Lessons

Lesson Info

Complete an InDesign Project with Type & Logos

Whenever I have an object or a shape or even an image container, doesn't matter. We have just some very basic shape tools. Rectangular, ellipse, and polygon tool. Simple, simple stuff. And this is here if I want to draw a circle or a square or fill something with a color and put it behind. But I want to put a band of color across the top of my page here. This is my fill and this is my stroke right here. We have a very limited amount of colors in here. Very easy to create new colors. Go to your color panel. Click on your cheese grater and just say I want a new color splotch. And, I can go in, use my sliders here. I can pick my colors. This allows me to pick and create a lot of colors. Create a color and click add. Create another color and then click add. Create another color, click add. Another color as well. Then go through here and I can make lots and lots of colors. Keep clicking add. And it just adds all those colors to my document right there. Just one right after another after ano...

ther. And with these colors, I can put a fill around my container. I can put a stroke around my container with these colors. And select my type. I can make my type that color as well. Whatever color I want, simple. Adding colors to inDesign couldn't be easier. More difficult in Illustrator. inDesign, super simple. Right there. So now, I may want to create a multi page document. And one of the cool things we can do with inDesign is we can create a multi page document so quickly. One of the things is that we set this up, I may be doing a one page flyer or a poster. But when I set this up, I may have the issue of going in and saying oh I don't know how many pages I have. The auto flow is quite awesome. But if I go under my file menu and create a new document here I can set the number of pages I want when I create a new document, or I can go over to my Pages panel and I can go in and I can insert as may pages as I want to. And if I go insert and say, okay I want 20 pages, I can put that before or after, at the start of my document or right there. I can put in all these pages where I can flow content and put them in and very easily put content in there, that fast. Not a problem. If I want to get rid of pages, simply go over to my Pages panel, click on that page. Hit the trash can at the bottom and away that page goes. I can just get rid of pages after pages after pages and just keep clicking. Delete them right there. If I have a page I'd like to duplicate because I would like to do something slightly different with it, really easy to duplicate that page. I can click on that page in my Pages panel. I can then drag that page onto the new page icon. And now I have two pages that are exactly the same. So then I can edit the other one very easily if I want to. So, how do you actually get from this to something like this? And it's actually quite simple. What I'm going to do these side by side so you can actually see how this works. So I'm going to go in and put in a new page here. Quick and easy way to do it is just go in and I'm going to create the new page. I'm going to dump it right in there. And it gave me a different page size than I was used to. Why is that? That's because you can create different size pages in your inDesign document if you want to. I don't have to have everything horizontal or vertical right here. I had set this up to be kind of a funky little file. Just going to drag in another one right here. Actually I'm not going to do that, I'm going to duplicate that page and make it really easy. There's my files right there. I want to show you how this actually goes together and how we would do this. It's very simple with the understanding of how this works. First of all, I'm just going to pull all of this content off to the side. And then Preview mode here I'm going to show you how this whole thing comes together. What happened was we actually started with the Word document that we had. I'm actually going to take all this out of here. Take these images out of here as well. And these are nothing but color containers. So what I can do is I can go in and I can just draw a container here. I think I'll just do that. Get rid of that as well. I want a background. So I take a container and I'm going to go in and I'm going to draw a container. I'm going to go to my fill and I'm going to choose a color for my container. And then I'm also going to have no stroke around that container. Making sure I actually get the right colors here, so that's a dark brown. That one as well. Whatever color that is. I'm going to cheat, I'm going to use my eye dropper tool so I can sample that color. That's what it is. So that's the color right there. Okay. Grab that color. Actually got that set as an opacity right there. Do that. And then I'm going to pick up that other color bar so I'm going to create another color bar as well. Right there. Choose a color there as well. There it is, there's my pink. And then my last one is going to be that tan color. And go in and draw another box there for my tan color. Now it looks like Neapolitan ice cream. Mm hmm tasty. Okay. Now I pick my tan color. That's how we created those containers right there. I've got this border that runs around here and this border is really simple. It actually has little rounded corners on it. We can do rounded corner boxes. I'm going to grab my box right here and I'm going to draw on here as well. And I've got my little rounded corner, my little corner boxes up here. And I can round those corners. I can go in to control, rounded corners. And I can control the order around that as well. I'm going to pick the color, a little different color there. Round those corners. A little different color so I can see that. Here we go. And then I don't want to see it here so I'm going to take this object. Object arrange, and I'm going to bring this to the front. So, very similar to what I've done here. A little bit different color scheme. But that's what I have, already. And then my donuts right here, I'm going to bring these in. So I go into the file menu and choose place. I grab my donut. And I place my donut and I realize that boy, it would have been nice to know Photoshop, that I could actually go in and I could actually take out that background in Photoshop. And I actually could because now that I can go I can't actually edit my files in here but I would be able to go in very easily to any one of my files here. Go in to my Links panel, relink. And actually go in and edit this file very easily. Where I could go in and I could edit this. And I could turn that into a layer, use my magic wand tool. Get rid of that, save this as a Photoshop file. Bring it back in. Yup, look at that. Now I can go bring in that new file right there. Oh my gosh, look at that transparent background. Wow. The cool part is, I'm going to copy this. I can do a copy and paste but I can hold down my option or alt click and drag. And there's my donut. But now I want to move my donut over. So I want to access my donut inside my window. I can double click. And I can just move my picture over, keeping the window in the same place. Because there's my window, there's my image. Now I got my donut on both sides. My logo here, but we're going to import it again so we go under File, Place. I grab my logo from my Illustrator file. There's my bakery logo. Place it in, I click and drag. There's my logo, its all coming together. Those three images that I have right here, simple. I go into the File menu, choose Place. Go to my Photoshop files that I have, select those. And I grab my three images right there. And I go in, three images and I can place the first one, place the second one. Place the third one, like so. And I'm going to select them all. Select one, hold down the shift key. Select them all then I'm going to put a big white border around them all. So that it looks good. I'm going to make that white. I can put that big white border around there. And of course when you're not good at design, you throw a drop shadow on everything. There's a drop shadow right there. Hallelujah! We got the drop shadow. So, you can see how this is coming together quite quickly. So I want to bring in my Word document so I can get my copy in here. So I can go into the File menu and choose Place. I'm going to go back to my inDesign file in my folder where I have my document. Show the import options so it makes it clean when I bring the file in and remove all the styling. I'm just going to put this off to the side here. In this case, I'm going to select the copy and make it bigger so I can see it. In this case, it doesn't make sense to link all my containers together. My headline is going to require some special styling. But in this case here, this is going to be one container with multiple columns. This is going to be one container because it's all going to be across the three columns there. And that's a separate container and that's a separate container. Anyway, I don't need to link it together because it's not important if I close this up that it reflows into here. So I can take this very easily and I'm going to select this copy and just take it out of there. Do a Command X and cut. Go under Edit and choose Cut, right there. I'm going to draw a container. I'm going to paste it in. Select all the copy, center it, zoom in a bit so we can see it. Go through my type faces here to see what's going to look really good for a type face. Something tasty. Oh that one looks good. Go in and make it big. I don't have to have all the type the same color. Maybe I go in and I make this a purple and then the rest of them I can make a different color as well. Like so. Select the other copy. Change the point size. Work with the type face. Set a little bit more leading there, bump it out a bit. So on and so forth. That's how we begin to put it together. Take my other copy, select that all with my type tool. Take that out, draw another container, paste it in. Select that container, make into three columns. Reduce the size of my copy so it all fits. As if I know what I'm doing. Looks pretty good, huh? Yup. And then I would just break this out. Put my container down here. Flow my copy in. Know my short cuts. Go in and I know that this copy is kind of light it's also going to be bigger. Going to make that bold. Bigger right there. This is going to be a lighter one as well, not so light. I'm going to go in and tint it like that. There we go. Now, it's coming together huh. And that's how we would actually go in and lay out this entire file. Just like that. One great thing with inDesign, love this. You'll notice that in my original inDesign file these two containers, while they contain separate type, they contain different fonts and different sizes and different styles. Unfortunately when I put my copy in here and I bring all of this in and in put my copy in I'd have to go in and now I'd have to figure out what size copy this all is. I have to click on this. Find out what it is, the size the leading, the color, everything. No. I can highlight my copy. And then I can use my eye dropper tool and I can eye dropper the other copy. And it picks up all the attributes of that. Isn't that awesome? But the key is you've got to select a copy. If you select your container use the eye dropper tool, it's going to want to fill the container with that color. You got to select the text. So I'm going to go in a select the text. Use my eye dropper tool, sample the text that I would like to copy it. Same color, same size, same font. Look at that. Pretty awesome.