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How To Speed Up Your Workflow For Advanced InDesign CC Users Styles

Alright, this video is how to go fast in in design for people that are pretty competent in in design already. Okay, so let's start with some of the easy ones. Let's grab the rectangle tool and let's say I want to draw out a box but I know it needs to be 20 miles by 30 miles, but I'm using imperial kind of inches at the moment. So I'm gonna draw out a rectangle and I'm going to give it a fill now along here it's an inch is okay, I could go into my preferences and change it or with my width and height here. I can just type in 20. Mm Okay, click down here and you can see it's converted it. Okay, same down here. I'm gonna type in 30 millimeters and now I've got the box exactly how I want it to be. You can do with pixels. Do it the other way if you're using millimeters or centimeters, just type in the two inch. Okay. Using the quotation option. Ok. And then click out and it will convert it for you. Obviously were working in inches. That doesn't work. There's a bit of meth in these fields, l...

et's say I need this but I needed to be at times to so asterix is times Okay. And I'm gonna tap out to the next one. Times it by two. Let's say I needed divided by three. Just forward slash and the three click out and it's divided by three. You can add minus subtracting times. Works for any of these fields here. Okay, Say I want to break this into, I need to rotate it 360 but I need to divide it by five. Okay, you can kind of do the whole bit of math in there without having to kind of start with a starting point, if you know what I mean. Same with percentages. Any text field will accept all of the math. The next option is quick apply. Okay, so I'm gonna delete my rectangle. Quick apply is just a really quick and easy way to apply style. So you can actually use it for lots of things. But let's say this is now a heading. Okay I want to apply my heading style instead of having to go window style blah blah blah. Ok. I can click anywhere inside of here and then just go command return OK. Or control return on a pc and it opens this thing called quick apply now if I type in MF because I've named my styles with MF it's perfect. Okay and then let's say I accidentally use this one as MF heading. So remember command return brings that up or control return on a pc. Okay, so I've accidentally applied it, I can click in here. Command return and you see it brings up the thing I lasted so it can get super fast. So actually command return back to body copy. So whenever you're naming your styles, I use this mainly for Styles but make sure you give them a kind of a good name. not just body copy and title. Why? Because whenever you do this, then you're gonna have to type in title and then back to body copy. Whereas if they've got an acronym at the front, maybe just like a Z at the front. It's often what I do and they're all going to be grouped together. Other useful things for quick apply. Let's say I need this all to be upper case. You can actually pick anything from these drop down menus as long as you know how to type it. So upper here is there? So I've just got the first part of the letters uppercase. Okay, so I can go through now and decide you my friends are all uppercase and it's just a quick, easy way to apply anything from these options here. Any styles, any options? I've said options a couple of times but yet quick apply is super useful. Command return or control return. Next little workflow trick is auto, correct. So let's turn it on. Let's go to end design preferences and go to auto, correct. Okay, and there we are there. Let's turn it on. Okay, I find this useful just by itself and then we'll show you kind of like a super slick advanced use of it, but just enable it and it just has lots of like misspelled words in here that helps you auto correct. So I'm gonna click OK And in here I'm gonna type the badly. Okay, so th e say you're really fast, you see it, change it around? I'll do it slowly again. Okay, so H T E space that order corrects it. Now I have terrible spelling so I spell across with to seize all the time space. It adjusts it about with two B's. I don't do that but probably good. And so there's lots in here. Ok, now my nemesis there or there? I don't know. Okay, you can go and add your own ones in there so you can go up to preferences, go again to auto correct and you can add stuff. So down the bottom here I've got it enabled. I'm going to add it to the U. S. A. Dictionary. You might be adding it to a different one. Click on ed. Okay. Type of deadly. I before e somebody once told me I before e that's how it works except after C or something like that. That has never run through. If you've got a better way for me to remember which way those go around, drop it in the comments, That'd be great. Okay, so I'm going to type in the right way. Ok. And click. Ok now I can spell it wrong and it switches around for me so if there's words you have problems with the one that drives my friend Margaret up the wall is grammar I like to spell it with two A's and it drives her nuts. Now I do it on purpose but at the beginning I asked her to check my grammar and spell it wrong. Her face goes purple. Okay. Another trick you can do and this only works while you're typing. Okay so autocorrect doesn't let's say I already had there so I've copied and pasted text. It's it doesn't kind of help you when I pasted in text automatically do it. Okay so it's just while you're typing. So it's one of the drawbacks or I guess yeah that's one of the things that happens with auto correct. It's while you're typing but if I paste from word or open an existing document it's not going to go through and just auto correct it. Okay. Where this can get super useful is just to save time. Okay, speedy workflow stuff. So let's go to in design preferences and go to auto correct. What we're gonna do is enable but we're gonna create some crazy words. I'm going to type in B Y. O. L. Okay and the correction is going to be bringing your own laptops really long word. It's really hard to type. Ok. And click ok click ok. And now my order correct is kind of doing some weird stuff where I go actually I'm gonna type in B. Y. O. L. Space bring your own laptop. Cool. Huh? I write lots of notes and in design. Okay so there's lots of times where I'm like okay so now go to your selection tool okay And I know it's not a long one but I definitely go into here and I say actually I'm gonna make one called selection tool. S. T. This is going to be a selection tool. Okay let's add another one. I'm gonna make this one M. S. And I say a lot. Make sure you have the use X. X. X. X. File open full stop. I say that at the beginning of every like note so make sure you've got the 25721 file open. So I'm adding that one is M. S click Ok. Now at the beginning of my notes I can say okay so my first note is going to be paragraph. Let's look at numbering is the first one here is going to be M. S. Space. Oh good. And then I just go and switch that out. Okay so lots of things. What was the other one now, choose your S. T. Selection tool like yeah you have to be doing some common stuff. Maybe just your business name, maybe your name or the C. E. O. S name or some sort of acronym that you guys use that needs to be spelled out in full turn on auto, correct. And it will do it as you type again, remember that's only while you're typing if I copy and paste S. T. From somewhere it's not going to go and automatically change it which is probably good. You have no control over it, but that's how it works. Okay, other workflow options is I'm gonna save this one here. I'm going to close it down now with nothing open. Okay, I'm gonna go from start to essentials now, if I change anything now, this will change the default forever. You might know this already. We've covered a little bit in this course, but there's things like hyphenate. Okay, so in here under paragraph I can just turn hyphenate. It's on by default, turn it off now and every time you draw a box it's not gonna hyphenate. Saying with the default font. Okay, I've changed mine to roboto light, change it here. It will change forever. Other parts. Okay, in your swatches, go and let's say I want to delete google. Okay, so he's not part of my main fonts. Okay, I'm gonna delete Fedex as well. Goodbye. And I want one with furniture not to be in this kind of like little group, grab you, grab this watch and just drag it up here. Okay, We'll have to do them more separately. Fun. Okay, but you get the idea these now will be in every document and you could go through now and delete these ones that nobody uses other things that I do. Is that the drop shadow. So I use drop shadows. Okay, but the default one is awful. Okay, there's a little icon up here for drop shadow, what you can do is you can get into it and if you change it now to something more useful? Actually go into here, go to drop shadow. It'll open it up and say, I don't want it to be this giant kind of like offset. Okay, I want it to be quite low and in my case I like to have it just straight up and down. So I like to be at 90°. I don't like it to be such a big offset. So I'm going to have . and I'm going to have the size of it. Okay, it's too big and fuzzy for me that I like. Okay, so I'm going to have it down to something like two. And now whenever I draw a drop shadow in the new document, open them up, draw a great rick tango and actually I've done the drop shadow on by default forever, which is not what I want. Okay, so that's my drop shadow that I like. Actually I don't like, it's not quite how I want it, but you get what I mean, right, you can get the drop shadow how you want. And then every time you draw it's going to work. One thing I did do is I clicked on that button and that just means that every time I draw an object it's going to be on. So back to here, go to this and turn it off. If you're finding this is a good kind of point I guess is that sometimes you, every time you draw a box, you're like, why is it got a pink stroke and it's dotted with a weird Phil okay, so you've just gone in and changed to here with nothing open. So I'm gonna go back to having a fill of none and a stroke of black. It's going to be my default and the and the drop shot has not turned on but it will still remember when I do turn it on what I did, yep Phil fill color, turn on drop shadow and it's better. I still want to go and change it though. Okay, another one of the features is actually, let's open up that document that I had open, speed up workflow. Okay. Is dragging and dropping So in every other program in the world, if you select something, you can click and drag it move it. You can't do that here. Okay, So in design it's turned off by default. Okay, inward it's on, I can select it and just move it around. Okay. But I can't in design I've said that twice. Now let's go to preferences. Let's go to type and let's just turn it on there. It is there enable in layout view. It just means now when I slick stuff I can say actually I want to grab this and I just want to drag it over here. Okay. So you might like working that way in the other documents, but dislike how it does it here in the design, you might not have never known that existed at all and there's nothing you can do, but now you can. Another interesting thing that help you work is the content grabber when it got introduced. I hated it. I'm slowly getting used to it. I'm going to import an image from. Let's just say background one that'll do okay, so I got a big background and this target in the middle. You might hate it because you're forever like why is it right in the middle? Okay. You can turn it off by default. Okay. And it is under window extras and there's one in here called content grabber, that's what it's called, I guess. Where are you content grabber hide it and then it won't come on again. You can just double click it if you need to move it. Okay, like the good old days up to you all right onto the next one. I love this one. If I shrink this down, let's say I want this kind of like to be I want the text to run around it. So we put on our text wrap. Okay, not very exciting. So weirdly. Textract has its own panel should be under type. Not sure why. But anyway, so it's going to run around the outside of the text is running around. I'm gonna push it out a little bit so I've got a bit of a buffer but let's say I want to add text to the top of this, you probably know how to fix this. I'm gonna say ah this is the Maybe we're gonna have a copyright notice. Okay. Copyright for 2018. Okay. And I want to add it on top of this, but you'll notice that if I try and do it right, the text wrap pushes it over to the edge and won't let it be on top. Normally what people do is they get an object and go to text frame options. You might even use the super duper shortcut command b or controlled beyond a pc. You say ignore text wrap. That works okay? But you got to do that every single time. So I'm going to undo that. I'm gonna show you a cool little trick. So in preferences go to composition and this magical button here says text wrap only affects the text underneath. Okay? So it doesn't matter that this has text wrap applied or not because it's on top of the image. If I push it below so I'm gonna move it below. It does get affected by text wrap. Okay? But if it's above, I'm just using my shortcut to bring it above, it won't and that is a kind of a default on for this entire program. So no more going into command being saying ignore text wrap on every single text box. Okay? It doesn't work. Obviously if this is behind the text, I'm gonna send it to the back? Doesn't work If I bring it forward? It does now it's in front of this guy. I'm gonna bring him forward. Alright, so that's a nice little time saver. The other thing to do is when you're working is to potentially have your own folder structure. Let's go check it out. So here are my documents. I've got this folder. His job is nothing really. He's just an empty folder structure. But if I open up it's called new job. Okay. But there's no actual files in here, just folders. So there's a folder structure. So there's a copy. So this is where all the copy goes. For many of the jobs that work on files is my kind of like, you know the second draw down all the files you're not too sure what to do with jim religious images go in. Their reference might be material that I've got from the client previous pdf or something sent to client. Our all the PDFs that I've sent them sent a supplier. There's only one in here only ever have one file in here. That's the one that went to the printer site files I have because I do a lot of web work and working is where I keep things like my in design, illustrator and Photoshop documents. Why is it good because I've got a new job and they say dan, can you help us work? And you say yep copy paste, okay, give this a name and this is my new furniture pressure and that structure is ready to go, especially if you're working in an agency or somewhere where you're dealing with lots of other people. Having consistent folder structure means everyone knows where to find stuff. You don't have to use what I use. Okay, But just come up with your own. I also have in here someone called sold every folder has a hold folder. All that means is Z. Is so that it ends up at the bottom. So I've got lots of files here and working those old sits down the bottom alphabetically. And I just dump everything in there that I want to keep. But it's kind of like old news. Let's say that I've got a versioning system. Okay. Or I've done concepts for a client and there's concepts A. B. And C. The client picks B. So what I want to do is get rid of A. And C. And I don't want to delete them. I just want to put them away and hide them so they don't get mixed up. But I can go back to them if I need them. So those old. So come up with your own structure. I'm gonna delete that one now. I've got another one that I use for video. It's kind of similar, slightly different kind of layout. So whenever I'm making a new video course like this, all I do is copy and paste this and say in design Advanced and I've got a place for my raw videos, my premiere pro after effects, the renders the copy all nice and easy. The other little trick is naming your files. Okay, so I'm gonna name this one and at the end here, so let's just give it a new name. Okay, and I'm gonna put it in coursework, I'm going to call this one, it's going to call it workflow just for keep it simple. Okay. And you might just call it workflow but you should give it a versioning number. Okay. That's not too hard because we all know that is the kiss of death. If you call anything final, you know, you're going to be opening this again and making changes then you up with like final two and final new and you've done it before. Okay, so stick to either a versioning number or what a lot of agencies will do will put the date backwards. Okay, so today is the 17th of the 12th and it's the 20th. Okay, so that's the kind of date backwards. It's the day of the week, the month and the year. I know if you're american you do kind of some reason you like to put the date in the middle there. You probably hated the way everyone else does it, but you might have to stick to this numbering convention just so that you've got some numbering consistency. The good thing about doing the date backwards is that they're all gonna stack alphabetically. Okay. And it just means that one at the bottom. Okay. So they stack alphabetically. It means that one at the bottom is going to be the latest version and kind of some really high flow, Um like newspaper ads or something that's going out every day. You might put the time backwards, the 24 hour clock backwards as well. I find I just use V one V 2. Another little workflow thing is I guess how you kind of back up your files. If you're at a larger company, you might not have to worry about it. But for me, I'm working on my own system backing up is I guess it's important. But plugging in my time machine kind of hard drive is a bit of a pain. Okay. It's not a pain. But the problem with it is that it's backing up onto a hard drive that is often right next to my laptop. So if my laptop gets stolen, they are unlikely not to take the hard drive as well. So they're kind of just gone together. So you need some sort of backup system now I cloud kind of works. It doesn't seem to work the exact same way that you want. Okay. It doesn't back up everything on your machine just backs up important documents. So what I use is something called mosey all it does is it's kind of like a drip feeding backup system. So whenever I create or how to save on a file, it slowly starts drip feeding it up to my mosey account. Mosey is M O Z Y. They charge okay. It is 10 bucks a month. But for me as a freelancer, 120 bucks a year just to have everything backed up, I've had to use it only once, thankfully my car got broken into laptops stolen and the cool thing about it is that there's like there's a ton you can. So all I did is I got a new laptop actually borrowed a friend's and all they did was install the app and the cool thing about it is that it said, hey dan, would you like to put everything back where you got it? I was like, oh yes. And what it did was is it started kind of just pushing everything back onto my Mac on this borrowed Mac into the right places. Okay, started started putting everything back my documents or my settings went back. It was a great little setup Now. I had about 50 gigabytes so it took forever, like nearly about three days to inject everything back in. If you've got lots, you can go to mosey in order DVD and they send it to you in the post next day. I did both didn't end up using the DVD but it's a super handy little service. Okay. Last little time saving trick thing is whenever I've got say a contents page or like I do it mainly for a table of contents, but let's say there's something you need to kind of update on a document or a note to other people using the end design file is let's say I'm going to draw a nice big box, I'm going to use the magenta because that means business OK? And I'm going to add some text in here. I'm going to join it to it and I'm gonna say remember remember to update. Okay, I'm gonna make it centered. I'm gonna put a couple of returns in bad design. I know, but it's just here as a kind of like a big don't forget about this thing. All caps exclamation mark, I really mean this. Okay, so I want this to remember to update this page before you send it out to print or just little notes to people. Okay, but you don't want to print, you don't want to accidentally have it go through. So what you can do is you can put it on a non printing layer. So I've got my layers panel here. I'm going to make a new there. I'm gonna drag got him selected and if I drag this little blue dot to the red dot okay, he's on this layer here. Ok. On layout to I'm going to give it a name, I'm going to say this is a non printing layer to make it super clear and down the bottom here. You can say print layer. So whenever I go out to export or print. Okay, this thing, this whole entire layer is not going to be added so it's there. It's in the working document. Doesn't go out. I use this quite often when I'm doing things like like the table of contents. But also I do trainer version of notes as well as the student version. So we'll have kind of confidential trainer version only across the middle. Doesn't go out to print but it's just so that I know which document I'm working on now. I'll show you this as well because this will happen and you open a document and you will see something on the page and it won't be exporting. It's because you've accidentally copied and pasted onto a layer that it's non printing took me ages one time to figure out why stuff wasn't printing. Okay. It's because it was on a layer that had the print layer turned off case I'm gonna click OK. And I'm going to lock it just so that I can't add other stuff to it. Alright, so that's gonna be it of workflow techniques. There was some good stuff in there. I kind of finished on a dud. I think this one here wasn't my most exciting feature. I should have finished on that auto correct stuff. Bring her laptop or the text wrap option. I felt like those are the best ones. But anyway, non printing layers, it was all right. That's it. Let's look at the next tutorial.