll practice this, right? You'll see how easy this is to do and really how vital it is as well. All right. I'm going to come back here to pages and then with pages, I want this to be all by itself. So what I'm going to do is drag the pages tab way to the bottom. Watch this. See that blue halo let go and now see that I've now created a whole new segmentation for my workspace love that..
That's great. This is how I'm going to do things now. You'll also notice how I can resize. I want to great. Don't have a lot of layers here, so I can go ahead and make this nice and big. So therefore I can see all my pages. Okay, so customize this however you want to for this exercise and for this class will be doing it a particular way. But of course, be comfortable with whatever you need. Okay, now I'm gonna go over here to window and I'm gonna bring in the control panel. So let's go ahead and click on that And you'll see something new now appears here. This is incredibly, incredibly important, making sure to.
Have this open at all times. Okay. So again, go over here to window and then bring up the control panel control panel and the properties panel. They actually do overlap a little bit. So just keep in mind, you can use both of these. I'll be using both of these throughout this class, but just know that there's some overlap and they both have some really nice utility. Okay. Now I love what I've done here and I have outgrown essentials, right? So thank you very much for giving me a foundation. So what I'm going to do next is just save my workspace as my own. So I'm going to click on this little dropdown..
I'm going to skip all these. Thanks for no thanks. I'm going to say new workspace.
And just give it a name. Okay. I'm just going to call this Dave's Faves. Okay. And then notice here, what am I capturing? Panel location, menu customization. Wonderful. I click. Okay. And great. There it is. Now it says Dave's Faves up there. Now let's see this in action, right? So I bring my layers panel over here, right? I accidentally..Close out my pages, right? I'm just making a mess of things, right? Everything is just, man, I'm a mad scientist at work. What do I do? I can certainly go back to window and bring some of these things back, but what I'm going to do is just reset Dave's faves. I like to call this the Mary Poppins effect, right? Where it's like Mary Poppins is like, put all away, put your toys away, place for everything and everything in its place, right? She wiggles her broom or whatever she does and then bam, everything's back in its place. So watch this. I click on Dave's faves and then I'm going to reset Dave's faves and watch this..
Everything goes right back to where it was placed for everything, everything in its place. All right. So this is essentially where we're going to be starting off. And then we'll be giving you a tour and then some, um, for the next exercise. All right. And you're going to be getting more and more mature as we go throughout, but I want you to do right now is just pause the video and then practice doing what we've done, but we've done here, right? What I want you to actually create your own workspace, similar to mine, but really get an understanding and a feeling of how you can manipulate all these different panels, right?.
You can move them around, you can minimize them. You can do all the different things that you want. All right, and then go ahead and save it as your own. All right, so enjoy and we'll see you in just a bit. Now that we have a good idea of how we can work with the interface and the workspaces, let's go a little bit deeper into some other components so we really understand kind of what's what and where things are and all that good stuff here. So let's just start off just by going way to the bottom here where we can see a few little elements down here. All right. So the first thing we're going to look at here is our zoom levels..
Okay. So how far are we zoomed in on the page? Okay, cool. That's helpful. All right. Maybe sometimes you want to zoom to be able to see something, zoom out to be able to see everything. Other thing we have here is going to be our page number. What page are we currently on? Okay, great. You can go ahead and navigate throughout the page going backwards and forward. You can also go all the way back to the beginning if you want to, et cetera. So let's just go ahead and see this in action. I can click on this and I can go bam, a hundred percent, and then I can go over to here to 25%..
Now I'm going to show you some good shortcut keys for all these things in just a little bit. Okay. But now let's go ahead and see how we can go from page to page. You can see, bam, I can go to page 18. I go to page 35. Hey, just like that, right? So great, whatever works for you. Now, eventually you might start working with the pages panel to be able to do that, but this is just an understanding how you can go directly to a page, especially when you have these big documents like that. Now, of course, you can use these little arrows here, go backwards, forwards, and you click on this first one that takes you all the way to the.
Beginning, click on the last one that takes you all the way to the end. Let me go right back to the beginning. Look at that. I just went up, you know, how many millions of pages there? No problem. Now, the next thing I want you to focus on is this thing. This is very, very important because you're going to want to be looking at this thing at all times to kind of take a look like, Oh, what's going on. It's basically telling you, okay, how many errors might you have here? Okay. And if you double click on it, What it does is it opens you up to.
This thing called the pre flight panel, and it's going to tell you what, in fact, these errors are. It's telling me that I have 57 link errors. Okay, there are missing links on all these. So that's no good. So as you're going throughout the program, as you're creating things, you want to make sure you have no errors, and we're going to be able to explore how we can rectify these or simply just ignore them if it's not an issue for you. Okay. But always keep an eye on these. All right. So that's going to be very important. Again, just simply double click on it to then open it up to see, you know, what's.
Going on under the hood essentially. All right. Now in design, not too long ago, introduced the properties panel. So if you click on the properties panel and just drag it out over to here so we can see kind of what's what you're going to see currently, because I have nothing selected, I'm going I am looking at the properties of my entire document. If I click on an image, I am now looking at the properties of that particular image. Look at that. And I get to do all these things, not only learn about something, but also control it, make some changes to it..
Let's go over to here to this text. Notice how everything changes, right? Notice I have character and text styles and appearance for that. And you can also see, I have fonts and all that stuff. So this is going to be really, really helpful for you working with the properties panel, people identify what's going on as you're clicking on things to understand what's what. Now, again, I want to make it very clear that when I click on nothing. I get the properties for the entire document. Do you see that there? It says no selection and the document, how big this is, my margins, all that stuff,.
Incredibly valuable to be able to actually make some changes on a kind of a global level that affects the whole document. All right. The other thing you'll see is that if I click on an image, I'll notice that up here. Where I have my control panel that also will change. Okay, let me do that one more time for my type. And you can see I double click on my type to get in there. And then notice how it's given me some familiar options like my font and my font size. And maybe you're familiar with letting and tracking and all that stuff..
Not you will be very soon. All right. So just some things to kind of just interface, you know, as you're going along here. Now, the next thing I want to show you is the ability to kind of take away Some of these little lines here, these lines are super helpful to a certain degree, but many times you don't want them at all. So I'm going to give you a nice little shortcut key, which is just simply the W key, right? I'm going to do a capital W. So you have that's important. And also you want to do shift plus W..
So what do those do? Let's take a look. I'm just going to hit. W right now and notice how all my lines go away. I'm going to zoom in, right? You can zoom in either by doing command control plus plus if you like, or I like to use if I'm using a mouse, the alter option and then just scroll with my scroll wheel. So I'm doing that, right? Or you can just do command or control plus and minus. Now, I'm going to hit W again. And you can see here, all my lines come back like my margins and my column separations. Okay. And then my, my text boxes and my boxes around my images, all that stuff..
Now, what does shift W do? Shift W takes me to presentation mode, and this is awesome. And I'm just using my arrow keys to go through it. Great. This looks amazing. I hit escape and I'm right back out. And then I'm hit the W again, just so I can see all my demarcations, so I can be a little more perfectionist about it, seeing all my grids and guides and everything like that. Now, if you're not a keyboard shortcut person, you can see how you can do the same thing with this little guy right here if you want to. So if you click on that, you right click, excuse me, you're.
Going to see here is preview and then here is presentation mode. So I click on that. That's the same thing I can click preview again, and that comes right back to that. I'm going to hit W, get my lines back, come back to here, come back to here. Wonderful. All right. So credibly helpful to be able to preview document as you want to be able to see it, not all that stuff here. And then one last thing I'm going to tell you, and this is telling you this because this happens to the best of us. Sometimes. You want to have all your toolbars to kind of go away for a split second..
And sometimes it happens by accident. So what is making it do it? If you just hit the tab key right now, just literally hit the tab key. Watch what's going to happen. Oops. Why did it do that? Right. Total freak out moment. Hit tab again. And it comes right back tab tab. Okay, sometimes that's cool because you're pretty much like getting to see everything, but you don't need all those panels there hit tab again and they come right back. All right, so experiment with that. Get a feel for it. Practice your zooming in. You're zooming out practice working with, um, presenting in such a different way..
Looking at your properties panel, working at you with your tools, get a feel for the program because it can be a little bit intimidating, a little bit complicated seeming, but the more you kind of work with all this stuff in the beginning, it'll really help you kind of not go crazy and really kind of tame the beast that can be in design. But very soon it's going to feel very, very intuitive for you. All right, so pause the video, practice that, and we're going to come back. And the next video, and we're going to start by creating a brand new document and see what all the parameters are around that and have fun seeing the next lesson..
We're now going to create our first original document based on whatever specifications we want. Now, when you open up in design, you'll see a whole bunch of choices in terms of what you want to create, how you want to create it, what size, et cetera. So if we look up on top here, you will see we have a few different tabs. We also have. Potentially some recent items, and you'll also have some templates that you can work from as well. Pretty darn good templates, actually. But let's go ahead and just check out what we have here. So under recent, these are recent things that I've worked on. You can see different sizes..
We'll get into what some of these units of measure mean in just a second. Here are going to be some saved templates that I've worked with, actually some presets that I have saved, right? Maybe it's different pages, different number of columns, all that stuff. And here are some other presets. Like if you're going to be doing print. They have these other preset sizes, and then you can check out the different templates based off of these particular media, right? So you can see here is web. You'll see that the unit of measure is going to be different, right? Instead of pica, it's going to be pixels. You go over here to mobile..
It's also going to be pixels, but you can also see it's for iPhones, this and this and that different sizes view all presets. You'll see different things for iPads for androids, et cetera. All right, so what we're going to do is we're going to come back to just our first tab, and we're just going to create something from scratch. Now, when you create a new document in InDesign, you're going to see a whole bunch of options over here on the right hand side. Some pretty familiar things that really are self explanatory, but let's go and explain them anyway. So, let's see here. So, what is going to be the width?.
And the height of your document, first thing I want to talk about is this whole unit of measure called picas. Okay. Technically speaking, a pica is one sixth of an inch. Okay. So, but most of us don't speak in picas. So they do give us the option to then change it to whatever type of unit of measure you want to work with. Right? So let's just go ahead and change that to inches. And we'll see that that 66 picas is actually 11 inches. Okay, and you can see it switches over here as well later. I'm going to talk about how you can switch this for good to make.
It so it doesn't stop asking. So it does stop asking you for pike is and you can always have this as the default. All right. So as inches as the default, that's not clear. All right. So you can also see how you can switch the orientation. Notice how it's going to go from landscape to portrait. It's also going to ask you how many pages you want. I'm just going to say three pages. It's asking me, do I want facing pages? Yes or no. So maybe if you're making a book or magazine, you might want facing pages. I'm going to say no. I'm just going to have maybe like three in a row..
They're all independent of each other. We're going to make three independent posters. All right. I'm going to start on page one. How many columns do I want? You can have more than one column if you want to. Now, before we go any further, I do want you to notice that I do have this option way down below. We come down here where you can actually preview. So if you're not sure on what to do, you can click on this little preview and then behind it, you'll actually get a preview of what we're doing. So as I'm doing this, let's say I'm like, what is a column anyway? So I changed this to three columns..
I'll be able to see that. Oh, that's what they're talking about. Wait, they're talking about a gutter. What is a gutter? Let's go ahead and increase the gutter and we'll see there's now more space between those. Let me go ahead and decrease that and you'll see now there's less space. So depending on what you want to do, I'm going to make mine just one column. It really just depends on the data that you're going to be putting in there, the content and everything like that, how you want to have it structured. Okay. The margins, same thing, right? Change it however you want. Notice there's also this little guy right here. It basically means if you change the top, it's going to change also the.
Bottom and the left and the right. But maybe you only want to change the left and the right. You can just click on that and then it unlinks these guys. So, super easy. See, they're independent. And again, I have the preview to be able to see, okay, how does that look? And you can see there's a difference between the top bottom and now the left and the right. Now we also have our bleeds. Okay. So this is what I have this set up here is a good place to be actually for your bleeds. You don't want to make it at zero because essentially what your bleeds are going to be is if you want to have like your images go all the way to the.
Edge, like for example, Here, right? You see that how it's going all the way to the edge that's going to have like no bleed at all. So you want to kind of exaggerate your bleed. If you have it at zero, you might actually have a problem where when it prints, you might still get a little bit of an edge along there. So this is a good kind of rule of thumb to keep it at like 0. 125 inches. All right. And then your slug. We'll talk about that towards the end of the class, uh, when we're publishing, but your slug is going to be, um, where all your kind of like information about your document is going to go like your colors, maybe your font, some instructions,.
The name of the documents, right? Your email, right? That kind of thing. And when you publish it, you'll be able to actually see that kind of on the far outside perimeter of the document. It doesn't actually get printed or cut into the print, but the printer themselves might benefit from that information. All right. So now if I love this, I'm always going to be doing this eight and a half by 11 and three pages and dah, dah, dah, all that stuff here. That's great. And I want to save this for the future. I can now click on this guy right here. And that's going to allow me to guess what?.
Save this as a preset. So when I click on that, I can now save this. I'm going to say three page poster, and I'm going to say portrait. Okay. Say preset. And that will be in with my saved with all the rest of these. Okay. And just notice how you can also delete it if you want to as well. All right. And then finally I'm done. So I'm going to come way down here to create and I'm ready to go. Now, just to verify, you will see now I have these three pages. You'll also see in my pages panel, it shows these three pages. And you'll see here, one, two, three..
All right. And when we come back, we're going to explore a little bit about the pages panel, but we're actually going to start creating something, right? We're going to be creating a poster using shapes and some of our other basic tools within InDesign. So go ahead and stop the video, practice this and try to catch up to where I'm at right now so that we can build our poster together. Now, before we get too deep into In design and working with all of our texts and our images, et cetera, I think it's important for us to have a nice little overview of the pages panel because this is where you're going to be spending a.
