Lessons

Lesson Info

Objects and Color

In design, everything that you work with is considered an object right? You can have a new object that's a photo you can have an object that's text and you can just have an object that's a shape filled with color or it could even be empty object so here we have two empty objects, so just two empty frames if I want to add color to any of these, all I have to do is select it so we'll select this one over here and I'm going to add a phil color to it so in designs a little different photoshopped you have a phil arab foreground in the background color in in design you have a fill in a stroke so a little bit different. So over in our swatches panel I've got all these different colors here and at the top this is where I have my fill color and this is my stroke color can you see it's very itty bitty so whichever one is in front is the one that's active. So right now this swatch right here is in front, which means if I click on a color it's going to be the fill if I want to change the stroke co...

lor after click to pull the stroke in front and then I can add a stroke in whatever color so if right now we'll just add a phil so now this object here has a pink phil if I want to change it, I can click right here and now it has this shar truth colored phil so that's pretty straightforward, pretty easy swatches panel this right here is another empty frame and we'll talk about how you make all of these in the next segment but let's say I want to add a stroke to this so I'm going to click the stroke swatch to pull the stroke in front and maybe I'll give it a blue stroke now you can barely see it because it's been and little and in design is currently displaying the actual graphic frame around it so it's kind of hard to see so let's take a trip over to our stroke panel if your stroke panel again like your swatches, if these air not open already, you confined them from the window menu here is under color we've got swatches and then for stroke it's just here by itself someone opened the stroke panel stroke is the design term for outline way might say I wanted to have a blue outline but in the design world we would call it a stroke so the reason being is that an outline literally would be on the outside edge and a stroke could be on the outside edge or it could be on the center or could be on the inside which would mean it's not an outline so good thing we have another word for it so it's a stroke so in the stroke panel we can do all kinds of really fun things we can fatten up the stroke so instead of just a one point stroke we could fatten it up so I'm just clicking this little up arrow teo make the stroke thicker here's where we can determine if the stroke is aligned to the center of the frame so here if I zoom in no I didn't choose a good color for this it's hard to see let's try orange ok so if I make the stroke orange you can see the blue line in the middle that's the actual frame the object so right now the stroke is on the center of that frame but we could move it to the inside if I click this button here or this button here will move it to the outside so now I guess it would be an outline and this would be an in line I don't know it be a stroke on the inside but you can also change the type of stroke that you have so you could have solid stroke we could come in here and make dashed strokes or like these for some reason these little slashes they're just kind of fun or you can have dotted strokes I mean there's so many fun things that you could d'oh so let's now that we kind of have a little bit of an idea of how that works let's go down here and let's pimp out this image here so let's go to our swatches panel let's give it a stroke I know these air crazy but it's just so you can see on camera I promise this isn't really how I make things for oh there maybe they love it all right so I'm going to make a big fat orange stroke that's actually a little too big when we get a little thinner I guess just so we can see all right so I've applied this now to this frame now what about these frames here? What if I want them to have the same stroke? Well there's two things I could do um I want three I could click them all and then recreate the stroke but you know that's for the birds right? So instead I'm going to select all three of these and how am I doing that I'm using the selection tool right up here which by the way the keyboard shortcut is the just like the move tool and photoshopped so I call this in designs moved cool but it's really the selection tool so I'm just going to click and drag a marquee across all three of these frames to select all three alright, you could also hold down the shift key and click on each one but this is so much faster, so I like tio draw marquis and then I could use the eyedropper tool so down here in my tool bar there's an eyedropper and if I click that and then mosey on over to this frame that I've already styled and I click and I lied cash into line where you treating me like this today? Oh, you know what? Because I clicked on um I clicked on him the image you have to really click on the frame, okay? So that's tricky because I want to sample there we go so I've sampled now the treatment to this image which incidentally, also adjusted the positioning of my images we'll talk about that in the next segment, but the little eyedropper sucked up the style, the treatment that we've applied to this so it knows that we've applied an orange seventeen point stroke, so it applied the same orange seventeen point stroke to these three frames over here so that's really great and then I don't have to recreate it all the time what's even better is if we could we make something called an object style and all that means is that we're going to save the settings of the style I've applied to this so that we can apply it to any frame in the entire document at any time and the nice thing is if I change the style it will update the whole document so here's how we do that we need to open our object styles menu panel so we're going to go to the window menu styles object styles because these frames these are just objects so what we're going to dio is select this one here because we've already styled it how we want it, how we want right? How I want crazy orange frame so I've got it styled and then I'm going to hold down the option key and click create new style right here and I'm gonna call it borns crush I guess all right, so we're calling the style orange crush and if I come over here to these attributes down the side, if I click on like stroke, you'll see it's already pre populated with the orange seven point stroke whatever it is we've created so we don't actually have to really do anything in here because we've already done it and it's so much easier to do it to the frame when I can see what we're doing instead of like clicking through all this crazy business. So I'm not going to worry about that, but what we do need to dio before we click out of here is that the very bottom under general ass tributes at the very bottom where it says apply style to selection what that basically means is that we're going to tag that image frame with this style so this this frame that we're using here to create the style is now going to be tagged as an orange crush frame so I'm going to go apply style to selection and click okay so this frame is now orange crush so if I want these frames to become orange crush I just click them click and drag to select them all and then I click orange crush and their play yeah why did you option click on the lot just like just pops up this if we don't at hold option it just makes a style and then it's like style one and then you have to like go get it again so it just kind of saves you from having tio it creates it and then opens it at the same time and which is just handier yes it's quicker so hoops now eh? There we go so these air now attack now the cool thing the whole reason we do stiles is because now if I want to change this so maybe my orange crush style is maybe it needs to be like, dotted or something. So I'm going to open orange crush to edit it right and then let's go down to the stroke at tribute here and then right now it's just on a solid stroke but let's say that we wanted to be dots I don't know uh all right so I'm just going to change it to dots and then when I click okay it updates the whole document so that little eyedropper tool that a little trick I showed you where you can sample this style that's nice but it on lee is like a one time instance so if I did did it with the eyedropper than I'd have tio go back and re select these an eyedropper it again and obviously that's a nightmare in a long multi page document so stiles they take a few seconds to build just second it's um but they're so important and I'm guilty too like sometimes I get lazy and I'm like I don't need to build a style I can just like manually do this I don't know if you've ever done that but I feel like people do that they get a little like I don't want to mess with styles like I only need styles if I building something really you know serious uh but then I end up doing so much more work whenever I want to make a change because I was too lazy to spend two seconds building a style I'm crazy for styles there are crazy for solve level I'm more of a character style kind of guy that paragraph styles but you know yeah well we'll talk about those when we get to text but for objects for for anyone who roll even if you're not a photographer, I mean, when you're in in design, you're working a lot with images, so you you may also create a lot of objects, styles? Um, they're really handy. So that's a little thing about objects, tiles to edit it, you just double click, and then you can change, you know, change whatever you need to do, don't let this box intimidate you. It is a little overwhelming there's, so many little fur things, little options, but really probably the only ones that you really need to focus on are the general attributes of the style, and then, you know, your fill in stroke, maybe, um, at least for now, and if you're if you're ever not sure you can click the little preview button here, and then you can preview any changes before you actually approve them in this box. So, anyway, that's a little bit about that, let talk quickly about preferences and changing some preferences, so when you build your documents, you can have things set up nicely from the get go. So, first things first, when you have your preferences, when you're changing them, you want to close any open documents, so I'm gonna close all of these, I'm not going to save them, because goodness, and was what I done to them just now so when you change your preferences, do it with all your documents closed because if you don't, those preferences will only apply to that document and then you'll have to reset them all the time and that defeats the purpose first things first some of you may I have noticed when you work in on a mac anyway when you work in different adobe products that you can see through the programme to your desktop or to whatever is in the background and I guess some people like that I cannot deal with it yeah no, right? So I won't tell you how long it took me to figure this out, but I will just go ahead and save you the trouble if you want teo not see through to your desktop, then you want to go to here window menu and click application frame and it will just fill that in nicely for you ok pc people I don't think have that problem so when I became a mac girl that was bothersome until I figured it out so there you go, all right, so let's change some other preferences on a mac the preferences they're found under in design preferences on a pc it's under edit preferences somewhere down here all right, so in your preferences there's all different categories of preferences we just want to start with general so we'll just open up this I guess I always go to general first and then I go in here so I guess that's a little inefficient but the general ones are probably fine so I guess we should have gone tio units in increments this is a big ikea because when in design ships the units and increments are sent to pikus and a lot of people work in pikus my brain does not do pikus so I have changed mine two inches um so you just do that here under the your ruler units horizontal and vertical I have changed both of those two inches but there are our other options if you want to work in cicero's just go right ahead. Oh are you know millimeters centimeters whatever there's all kinds of options but I'm going to stick with inches so that's a biggie that I always change. Another thing that I like to check on is under display performance this has to do with how quickly and design can render and deal with your stuff. The default view I think is typical, which is probably fine, but every now and then I get messages from people who are like help my images look pixelated and in design they're not pixelated it's just trying to save itself some brainpower by not rendering it so if that bothers you, you can change it to high quality another thing I like to change is down here where it says greek type below blink what that means is if you have text in your document and you zoom out you'll notice that your text changes from text you can read into just little greek it's called greek text so it's not rendering the type it's just showing you little characters to try to save some brainpower and I don't like that so I don't want any greek type so I just make that zero so I don't have to worry about it I think that's probably it for this kind of stuff right o under type yeah you also probably want to make sure there's a check next to typographer quotes and we might run into that when we talk about type that just means that when you use quote marks in your text that you're getting curled quote marks that hug your sentence instead of straight up and down like inch marks so if you are into typography people get really upset when they see inch marks instead of hugged quotations huggable quote so though they're called typographer quotes so you might want to make sure that there's a check they're all right then we'll click okay another thing that I like to do is in my swatches panel these air your default color swatches I don't know why I really don't like them so whatever you put here is going to be what's here for you for all of your default documents, so I like to get rid of these, so I'm just going to click and shift, click and trash him, and then I'm gonna load other swatches instead, so I'm gonna click thea panel menu for swatches and we'll go to load swatches and here's what school? You could actually load swatches from other documents, so if you have some document were like those were the best colors in the world, I just want them for everything. Now these will be my defaults watches that I have that's kind of more than I need, but you get the idea right? So just something to start with so that's nice, another thing that's huge, and we won't see this the benefit until the next segment, but we want to change our object fitting under our object menu, you're going to go toe object fitting frame fitting options. Okay, what this is talking about is when we drag and drop an image into indesign, we're telling it how we want it to deal with that image in that frame by default, it takes all the pixel data, of course, it's not placing the pixels but it's reading them from the linked file and it's going to just drop them in like full size. Which is kind of a nightmare. So what I recommend is that we change the fitting from none, which is what it is by default. We want to change that to say phil frame proportionally and I'll show you what that means in the next segment, but just for right now, trust me that you want to change that philip bring proportionally, and we want to make sure a line from center is on andi again, we'll see that in the next segment, we'll go ahead and click okay now I showed you a little bit the benefit of the links pennel and how you khun magically popped those images open and photo shopped for editing that john dropping trick yes, so that was a custom keyboard shortcuts. So how do we create a custom keyboard shortcut? We're going to go to the edit menu and come down teo keyboard shortcuts, so end it keyboard shortcuts and that keyboard shortcut happens to be related to the links panel, right? So I guess let me cancel this firm in it. The long hand way of doing that would be to select a link and then you can come up here and say at it with photo shop or whatever that's a lot of work, but that is a function of the length panels, so when we go to change our keyboard shortcuts over here where it says product area we have to tell in design what area we wanted work with so that is a panel menu so we're going to go a product area panel menus now which panel menu the links panel menu so here we get to go on a fun little squirrely ride we all the way down to el to the lengths I know there's a lot links okay and then here we are links oh, not in bed edit edit original right. Okay, so the keyboard shortcut that I like to use for that and believe it or not it's not assigned any where else so we don't even have to steal it from another a place I like to use commander control and then the down arrow key so commander control down narrow and the way that I remember that is that photo shops usually down here in my doc and it's like a hungry little puppy and it's just waiting to be fed s o I seed it images from in design I feed it down to photo shop using command down hero right or control down arrow on a pc s so that I would just type that in right here and then click a sign um and it'll if this is the first time you're doing that is goingto prompt you to make a new keyboard shortcuts set so just follow the prompts and give it a name the other command that I like to use is still under the links panel and that is going to be links reveal in bridge so for that I use commander control right arrow and I'll assign that and then I'll just click okay? And if we open up another document so we'll just open up this album again that's missing some some leagues but not all of them, eh? So if I want to find this image here within bridge, I can just do command right arrow and it's going to jump right to it in bridge and I don't know if you use bridge a lot, but I love it and bridge doesn't get its own day here I guess it aps week creative cloud week but um it's really great and it's it's called bridge because it is the bridge between all the different caps so it's like a super glorified file browser on dh I use it all the time and will see this in closer detail in the next segment. So, um those air the biggies as faras preferences, the other thing that I wanted to show you and then we'll be like right on time my thinks me great um is what we're talking about objects I wanted to pop down here and show you, um alignment options so we'll work with images in the next segment but this works for objects to so here we have five little objects and they're all kind of scattered across this page and, um, in design makes it really easy to align them and organize them. So the way that you do that is you just have them all selected, and then you want to open your align panel and the line is kind of ah, hidden one it's under window object and lay out a line came and you get this whole panel here and you can align all creeds kinds of different things, so if I wanted to align all of these two have the same top, I want to line them all to the same top edge, then I'm going to click this button right here. So if you e zoom in on this, you can see kind kind of there's all these little icons after a while, you get the hang of where they are, but this little icon represents objects being aligned to the same top, so I'm going to click on that, and they're all going to pop up to even alignment at the top. I could align them all to the right side, so now they're all on top of each other over here, um, I could have aligned them to the bottom. And they would all jump down here so the way that that works is if you align to the top they're all going to move to the top of the top most image or if I do the bottom they're all going toe line to the bottom of the bottom most image or the right or the left if it s a in this case will just say top and then down here we can also distribute the items so if I want them all evenly spaced I can distribute their horizontal centers by clicking right here and now they're all looking pretty and um and I didn't have to drag it around and try to do anything that's too much work if you wanted to manually align things for whatever reason dragging out rulers is a simple as clicking and dragging from the ruler here if you want the ruler to be across the whole spread you see right now it's only going on the left side then I can hold down commander troll and it'll go across the whole spread so that's the horizontal ruler same over here you can drag out vertical rulers um these don't print there just lines on your screen that you can use for placement another thing that's really handy eyes what I call a wonderful mode what that means is when you're working and in design you're looking at all kinds of things on your screen like margins guides all of this kind of stuff, and sometimes it gets really distracting so it can be helpful to just hide it. And you can do that by pressing w so I help help you remember that by suggesting that it it's wonderful mode because it just looks so much prettier when that's gone. Let's, go to our page is panel where we can just scroll to the last thing I was going to show you, um, when we talked about setting up a document, um, when you set up a brand new document, you have some choices as to whether or not you used facing pages or not facing pages, and what does that mean? Facing pages is like what you would see in a magazine where the pages are side by side and they face each other so you have a left page and a right paige and they faced each other across the spine. Okay, that's. One way to build a document. If you're setting up your document that way, the dimensions that you enter would be for each individual page, so you would have, like in eight and a half by eleven and an eight and a half by eleven they face each other making a spread, but you would enter individual page information, um, the other option is non facing pages where you just like, which is what this document here that we're working in thiss my presentation is non facing pages so it's just a spread our page after page like this um, so you have that is an option as well. So when you come up to file new document it's either the choices that you want to make right here facing pages or not facing pages and enter in your size um and then down here is people asked me a lot about what bleeds are when you set up a new document, you're gonna have to decide if you want to bleed or not, and when I was getting into this whole industry I could not understand bleeds I don't know why it's really not that hard I just couldn't get it in my head, so maybe this will help you, but when you're talking about adding bleeds, you take your written, you're finished document size, so in this case, let's pretend that we were designing like a four by five a postcard or something, so this internal frame represents the actual printed finished for by five, but in order to have this graphic go all the way to the edge, we can't actually ended at the edge because when you print things, you have to have a little wiggle room for printer business, so so we would actually take this image and build the document actually larger so even though the finished trimmed piece would be four by five the actual document would might be four and a quarter by five and a quarter and then we'd want to extend the image all the way to the edge so the whole thing would be printed and then it would get trimmed down so the bleed is the part that bleeds over the edge to get trimmed later and when you make a new document file new document this is where you would do that under bleeds if we wanted to add an eighth of an inch bleed I could type that in and when I click okay we'll just add a non facing page eight half by eleven let's say or let's do our example for my five four by five inches all right, so we'll click ok eso here we see the actual four by five is this white page this right here is the margin and then this red line is the bleed so you'd want to take your graphics and put them all the way to this bleed edge if you're using a bleed, some documents don't need to bleed sometimes the bleed is built in already for photographers that happens a lot because they sort of just that's just how it works so yeah, if you're ever wondering what a bleed is that that's how you set it in design and and in your other document, if you go to your where you showed the bleed. Yes, the reason why you screened back that portion is to show to show, yeah, to show where the bleed is. But that would be one hundred percent correct. So this area, I've screamed back, but it would really be one hundred percent like this. And then it would just get groups. So this would be the part that gets trimmed down, teo. But, yeah, good point.