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Lesson Info
Templates
If you are using the same thing over and over again, let's say you had five different catalogs showcasing your different products that you make. You might want to create a template instead of just copying and pasting. Or maybe you're doing something like this. I mean, keep in mind, this is just how to make a digital portfolio. Everything we're learning here we could create a digital newsletter that we're doing to PDF. The newsletter is going to change every time, and it's gonna change a lot, maybe monthly. You might wanna make a template where you have the same bones that are there but nothing in there is really what you're using. Like the bonus that we have is a template. It's the layout of the document without the images in it or with the images there as placeholders but you pull them out and put your new thing in. When I'm creating a template, I'm basically working. Let's come in here to my template file. When I create a template, I basically take what I started with and then I dele...
te everything that isn't important. In this case, I had the Iceland book and I realized, okay I like that. I'm gonna do this, I wanna create this for all my clients, and I want to give them a book of their photos or whatever photos we took of them in a book format, and I wanna use that again and again. So, once I've laid it out and I like the way it looks, then I'm gonna start stripping away. And then I'm gonna save it as a template file so that when I open it up, which I just did, I opened a template file and I'll show you that in a minute. But it automatically opened it as an untitled file. It automatically knows. It wants to take that template information and save it as something new. In this case, I took what it said, Iceland, Land of Fire and Ice, and I just put Title here, something that showed me that, okay, this is where things change. And then I pulled out the picture, 'cause obviously the pictures are gonna change. I duplicated that here. Also, on the page numbers, if we look at that I had, before it said Fire and Ice. Now it says Book Name Goes Here. Sometimes I try and put things like, I'll put XXXX or something like that, so I can do a Find Change to make sure I've gotten all those place holders pulled out. By putting Goes Here, I can just look for Goes Here and make sure I have nothing left that says Goes Here. That I've actually put some information in there. Again, this is just the layout I had before. I even put this in here. A nice, vertically centered pull quote goes here. Person's name goes here. Subhead goes here. Text goes here. Again, I've got the layout for the images that are here, ready to go. Basically I took my finished file, my finished book. When I said I made that first one, I thought this is great. I'm gonna do this again and again. I opened it up and I pulled out everything that I didn't need. Images, I left some place holder text. I left maybe instructions of what it is I'm supposed to put here. When I'm done with it, I'm gonna do a Save As, not Save. Save is just gonna save that InDesign file. I'm do a Save As and choose Template instead. That changes it to an INDT file. It's basically gonna save it as a template. When I save that out to my desktop, I've got this template here ready to go. When I look at that, I come in here and it looks a little different than a file. It does say INDT. I don't know if you can actually read that. Looks a little different. I don't like the new icons. They don't quite show me as readily that it's a template. The nice thing is, when I double click on this file and open it, it automatically opens an untitled file. As soon as I hit Save, it's not writing over the template. It automatically says, "Oh, what do you wanna save it as?" As an InDesign file, and what do you wanna call it? I can call this, you know, the book for the Jones's, and then book for the Smiths, and I can just go through and keep making all those changes as we go. That's how we reuse the same items over and over again. Whether it's through styles or master pages, or making a template, and those all work in conjunction. You can have one that has all three inside there. Your template can have master pages. It can have those styles built in. Keep in mind, your object styles can have paragraph and character styles embedded in that as well. It's kinda like inception for the styles and we get it all built in there. But then, we've done the work. Why do it again? We can open up something we know works and we can just boom, boom, boom, put in the new stuff, and then you can get back to working on whatever it is that you need to work on.
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Ratings and Reviews
Sonya Messier
This course give great advice on how to work in In-Design. Erica does a great job on how to use some tools to achieve a portfolio. Thank you.
Carolyn Hicks
This course was so jam-packed with valuable and clear information. I had avoided InDesign as I found it very overwhelming learning it all on my own. Here, Erica explains perfectly how to do so much with this software, and how to do it easily. I am now excited to get back on InDesign. This course is really for a lot more than just creating a portfolio. Thank you!
a Creativelive Student
Erica does such a great job with this class. I was just going to watch it but half way through I just had to buy it.
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