Lessons

Lesson Info

Class Introduction

Hello there internet everybody we are going to be working today within design and I have titled this course in design for total beginners so if you are one of those people who have opened in design and maybe had a bit of a panic attack, maybe it's kind of scared you and then it felt a little overwhelming at first you are exactly who I am hoping tio to today's, so thanks so much for joining us on we're going to really take it from the beginning, so we're going to go nice and slow and really cover a pretty good foundation today with design um so as to mention my name's carol clinton it and I am really big on instagram and twitter and all that fun stuff, so I really hope that you guys reach out and let me know what kinds of things you end up making into design and how much you love it. I can't wait to see all your projects now, the first question that we need to answer is what is in design, right? Because I think there's a lot of confusion around that sometimes so in line is layout softwa...

re okay, so publishing is the word that goes with that layout software for publishing what does that mean? That means that you can make things like magazines in design you can lay out newspapers and not just actual print materials like print in magazines and printed newspapers, but you can use indesign to dio digital media as well, so that could be things on the ipad you could be laying out digital magazines. I always think of martha stewart living, which is, I think, the epitome of well done design and layout and incredible interactive features they add in there too, so that is built within design. Also online newspapers and e books as well, this regular he bucks you can also use it to layout traditional printed books. So this is my most recent book album moxie, and in the book we talked about using in design specifically for photo albums on dh. The book was built within design, so there's all kinds of special features you can use to create not only just the layout things like table of contents and index you can create cross referencing and all those kinds of things has some incredible capabilities. One of the things that I used it for or on a regular basis is my photography materials. So whether that is a contract in this case is an example of one of my contracts, and I'll actually I can show you guys the pdf when we give in to it so you can see how it works but it's interactive so what that means is not only can you type right in all of those forms so when I send this to a client they can actually just type right into it they don't have to print it they could type right into it but also the pricing information is interactive too so whatever pricing package they select it actually updates their total and in design does math so I don't have to do the math my clients don't have to do the math which is really great I also use it for wedding album design so one of my eight things my big things and my business is workflow and I worked really hard to make sure that my clients get things really quickly so I turned around their entire wedding album at it their wedding image edit as well as the album design within a week of their wedding every time yes and in design is a huge part of what makes that possible so I designed all their albums and in design as well and it's really simple it takes me about an hour less for ah wedding album from scratch and then I also use it to create my marketing materials so this is an example of one of my marketing pfc so I have you know pricing information frequently asked questions and a swell as a video you can actually embed video in your pdf using in design so I even have like a little promotional video embedded as well as theirs all these links down here so clients can click to go to my website or going to email me or to find me on twitter or facebook are all of the things so in designs really powerful so you can use it for a lot of different things and I always just liked to show this because sometimes people they hear about it but they don't know where to start or they don't know where what's possible on where they can go with it so there's a lot of different possibilities in fact even this little keynote presentation is in design this in fact is not even keynote we're just really inside and design right now and I can prove it to you if I hit the escape key you can see my whole presentation right here begin scroll through all the pages of it um which I think is pretty amazing so you can use it for presentations even so I build all of my presentation's in design I don't always deliver them from in design as I'm doing here but oftentimes all designed them in in design and then I'll export j pegs and throw them into keynote because it's nice to be able as the presenter to know what slides air coming up next so I have given up that nice luxury you for you guys today so that I could, uh make this point but that's really incredible I think so even this presentation is built in in design and delivered from in design so I think it's also helpful to talk a little bit about how in design fits into the whole adobe world because as photographers or as designers we tend teo sort of grab onto whichever adobe product is our bread and butter and we squeeze the life out of it and we use it for everything and we try to make it do all kinds of things that it was never intended to dio but it's hard to understand how all the different applications come together. So hopefully this week has been a really good eye opener for people to really see all the different applications and what they all d'oh s so how does indesign fit into this? Well, if we just look at three just photo shop in design and illustrator um obviously in photoshopped that's where we're going to edit our images and in illustrator that's where we would be editing are illustrations or building are illustrations and aline is the place where we put all of those together so we might be adding our images, adding our illustrations and then adding text more than likely on dh to create something new so it's kind of the place where all those come together in fact I like to think of it like this if footie shop and illustrator were rock stars then in design would be the stage that they come together to perform on right, isn't it? Oh yeah so in design would be the stage here that's why it's pink? Because it's in design on dh this would be photoshopped the blue guitar and the yellow one is illustrator and they come together to make great things happen in design, so hopefully that helps to clarify some of that stuff. One of the other things that I think people struggle with is the fact that the programs do overlap a little bit right? So in photo shop we work with pixels and we edit our photos and everything but of course we do have some vector capabilities as I'm sure has been discussed this week you can draw things with the pen tool in voter shop and of course the types that you work with him photo shop is vector but photo shop itself is a pixel based program, so while you can do some things vector related and foot ish up it's not the tool you would choose if you were going to really be vector heavy right you and choose something like illustrator to create your illustrations because that's what is paid for and an illustrator you khun place graphics you can place the raster based images into your illustrator creations, but you can't edit them the same way that you can in photos but there is some overlap, and in design you can create some vector graphics, as all I can show you here is, well, he can create some vector graphics on dh. You can place your images. Um, but there's a lot of things you can do in in design that you can't do in the other programs. So even though all the different aps have some overlap there still they still exist for a reason. So, um, ah lot of times in the photography world, people get really sucked into photo shop because it's very it's, very alluring. That photo shop and it's great. But, you know you can't do everything with it and that's why it's important, tio be aware of the other programs and get to know them to I think what the joke is that photographers would even balance their checkbooks and photoshopped eyes if they could, they would. Eso I also think of that saying that you know, if the only tool that you own is a hammer than everything begins to look like a nail, right? So a lot of times photo shop for a lot of people is that hammer, and we like to use it to hammer out everything, but but that's really not the best way of doing it. And in my years of teaching photo shop in and in design, all these things, I've really found that people do some pretty adventurous things and photo shopped. For example, someone told me once that their entire office had built their products catalog in photo shop, which, uh, was a little bit, uh depressing because it's so much work, right? You can't have multipage jj documents in photo shop, so that's really, what in design is for? So I hope that today inspires you to give photoshopped a little breathing room and embrace some of these other great things about this line. So sometimes people say, okay, care about what? About my her soft word, right? Exactly. Um, because in microsoft word, you can put graphics, I guess I mean, you can put images within your word document, but it is not layout software, so we all just have to agree to quit doing that could be him. That is what in design is for word is the word processing program it's not layout software. So if you are making garage sale flyers or barbecue invitations or whatever and you're doing it inward, just stop that's what you could be doing in enzyme so let's, talk a little bit about creative cloud I'm sure people have talked about this all week, I would hope, but sometimes it's just good to hear it again maybe but what is creative cloud and how does this all work so it used to be of course that you would purchase the different software applications that adobe has but now and in order to in order to make sure that everyone has all the current versions of everything all the time and to make sure that everything is fully supported they've moved away to the description based model so now you actually subscribe to creative cloud and you can get all the different programs for a low monthly fee and I think that's really great when they announced that big change I was super excited because I've always been trying so hard to get people excited about in design and you know let go photoshopped us a little I love it too but let go and like be happy within design on dh people would say oh, you know I just I'm so vested with photo shop but now as a creative cloud member you have access tim design so you really don't have an excuse so you have all these different programs on dh this fun little drawing by the way it was also created right here in in design so this is just text this is a fun little cloud that I drew using in designs pen tool and these little trees same thing little stream background and these little guys these little icons are just text even the box around them is actually text, so we'll be talking about this and how you do all of this later today and by the way, just because I'm a total nerd in the bonus materials that you get with this course I made this into desktop wallpaper, so whoever gets that you'll have a fun little desktop wallpaper of adobe land, which I think is kind of fun. Kerry is the keynote in there as well. The keynote is not in there, but guess what else is tell me a list of shortcuts also a whole thing about shortcuts and resource like recommendations for fonts and great that's off and practice files. We love that I wanted to announce that to the gang so they know they are going to get some practice files and those key commands which are so important in design yes, there's a lot of them, so I'm really super excited about the bonus materials and then the desktop wallpaper is like a bonus bonus because I just thought I was really happy with this little fun drawing and I thought we'll just give that away because it's fun it's happy okay, so let's talk about what we're going to be talking about today we've got four segments the first one that we're in right now session one is going to be all about the anatomy of in design, so I think a lot of times when you're new to software, especially adobe software that's so powerful it's really easy to feel totally overwhelmed and what are all these panels? And I don't understand how this works and all these commands and the tools are, you know, clumsy sometimes, so we're just going toe talk about the workspace just so you get comfortable with the workspace navigating around the work space, using the panels and all that kind of stuff, just a general overview of how the software actually works, so you can really understand sort of the way that in design thinks, I like to say, because it's a little different than photoshopped how photoshopped thinks if that's what you're used to so that's going to be yet, uh, this first session and then in session to we're going to talk about working with images, which is maybe one of my favorites. I don't know I can't side, but we're going to talk about placing our image is how we can actually edit them, applying stiles to them and so many more things, so that will be fun and that's really exciting, I think especially, you know, if you appreciate typography and you're used to working in more of a photo shop, a world where you can, of course you can work with type and photoshopped, we know that but there are so many things that you could do in in design with type that you just cannot dio with voter shop it's just impossible or an enormous work around that very inconvenient so we'll talk about that we'll talk about fonts were going to talk about working with gl ifs, which are super fun, so a lot of those these little icons are made from different cliffs that I put together and I'm going to show you how we do that we're going to do some we'll talk about working with columns like you might use in a magazine or a brochure or something doing text rap and we'll talk about how to install fonts and where to get them and all that kind of stuff well, geek out a little bit with funds, so I'm looking forward to that and in session for we're going to talk about output and interactivity so once we have our documents bill that we need to know how to get them out of in design and it turns out there's a lot of different options for that because we can output teo j peg pdf e p s swift each tomb out like so many different things s so we'll talk about how you kind of choose those formats and what's different about all of them and then we're going to get into some interactivity which I am really excited about to because that's. How you take a document and you make it alive so we can add hyperlinks, weaken, turns things into buttons. We can have things turning on and turning off. You could embed video, all that kind of stuff, so we'll touch on some of that. The basics of some of that when we wrap it up today in session for