Lessons
Class Introduction
01:51 2Document Set-Up
15:39 3Panels
11:46 4Toolbox
08:22 5The Adobe® Workspace
05:17 6Shortcuts
05:33 7Saving Files
05:37 8Guides
12:42Text Frames
08:13 10Shapes, Fill and Stoke
07:43 11Arranging and Modifying Shapes
08:31 12The Pen Tool: Drawing, Stroke and Fill
06:52 13The Pen Tool: Handles and Anchor Points
08:27 14Pencil, Smooth and Erase Tools
05:46 15Strokes and Arrows
13:33 16Importing Shapes from Adobe® Illustrator®
08:57 17Placing Graphics
08:05 18Placing PDFs
04:22 19Placing Multiple Files
06:14 20Frames: Fitting and Manipulating
07:28 21Specialty Frames
05:52 22The Links Panel
21:34 23High Quality Display
06:48 24Clipping Paths
13:08 25Transparency
09:41 26The Gap Tool
03:55 27Color & Swatches Panels Basics
16:38 28Eyedropper Tool
10:03 29Gradient Swatches
05:31 30Character Panel
23:38 31Paragraph Panel
15:09 32Spelling & Autocorrect
06:42 33Text Frame Options
08:10 34Printing and Exporting
16:16Lesson Info
Shapes, Fill and Stoke
So the frames are pretty easy to create. The other things that we can do as we're drawing out a frame, we can hold down the Shift key which constrains the proportions. So I'm stuck with the square here if I keep holding down the Shift key. And the other thing that I can do is it automatically drew from the upper-left where I started, but let's say I knew exactly where I want the center of my item to be. I want it to be right where these two guides come together and I don't wanna have to draw out a shape and then move it to line it up. I can start with that shape, line up my cursor right where I want the center to be, hold down the Option or the Alt key and it draws from the center-outwards. And if I hold down the Shift key as well, then I can strain it to that nice square. Alright, so the Option/Alt key, if I don't have that down it grabs from where I started clicking and dragging. If I hold down the Option key it draws it outwards, the Shift key constrains proportions. That works whet...
her you're using rectangles or you're using the ellipse as well, so if you wanted a nice, perfect circle that starts at the center here, hold down the Option or Alt, and the Shift key, and you get a nice circle. If you wanna create several concentric circles you can do the same thing. So I'm holding down the Shift and the Alt/Option, and I get several circles right inside each other. Working with polygons is slightly different just because we don't know how many sides, and we have a couple different options available to us. One of the things that we can do is we can double-click and I can tell it exactly how many sides I want. Maybe I want a nice starburst and a Star Inset, if you tell it zero, it's going to give us the flat sides like we would expect, like let's start something simpler. Let's do eight sides and no Star Inset. So now when I draw out that shape and hold down the Shift key, I get my nice stop sign shape. But I wanna add more sides than what I know. You know i don't know how many sides, I just know it's a lot. I wanna do a starburst and I also wanna pinch the sides in to create that star-looking shape. So, as I'm drawing, I can start to draw here, and I can hit the Space bar once and that basically turns off something that we'll work with later, but I'm gonna hit the Space bar once just to toggle that off and now I'm going to hit the up and down arrow keys, and as I hit the up arrow keys it's adding sides, and if I add too many, it's gonna start looking like a circle because those sides are so small. But where I can see the difference is the Star Inset and to add the inset, and that pinch, I use the left and right arrow keys. So I'm gonna use the right arrow keys and it starts to pinch in that side. So the up arrow key adds sides. If I hold that down and keep hitting I mean, I'm actually getting rid of sides and the right and left arrow key changes the amount of pinch. So I come in here until I find what I like and then once I decide how many sides I have, and if I like it, I can hold down the Shift key, and now I have a nice circular, starburst that's there. So that's how we create polygons on the fly and it always remembers the last thing you did, so as I click and drag out, I automatically get that same shape. So you can either do it on the fly or if you know exactly how many you need, you can double-click on the tool and enter that there, and draw it out. And now those polygons, those can become shapes to put images in. I can easily draw out this starburst and draw up an image inside that if I want, and we'll work with that when we start working with images as well. But just know that those polygons are easy to create that way. The other thing is I was creating by dragging and dragging out those sizes, on any of those shapes if you double-click, actually sorry if you selected - the polygon works differently. Polygon you double-click, you input it. The rectangle and the ellipse, if you select the tool and then just click instead of clicking and dragging, this is where you can tell it exactly if you know numerically how many sides or how wide and height needs to be; you can enter that here and it draws it from where you clicked. If you Option + Click it will draw it from the center as well. So those are the different types of frames. We haven't done much to'em, we put the frames in there, we're gonna work with color in a little while. So let's actually work with that. Actually that's a good place to do that; we'll start putting some fills and strokes in there. So I'm gonna go back to a simple shape, just this rectangle shape that's here, and I'm gonna reset this to my Rectangle Tool as well, and one of the things I said that we had we have this Fill and this Stroke that's here. So I'm gonna go ahead and choose the Fill. So these are just representative of the Fill of an item and the Stroke, or the line around the item, and whatever one is in front is the one that I'm affecting. So in this case I'm gonna say let's make a stroke of black and the black is here because this is the last color that was used, so I'm gonna apply that color. So now because I had nothing selected except for this tool, every time I create a new shape, it automatically has a stroke of black and I have to actually click off for you to see it because I have, you know if I have this selected, I see all the handles and I see the blue that just shows the outline of that item. But what I wanna do is I'm gonna hit that W key so everything else goes away and now I can see that I actually have this black line that's here, that stroke. And I'm gonna go ahead and gonna work with strokes think, yeah I'm going to, we're just gonna work with simple strokes right now. So I'm gonna come into the Strokes panel over here and just make it a little bit bigger so we can see it. So I just upped the weight to four points. So again I've got this stroke and I've got a fill, and because we're not really working with colors I don't wanna go into it too much until we get into colors. But just to kinda show you that when you're working with the shape and you needed to change it, we can come over here to this item, to this in the Toolbox, and we can also go into Color and Swatches, and in this case I'm just gonna do one simple thing so it's sort of a preview of the color module that we're gonna work on in a little while. I'm gonna make sure again, you've got the same Fill and Stroke icons that are here, I'm gonna click on Fill and I'm just gonna click on a color down below here. So when I do that, that automatically fills it, and now I can see what the fill looks like, and what the stroke looks like. One of the things you might need to do is swap the two. I am one of those people that I just keep forgetting it, I forgot that I had the Stroke selected, and I meant to color the Fill, you can automatically just say oh I did that completely backwards, click this little double-headed arrow that's here, and it will swap the two for us. So now we've got a fill of black and a stroke of that orange. Alright, the other thing that we need to be aware of is that when we're working with the Fill and the Stroke is whether or not we're affecting the container, which in this case that's our only option, or the text inside the container. So if this were at Text Frame filled with text, would I be actually putting a Fill and Stroke on the text itself, or the frame itself? And we'll work with that again as we get into putting Text Frames on there. I just wanted to show you that the Fill and Stroke is how we decide what our objects look like, and that this icon appears here, it also appears in the Color panel, it also appears in the Swatches panel. So it's everywhere that we're dealing with color. Alright, so when coming here we can decide No Fill, so I make sure Fill is selected and then choose the little None icon. Alright so we wanna keep these shapes super, super simple.
Ratings and Reviews
Susan
Fantastic course. I have used Illustrator and photoshop, but learned when under tight deadlines. We are going to begin using inDesign to publish a more extensive multipage newsletter, and I wanted to build a better knowledge foundation of this tool, rather than just diving in. The course was comprehensive and I feel that I'll be able to make a better product after taking the course.
Terri
Have loved Erica since I was a baby designer. She is a great educator, and even though I have been using ID for about 8 years, I just changed from CS6 to CC. This was a great refresher as well as a mental upgrade to new options and effects.
Gilbert Beltran
I enjoyed these classes. Learned the Indesign toolbox and picked up a few smart tricks. Erica is great at keeping up the pace and being very clear and easy to follow.
Student Work
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