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Adobe® InDesign® Overview

welcome everybody to in design Creative Cloud. The first thing people ask is, What is the creative cloud and what is this? So in plain and simple terms, basically what we have is we have the next version of in design. Would CS four, CS five, CS six and this would essentially be CS seven. But it's now the creative cloud. So what you are not going to find is you are not going to find updates that are going to come every 18 months that normally come from Adobe. You'll get incremental updates, and so this is like version nine. And then they have 9.19 point two, and I think we're 9.2 as of January and these little updates kind of happened. So if you are not used Teoh having to buy new software 18 months, you'll get little incremental updates. And it's always good to click on the what's new button next to that update to find out what new features have been added and being Adobe certified expert in these applications, it's always interesting to run across several different interface changes A...

s they go. I noticed a few and photo shop a couple weeks ago a couple of illustrator. And so, if you're expecting all these updates and somebody to tell you what's new when the update comes up, click on the What's New Link and you will be able to find out what's new and what you're downloading. So here we are, within design. Creative Cloud. If you're in in design, user from previous generations, this will all look very familiar to you. We're going to touch on the new features as they come into play and we're going to get started with a brief overview of the interface. The tool bars the menus, what makes it tick and how to set up a quick file. So to start off with here, here is the in design interface. We work on Macs here, so I'm gonna be sharing the shortcuts for both Mac and PC. I also have this wonderful little thing called mouse pose A, which shows up on screen. So whenever I press any keyboard command, they come up so you can learn the keyboard shortcuts as well. And any of our little modifier keys they come up and I'll be walking you through those as well. So for those of you who are paying attention for the next 72 hours, make sure you pay attention to every single thing by the whole show. So here we are, within design, going to start off with some of the very basics on the toolbar, the control bar, the menu bars where you find things. This is just a really quick overview so that you can get a nice understanding of what it is and pretty much everything we're gonna cover in depth over the next three days. So if you missed something here, don't worry. We have hundreds of hours left. Don't feel bad, but don't walk away from the monitor. So to start off with, we're gonna start off with the toolbar toolbar generally, what happens when people start to mess with the toolbar? They move it around and they're like, Wow, this is great. And they immediately closed the toolbar. If you ever want to get your toolbar back, you got to know where it is under the window menu. This is where all of your panels are. So if your tools go missing or any of your floating panels go missing, you're gonna find them right here we call it the tools to a bar will come and go. And another thing that I found that happens to when things disappear is this wonderful little thing called the Tab Key. The cat will walk across the keyboard. You'll hit that you're in design will be up. You have all your menus, but just like where did everything go? So, of course, you shut down. The computer started up again and everything's back. It's just the tab key. Folks try that a couple times. It's fun. Disappear, reappear. It's magic. It's not a problem. It's all good. But that's what happens. So if you ever missing a panel or a palette, just go into the window menu here, and you are gonna find every panel in every palate you could possibly look for right there in regards to the toolbar right here. What we have is we have a divided into sections, and if you have not used in design before, you can hover over any one of your tools, and you can get the name of the tool and in parentheses. Next to that tool, you will see that there is a shortcut. It's usually just a simple keystroke shortcut to be able to access each and every one of these tools. If you're in Adobe User, many of these tools are going to have similar, if not the same names as the other Adobe applications, as well as having the same shortcuts. Once you learned these, hopefully the other adobe applications will begin to make a little bit more sense. Up in our upper section, you can see that we have six icons right here, divided up, but this little line across there, this is our basic editing tools that we can go and we can move things. We can rotate, weaken, scale. We can change the size of our page, control the gap between items on the page as well as be able to go in and place content on the page and what I call the little content Conveyor actually call it the place or an ejector. But you know, I have my own little terms and you'll figure out those idiosyncrasies because the whole point of doing this is so that you learn this stuff so I may not call them by the technical terms, all calling by the terms that you will never, ever, ever forget. And you'll start sharing those with your friends and they'll be like, What was that? And it's like which we get to the cheese grater and people like, Oh, my gosh, it is a cheese grater. Exactly. Stay tuned earlier. All about that. So the next set of tools here are are drawing and type tools. We can create, text in a text draw line, draw freeform lines, create containers and we have multiple containers here, circles around squares, polygons and those are basic drawing and type editing tools right there. And then we have a little bit more of our special tools where we can create Grady INTs and fades. We can go ahead and use our scissor people like, What's the scissor tool? Well, this is a tool is like the best tool to run with. I never use the scissor tool, but I will use it just for you to show you what it does at the bottom of our sections. Right here we have our eyedropper tool, one of the most awesome tools that you could ever imagine. Zoom tool, a hand tool as well, as well as dealing with our fill and our stroke where color picker and there are different types of preview modes. And again, any time you hover over these, you will get the tool hint. You see what it is shortcut associated with it. And as we go through this, we're gonna use all these tools. I'll tell you what it is. I'll tell you the short set. So you become familiar with how these work. A couple of the tricks with the toolbar with the toolbar when you normally start up in design in design will go in and have the tool bar on the left hand side. And it'll all be a vertical, um, toolbar. If you go up to your top of your toolbar right there and you click on that little double ended arrow that's going to go ahead and make it horizontal, and it threw it down there at the bottom. It will make it the double columns right there. That's what I'm used to having. So if yours is the single column, you can click on that little double ended era. And if you click on that little X right there, it goes away. But no fear under the window menu. There's your tools. You're back again. So horizontal, vertical or two columns is all taken care of by clicking on that little double ended arrow right there, all nice and happy. Okay, so that's all the tools, but it is going to go a lot faster. Jim, I think, will be done by noon. So next is just a quick walk through of our menus here because we're on the Mac if you're on a PC here. The Onley real difference between the Mac and the PC when it comes to design interface is actually this menu right here. For some reason on the PC, they do not have an application specific menu. So some of these items, like the preferences and the Quit and Design, are going to be at the bottom of the edit menu if you're on a Windows version, and that's the only difference between the men use their basic file menu. Nothing new here. If you've used a computer before File menu. New file Open, open recent print. Save close. You know, shred. Fold into origami. The basic stuff. Okay, edit menu Key thing commands your control. Z undo, undo, undo. There's a few other things that we can do here. Course. Cut copy paste, go in and be able Teoh. Find and change items within our document. Most specifically text do or spellcheck. And if you're on the PC here, here's where your preferences air going to reside as well. The Layout menu. We can control the number of pages how insert pages where we insert pages also control our margins and columns for our initial page layout as well. And some simple page navigation. Don't spend very much time in the layout menu, as you'll very quickly find out in design is rich with a lot of panels on a lot of information that's readily available right there at the click of a mouse so we don't spend as much time in the menus. We're gonna get you up to speed and really proficient very quickly. So quick. Little caveat. Here in design is a page layout application. We don't actually create photos in here. We don't do a lot of illustrations. We simply take all of the files that were created and we put them all together. So we're gonna bring our copy in weaken. Type it in. Here are illustrations and our images are all gonna go in here. So the way I like to teach this is we have two basic things that we haven't in design. Either it's type, and if it isn't type, it's an object. That's pretty much how we break it apart. So the type men he was everything to do with type, fought size, color, flavor, shape, attitude. How the type is going to fit into the box is what it's going to look like, how it's going to behave when it goes out in public. What you're going to do with the type special characters, everything to do with type. It's got to do with type. You're gonna find it under the tight menu. If it isn't type well, you probably figured it out. It's not type, so it's gonna be an object. So this is where we can take our objects and we can apply color. Fill stroke, change the size, change the attributes, arrange them, bring them to front, send them to back, lock them, marry them together, have them of offspring, do wild and crazy stuff with them, make things fit, make things not fit, lock things on change it you name it, So if it's type you're most likely gonna find into the tight menu onto the object menu, it's gonna be everything other than type pretty simple. Our table menu. Well, we're gonna get to that to be able to build table's rows and columns. If you use any type of spreadsheet application and you know what rows and columns are, that's a table, and we're going to show you how to use the table harder to convert text the tables as well under the view menu. This is everything that has to deal with how we're actually viewing Thean design file on screen, were able to go in and were able to see our previews. We can zoom in and we consume outfit the page to the window as well. We can also control whether we turn on and turn off our rulers and all of our extra little hidden things that, if we want to have them hidden or shown, are grids and guides. This is where we turn all the visibility items on and off when it deals with what we're seeing on screen. Virtually all of these don't affect the in design file this is for you to the user so you can turn these things on and off to help you lay out your file. See certain items. It's well, the window menu is we're gonna find all of your panels and your palettes. So over here on the right. You see, I've got some of my panels up here and we have way too many panels. If you open them all up, you will no longer see in design. So we call those up when necessary, and as simple is going in and clicking on it. And it calls up the panel someplace. And as we go along, we're going to show you how we work with the panels and nest them together and break them apart. The help menu. It's extremely helpful. The search function is not. It's just not that wonderful. Um, so if you do want him in design, help, The actual in design help is an online adobe website that allows you to go in, and you can inter actively get all the in design help that you want. If you launch that, it will bring you right to help dot adobe dot com, and it will walk you through in a very easy to understand way. Everything is spelled out in a top level outline, and you want to find out what's new. You can see the what new what's new features. If you want to know something about text or containers or color, you simply launch the help menu. Click on whatever you want. It breaks it down into very simple items, walks you through. It's got pictures for people who don't read, and it's got texture. People who don't want to look at pictures suits everybody beautifully, works great, and that's right there. So under the help menu is where you're going to find that also, if you're in design, is doing something funny or you don't know that you have the most current version. This is where you can just run under the help menu and check your own updates Right there, one of the most common things when in design, starts acting a little bit funny. There's a few little bug fixes out there. Just go under your help menu and see if your updates or done just run that. Make sure it's all good before you begin to panic or anything else. and in many cases that will take care of little issues that you may be having certainly worth checking. I know a lot of people are like, Well, you know, I've got a lot of updates. I don't do them. This will help you. So run your updates, which is great. So that's our basic menu. Now, the lifeblood of in design is right here. This is the entire control bar, and the control bar is here. And these are all the quick and easy short cuts that in design puts in front of you. These air, the boilerplate items, these are the things that you're gonna be using on a constant basis. Yes, you can find a lot of them in the menus, but this is here, so you can have quick and easy access to everything that it is that you need to have when it comes to using all the in design features. Now all you need to do is learn about new icons here and you'll be all set. OK? And do we really need more icons? Well, the answer is no, but okay. You know, we've got them. So the control bar here is going to be something that we're going to you pay attention to constantly. And just like any of our tools, when you hover over any one of the fields here, it's going to give you a tool hint, and this is a little bit more explicit. They will actually tell you what's going on in this, and it just doesn't give you the name. So if you go through and you hover over something, you don't know what it is. And a lot of cases you'll get shortcuts, keyboard commands and a brief little description. It wouldn't hurt to spend 10 or 15 minutes just to walk through these things, get a sense of what it is, right down the things that you don't know so that you can go back and research them. And we're going to basically be cross referencing these through the control bar as well as in the menu. Because I've done this for what 600 years now and a lot of these things I'm not absolutely sure where they are in the menu because I don't access them through there, so we're going to use the control bar big thing with the control bar. The control bar changes all the time. Now, if for some reason your control bar disappears, you can go under the window menu and you can go in, turn on and turn off the control bar right there. Generally, it doesn't disappear because it snapped right up there. But every once in a while we have that special user that, you know, it broke free like the iceberg, and then it sank. And they can't figure it out. There it is, folks. You want control, There is your control. OK, so with the control bar, it controls many different items, and basically, how it does this is whatever tool you have selected in whatever object you have selected, whether it be a line or fill or an image or type, the control bar is going to reflect whatever object you have selected in this case, I simply have a container, and we're going to run through these really quickly and we'll get more specific. So if I have an object selected on the page with my selection tool going from left to right here, I have my position of the object on the page right there. The within the height of my object. I have the scale of my object. I have the rotation in the skew of my object, whether it's been flipped or rotated right there, being able to go in and arrange things spring to front, send back if the object has any fill or stroke on it, or the weight of that stroke being able to apply special effects, drop shadows, opacity and such. Having a text wrap around the object right there. Corner items so we can change the corners of our container as well. And then how the content actually fits within that container. And this is just a simple container. If I switch over to my type tool and I go and I select some type, all of a sudden my entire control bar will change. And now this has everything to do with my tool and my object combination. In this case, I have my type tool, and therefore, when I have my type tool and I have type active now I can get my font and the size and letting here and the style I get my current ing and tracking by horizontal vertical scaling my drunk until t type right there, huh? Fake italics, The fill in stroke of the type my styles and then far left on the control bar again, I have all of my paragraph formatting controls. So I have my character formatting controls which form at all my type my character formatting or my paragraph that allows me to dio right centre left justified. And then all of my paragraph formatting controls left in debt right in dense base before drop cap space. After and such my bulleted and numbered list right here by hyphenation by paragraph styles the way my copy is going to be aligned. The number of columns in the space and my document and a really cool feature. The span and split feature right there. So again, all in the control bar. But this will all change. So we get something even mawr when we get into a table. When we get to that, this whole control bar will change and reflect all of the table items. So in many cases, if the control bar isn't what you expect your what you see, chances are you do not have the right tool or object combination. Selective. It's very simple. If you have a type two and type selected, you're going to get everything to do with type. If you have your selection tool and you have an object selected, it's going to be everything to dio with that object. So just the fundamental basics of the control bar now over to the panels and or pallets. I've used the Adobe software for so long. They used to be called pallets, and now they're called panels. So interchangeably use those. It's the same thing. Okay, we just call it the floaty things. So when you see the panels, you can call up any of your panels under the window. Man, you when you call up a panel, sometimes they will come up as a single panel. Other times they will come up with a group of panels, all nested together, and I'm going to call ups a mini bridge, and it will call it up. Some of these air floating panels. Some of them will come all nested together. There's a lot of different ways you can control your panels. If you're working on a smaller screen in general, what will happen when you open up in design? You will probably have your panels sitting over to the side. Here we have two different widths of our compressed panels. Right here. This is an expanded panel. We have the tag and we have everything we can see. These are compressed ones where we only see the name of the tag. In some cases, I'm gonna hover my mouse right over the left edge here, and I'm going to just pull this in so it will go just to icon view. So if you see just that icon view, hover your mouse over the very left edge right there and pull that out and you can see with the name as well. When you click on any of these, it will come as a little fly out menu. Click on any of those and they fly out. And when you're done, you can just press the little double ended arrow and it's gonna fly back in. If you want to see the full on panel with all of the information, that's what that little double ended arrow is for right there. That's going to expand the panels and then you will see the completely expanded panels right there, each and every panel. When you come contract them. That's what you get. If you have a panel, you click on the fly out here and you'd like to bring that off all by itself. Click on the actual name on the tab. Click on that and you're going to drag it off, and that's gonna allow you to break it free if you want to close. And the individual panel, that's the X up inside the panel right there. If you close and use the X right here, that's going to close. All of the panels get used to this. It's like writing a brand new bike if I want to nest panels inside of each other so I can have one floating window with multiple panels. Click on the name of the tab and you're going to drag that tab panel right up next to the other one. And once everything goes transparent, you know you have it nested inside there. If you have ones that are nested together and it isn't uncommon to go under the window menu and call up a panel and you'll see this whole nest come together, you may say why didn't want all that not a problem if you have several nested panels and I put these all together here so you can see and you call this up and you see that all of these air together and you don't want all of these, you can simply click on any one of the names here, drag that out into free space. And you've got that panel all by itself. You can close that panel, you can nest them together as well. And once you have a set of nested panels, you can simply click on the name of the tab to cycle through them all. You can compress them by clicking on a little double ended arrow, and you can expand them by doing the same. Each and every panel also has its own drop down menu and this little cheese grater right here, which I will hear aboard, qualify as the cheese grater because it looks like a cheese grater. Right. Every panel has this cheese grater. This is the panel menu. Items are options under there. You're going to have very specific items that are going to work directly with that panel. So if we have our pages panel or layers panel, these are going to be all of your items and options that they're gonna be relevant to that particular item. So that little cheese grater there, every panel has a cheese grater, and when you click on that, these air all the items specific to that panel. Now I have my floating panel, and I'm going to attach it to the right hand side of my screen so I can grab not my actual tab here, but the gray bar right up above it. I'm gonna bring net over, and I'm going to touch my mouse to the edge of the screen. You see, when I dragged my mouse over and the mouse touches, you will get that little blue docking, and that will allow me to snap it to the edge of my page. And I can compress that and bring those back together. There's about six or seven different ways that you can dock these snap, thes, expand compress. Take a little time so you can figure out how that works. You can put them side by side. Here, you can go ahead and you can snap them underneath each other as well. You can build child's play sets out of that. Whatever you want to dio. Okay, so that's the basic panels. We're gonna control how these panels fit and how they work. And over time, because we're gonna need different panels for different items that we build on in design. So that's the basic interface overall.