Lessons

Lesson Info

InDesign and Creative Cloud Libraries

One last thing I wanna talk about is a little bit about libraries and I'm not gonna go into libraries a whole lot because they are kind of in flux right now, and I think Creative Cloud Libraries is sort of a whole 'nother topic you could go into forever and ever. There's just so much to it now. But I just wanna clear up, there's two different libraries in InDesign, and there's not in any of the other Adobe products. So when you're working with libraries in the other products you're talking about Creative Cloud Libraries. But there was already a thing called libraries in InDesign, so now there's libraries and there's CC libraries just to confuse things in InDesign. So what a library does, an InDesign library does is let you take items that you use often and put them together so that you have them somewhere so that you can pull them down easily to use. For instance, let's say I wanted to use these arrows all the time. Now let's grab all three of them, just the arrows and I'm gonna just g...

rab each of those. And I wanna use those in other places, not just in this document, but I wanna use it in other documents. And I have a whole set of arrows. And maybe I have a set of you know the pie wedges over here and I want those to be used. And just all these little graphic items that I'm using and they're not necessarily a style, I just want them to be something that I can drop into different documents as I go along. I can create what's called a library. So I can do File>New>Library. And it is gonna tell me that hey, maybe I should look into Creative Cloud Libraries, but I do not wanna try that right now. And I'ma say no. It's gonna open up a save dialog box, I'm gonna save this out to the desktop. Here's another file type, INDL, it's an InDesign library. And I'm gonna save that to the desktop. And now I've got my little library panel open, and I wanna take these items that are here and I'd like to add them to the library so I can use them wherever I go. Libraries are not connected in any way to a specific document. So I'm gonna come in here and I'm gonna tell it to add that item, or I can add all the items on page 10, or I can add all the items on this page as separate objects, each thing by itself. I don't wanna do that. I just wanna add the item that I have selected. So I'll say OK, and I can see that I've got those three arrows ready to go. If I double click on that, I can call this just arrows. And I can put some description in here and this is nice because you can do a search by the keywords that you put in here. So I'll say OK. So I have those, so no matter where I go, if I go to a different document, let's create a new document, open that up. And I just wanna go ahead and place these items, I can just drag these out and I have them in the same exact configuration that I had them when I put them into the library. If I had brought these items in here, I can put each of those items in there. I can add those items as separate objects. Is this gonna add everything? It is, that's not what I wanted to do. (laughs) So I'm gonna go ahead and select all of these, sure I am. I'm gonna select these items here, I'm just holding down the shift key to select everything and deleting those. I just wanted these, are they grouped? They are not grouped. I should be able to add those items as separate items. But it's not letting me do it. Alright well I wanted to bring each of those in as separate items, each of those that I have selected as their own thing. But that's alright, we'll leave them as they are. But the nice thing is like I said, I can just drag these in there and drop them in. I can add guides and crop marks. I have a whole library that I use that are just like setup business cards. Let's say you had guides, I'm just drawing these out roughly. But if you had those and you have little crop marks set up as well, you've got all your crops set, again I'm just manually drawing these. Let's see how they actually look. Alright so I've got my crop marks and I've got some guides. I can take everything here and I can add all the items on the page, not as separate objects, but together. So that when I create a new document and I need that same sort of layout, I can grab this item. Now you can't drag if it includes guides. You have to use the menu, and I can say place that item on the page. So now it places that item, those same guides and those same crop marks are there for me to use. And I'm ready to go. If I've set up something with bleeds, like if you've done four up postcards with bleeds or 10 up business cards with bleeds, you've got a lot of crop marks and a lot of guides that you've taken all that time to set up, it's great to be able to use the library item and drag them in here. So I use those for recurring things, like you might have a library that's all logos for one client. And it might be the black and white version, the color version, the RGB version, CMYK version, and the nice web version and an animated version or something like that. You've got all these different versions there and you can have it in a library that's you know, your client's, you know we have Cybis, all their logos in one place. And then that way when I go to use 'em, they're all in one library, I can just drag 'em out as needed. Just keep in mind that if it's something that was created in InDesign like these arrows, that's not gonna be a problem. When I drag it into a new InDesign document, it's going to basically recreate those same objects as if i drew them in that particular document. If I decide to grab this photo and drag that in to the library, it expects when I go to use this library, it's sort of a one way bookshelf, I think of it as. When I go to put this in a new document, it expects to find this image wherever it was linked in the links panel, now it's on my desktop in this case, so it expects to find it in that same folder. If it goes away and I've moved it and it isn't there anymore, and I go to place this, it will place it, but will place it as a missing link. So I will have to go hunt it down still. But at least it remembers what it's supposed to look like and it puts it in there, at least as a placeholder. But it does expect to find it in the same place. So if it's a placed item, it expects to find that same link path. If it's something you created in InDesign, it will recreate it for you. If you use a font that you suddenly don't have it will place it with a missing font and give you a font warning as well. And that's the library panel. So the library panel sits, it's a separate file. We create it on the desktop here. We've just got the INDL here. And so it just sits there and we can hand that off to people, especially if it's items we've created, it's easy to hand that off to someone else to work with. And then they have these arrows to work with as well. They don't need the whole file, they just needed the elements that we chose to create this file. So I can hand that off. But it basically is, there is one library, can sit on a server, one person has to sorta be in charge of it. But that's where the Creative Cloud Libraries come in. So I can actually come in here and with your Creative Cloud subscription, you have libraries available to you. And you can create as many libraries as you need. And for whatever reason, this one is not gonna stay open. I have no idea why it's not letting me choose another library. Well that's great, I'm on the one I need to be on anyway. So when I look in here, I can see all these different items that have been saved to this library. And there's tons of different kinds. And like I said, this is a whole day class probably on its own. But here are all the images that I placed in this document, I can see that I actually have, I bought them all from Adobe Stock. So when I shop for them from within InDesign, I can actually shop on Adobe Stock here and decide okay I need a picture of money, let's say, and then I can go and see all of them inside here and say okay I really like this one. And I can choose to download it and save a preview to this library that I have. Right so I got ahead and save that, and then in this library, I can see all the items that I have saved. So if I go ahead and just go back to my current library and look at that, why do I, oh. 'Cause I want this turned off. There we go. So once I save a preview, I can then look at it here and say okay I want to use this image on this page. So let's actually grab one that I'm not using. I didn't use this one, this is just a preview. I'm gonna drag it across from the library and now I'm gonna place it on the page so I have this item here. And it's watermarked, and that's great. I can keep working with that. But as soon as I'm ready to buy it, I can buy it straight from here. In fact I can buy it from the links panel. Then I can come in here and see there's a little shopping cart and when I double click on that it will actually buy it from my Adobe Stock account that's there. So again the Adobe Stock is a separate purchase that's attached to your Creative Cloud subscription. But so when you purchase it, it's more. But you are able to actually look through there and you can either download the watermarked images or work with it in the library. And it's not just for stock photos, there's all sorts of things in here. For instance, color themes. So it may be a color theme that I created with the color theme tool that's here in InDesign. In my beginner one we looked at this and I said oh let's create a color theme based on whatever I drag across in this page. So I'm gonna do that. And I created this color theme. One of my options is save that color theme to my current library. So I'm gonna click on that and that's the color theme that I just created. And now I have that available, not only to all my InDesign documents, through the Creative Cloud Library, I have that available in Photoshop and in Illustrator, and also I have it available from many of my Adobe mobile apps. So basically this just lives in the Adobe ecosystem. And anything that can use Creative Cloud Libraries, I now have access to. I may have created some of these themes, for instance, with some of the mobile apps. I took a photo and then the capture app lets me choose colors out of that photo and creates a nice little theme, that you know I just saw this nice cactus blooming, I took a picture of it. Now I have five colors from it and now I can create my entire document based on that as well. So just know that Creative Cloud Libraries are syncing, and all the apps that are plugged in to the Creative Cloud Library, you can create in one area. And then have that available for you in other areas. Those photos I could open up in Photoshop and make changes to, then it'll automatically update here for me in my InDesign document. So just know that everything lives in the cloud and I know that can be scary and all that but you have some really cool ways to work, and you can even share these libraries with other people. So if somebody wants me to work on something for them and they've got their particular images that are in there, I can use that through sharing their libraries. I can't do anything else with it, but I can work on their images, and save it back to their library for them. So Creative Cloud Libraries are really cool. And the nice thing is one of the options when we have that library file open, and also when I created it, it asked me if I wanted to migrate it, I did not. But I can come down here and I can migrate this particular library item over to my current library. So it asks me which one I wanna send it to. Let's send it to CreativeLive. Now I have this item available to me in this library item that's here. So now it's in my Creative Cloud Library. I can use it if I'm creating something on one of the mobile apps or if I'm in Photoshop, I suddenly have that available to me. And just know that some things you create here don't necessarily open up in all the apps, but they're available and they're there and you can see them but sometimes between the apps the certain types of items that you put in there maybe aren't compatible with that. But definitely check out Creative Cloud Libraries, and that's the difference between the two. There's Creative Cloud Libraries and there's libraries. Which they no longer have, it's down here now. It's very hard for me to find. It used to be in the Windows up here, the libraries. So there's libraries and Creative Cloud Libraries. And I think at some point the regular libraries may go away. So I'm trying to migrate over to Creative Cloud and get more used to using the Creative Cloud Libraries that are there. But just know that you have that option available to you.