How do I advance my skills in InDesign? : indesign
Hi everyone! I’m 22, I’m not in a design program, but I’ve been using illustrator for a little over three years now and am pretty adequate. I've also started using photoshop more in the past six months and am advancing at a nice speed.
My first time using InDesign was about a month ago to re-do my resume, and I just volunteered for a social services agency and made up a lot of forms (all interactive) and other things for a charity golf tournament using InDesign.
I’m not proficient with the program. I haven’t watched many tutorials yet, and I’ve only used it for 7 or 8 documents so far.
My problem is, I learned illustrator through digital doodling and playing around with it, and photoshop the same way (learned how to make mock-ups and edit photos and such). Now I want to learn more in InDesign, but I don’t know what I should be doing to learn. Maybe I’m just blocked creatively or something, but I’m not sure how to practice. Unlike illustrator and photoshop, I find it harder to play with the program for the sake of just playing with the program.
Does anyone have any tips?
28 Useful InDesign Tutorials in 2022
If you’re still an InDesign newbie or are suffering from a creative block while designing the same objects over and over again, this rundown of InDesign tutorials will open up an array of new, exciting projects for you to take up.
28 InDesign Tutorials to Improve Your Skills
I’ve collected the best Adobe InDesign tutorials on YouTube that really work. From basics to EPUB designs and many other stuff in-between, there’s a high chance you'll find a project that you would never even think of.
1. Get Started with Adobe InDesign
If you’ve only recently started to learn this program, do yourself a favor and watch this tutorial that covers such InDesign basics as what is an INDD file, InDesign plugins, and who is this software aimed at.
It’s an extremely straightforward explanation that also demonstrates several timesaving functions, which will make your life easier on numerous occasions.
2. How to Add Page Numbers in InDesign
Does the idea of adding page numbers fill you with dread? That’s a common reaction, but after watching this tutorial, you’ll never have to wonder how to use Adobe InDesign for page numbering again!
3. Creating Your First Document
Once you buy InDesign, it’s time to find out how exactly this program works. This handy tutorial explains how to create a new project and goes over all the available options you have when deciding how exactly you want the new document to look like.
4. Quick Guide to Master Pages
The basic concept of a master page entails that whatever is added to it, it will also be added to other pages applied by the master. They’re very handy for making sure your design is consistent and increasing your workflow speed. This tutorial on Adobe InDesign basics teaches you how to use them.
5. Using Keyboard Shortcuts
These hotkeys can save you a ton of time and give a significant boost to your workflow. Watch this tutorial to make your work in InDesign even more efficient. However, you should remember that it only works with the legal version of the product.
With pirated software, like InDesign Crack and InDesign Portable you can expect to deal with a lot of problems.
6. Placing and Formatting Images
This Adobe InDesign training video will walk you through the process of using graphics in this program. It’s divided into 4 steps that cover how to add graphics, move, resize, and reshape them. You’ll also find out about linked graphics and text wrapping.
7. Typography in InDesign
This 8-minute guide offers a simple insight into how to use typography. The video covers 5 simple tips that will help you design creative layouts by using type. The video is easy to digest and very brief, and if you like its style, you should check out other similar InDesign tutorials on the same channel.
8. How to Outline Text
Unlike InDesign alternatives, here you can master text outlining very quickly. This video will teach you how to easily convert text into outlines using InDesign. It’ll also explain when you should use this feature and when you should avoid it.
9. How to Turn Off Hyphenation by Default
InDesign is a terrific tool that includes a plethora of both automatic and manual features. That said, some of the automatic tools like hyphenation can sometimes be more of a nuisance than a useful addition. This tutorial explains how to understand, control, and turn off this feature.
10. How-To Find Overset Text Frames
Whenever text is too large for its frame (overset text), you have several methods of dealing with that issue. For starters, you need to locate the places where you have overset text, and this tutorial on how to use InDesign will help you do just that!
11. Using Spell Check
Nothing screams unprofessionalism like a typo, which is why the developers implemented a top-notch spell-checking tool. Watch this video to see how you can ensure your documents are mistake-free by using spellcheck, dynamic spelling, and autocorrect.
12. How to Create Sections and Section Markers
If you’re looking for InDesign tutorials on creating sections, you should watch this video. It also explains how to set page numeration for each section and add markers, so that the program formats the pages in a single section automatically.
13. Import a Word File to InDesign
If you have no idea how to import Word documents into InDesign while mapping its text styles, this YouTube tutorial is a must-watch for you, as it covers both the import and synchronization procedures.
14. Create a Table of Contents
Designing a table of contents is among the most useful and common things you do in InDesign. If set up properly, it automatically adjusts its structure whenever you change the document, and the program even allows you to create several tables of content in a single project.
15. How to Insert Discretionary Line Breaks
If you’re looking for free InDesign tutorials, don’t miss out on this one. The creator explains the purpose of a discretionary line break and shows how to add it. The video also demonstrates how line breaks help you deal with problems that sometimes appear when using the program’s special space characters.
16. How to Use Multiple Page Sizes in a Document
This tutorial was created to teach you how you can set several page sizes in a single document. The author explains how to use the Pages panel and Page tool for achieving that goal. This technique is essential when designing book spines, business cards, banners, or gatefolds.
17. Create a Neon Text Effect
Backlit neon text is the perfect effect to introduce a bit of 80s glamour to a design. This InDesign tutorial demonstrates how to create this effect in less than 10 minutes. Moreover, the skills you’ll gain here are easily applicable to other projects as well.
18. How to Create Paragraph Styles Quickly
This guide teaches you how to use existing text for creating paragraph styles, as well as how you can improve and update them until you get those styles to look exactly like you need them to.
19. How to Print a Page Range
This tutorial is a must-watch for users, who have trouble printing a range of pages from InDesign. It will teach you how to quickly and easily print specific pages regardless of how complex the numbering method you’ve chosen is.
20. How to Set Up a Book Cover
If you’re looking for InDesign tutorials on how to design a book cover, you should definitely watch this one. It’ll teach you how to separate pages for the front, back, and spine and ensure you can easily adjust the cover should the spine size change.
21. Magazine Design Tutorial
This is a must-see guide for everyone learning InDesign, as it covers most features you are likely to use. The video teaches you how to design both interior layouts and covers for magazines by using InDesign free so that they look as professionally-made and eye-catching as the latest issues of GQ or Cosmopolitan that you can see on a stand.
22. Creating Business Card
Even though a business card is typically small, it can do wonders for promoting your services. This program lets you design stunning, print-ready business cards in a matter of minutes. This guide will give you the much-needed initial push by explaining how to use the standard sizes for business cards.
It can also be a great start for implementing your real estate postcard ideas.
23. How to Create an Interactive EPUB
This program wasn’t just developed for designing print documents. The most recent version of InDesign is great at creating EPUB projects and putting out eMagazines, eBooks, and interactive PDFs. Instead of looking for an InDesign tutorial PDF, check out this video on EPUB projects instead.
24. Creating Three-Page Magazine Spread
Elevate your magazine design skills to the next level by discovering how to use InDesign for making a 3-page magazine spread. The guide is twenty-two minutes long and it covers every aspect you have to know to undertake such a project.
25. Creating Invitation in InDesign
If your goal is to design attractive layouts, this Adobe InDesign tutorial is the video for you. The program’s UI is perfectly designed for easily putting together professional print designs by doing foiling, die-cutting, and embossing.
InDesign is also an ideal tool for designing stylish stationery like wedding or party invitations, and this guide teaches you how to do all of that.
26. Creating a Trifold Brochure
Are you searching for InDesign tutorials that could help you spice up your advertising designs? This video will teach you how to create flyers and brochures without any hassle and prepare them for single, double, and multi-page print.
The creator specifically focuses on designing a trifold brochure and making a mockup for it in Photoshop.
27. How to Create a Calendar
Calendars are fantastic for establishing a schedule and staying organized. Additionally, when you create them yourself, you can make them look in the exact way you need them to. The guide takes you through each step you need to take to create and customize your calendar using InDesign scripts.
28. How to Create CV/Resume Template
Designing a resume in this program is incredibly easy and you get to pick what kind of column layout, color scheme, and fonts you want to use. If you’re unsure where to start, it makes sense to use a premade resume InDesign template.
In this tutorial, you’ll find out how to create a terrific template that is easily customizable and looks stylish and trendy.
How To Use Indesign : Beginners Guide (Useful Steps)
Indesign – It is more than a decade since Adobe InDesign has entered the publishing arena and it is not hard to believe that InDesign is leading the markets right from the day it struck the world. InDesign is much better and extended version of Adobe’s previous counterpart Pagemaker. But the later took the publishing to the next level providing features, tools and additions that added more value to the publishing Industry.
InDesign is comprehensive software that is made to design requirements for diverse domains of Multimedia Industry. InDesign’s well structured and handy features can come to use for newspapers, books, newsletters, magazines, advertisements and the best for the publishing industry. In its recent versions, the software took a giant leap in accommodating layouts for new age technologies such as smartphones, tablets and iPads.
Through this article, “A beginner’s guide to InDesign”, we aim to provide sophisticated information about the InDesign software that helps those who are fairly new to the field.
Start Your Free Design Course 3D animation, modelling, simulation, game development & others
Creating a new document and print settings
To create a new document, open Adobe InDesign. As soon as the software is loaded, the introduction window pops up, through which you can access existing files or recently closed files. However, you can also create new documents and access Adobe’s help files from the bottom left of the window.
Creating a new document according to our print requirement is not available by default, so you should find your way through. InDesign allows you to work in points, millimeters, inches and more units as per your convenience. In this case, I want to work in inches, and I will prepare the document.
Edit > Preferences > Units & Increments
Under Units & Increments – Select Rulers and Units – Change the Horizontal and Vertical fields as per your requirement. Here, I am changing them into Inches.
You can now start creating a new document in two ways
You can use the shortcut keys by typing Ctrl+N You may click on the Document link on the ID Introduction window
You will now find in the window the units are displayed in the Inches as we already made the adjustments to the document.
Layers
You can never master InDesign without understanding the workflow of the Adobe’s most famous Layers palette. In the recent versions, InDesign Layers palettes are added with valuable changes, mostly borrowed from the Vector software Adobe Illustrator. In case you have previous knowledge of Illustrator, it will sure help you understand the part easily.
Open an existing Indesign document. To open the Layers palette,
Click F7 or Window > Layers
The layers palette pops up, and you will notice the drop down arrow on layer 1. When you click on the arrow, the layers palette opens to arrays of sub-layers that are predefined with individual item as text, shape and imported graphics.
Change layer name
To change the name of the layer, double click on the existing layer name. You will find the cursor arrow changing into a finger cursor, and the text is selected in Blue. Type the name you want to give the layer.
Lock the Layer
Just as in any every other Adobe layers palette, the lock and visibility icons are seen arranged just before the layers palette. You may click on the lock symbol to activate the layers lock, so you will not disturb the contents of the layers. You can also hide the layers content by disabling the eye symbol and place it in the hidden mode.
Group Layers
In case you want to group the content in two or more layers you may choose to place required layers and create a group. It allows to move, hide and lock a set of layers together saving your time working on them.
By default, InDesign will name the Group as Group1, Group2. You may choose to rename groups in the same way as mentioned in the Layers column.
Rulers and Guidelines
In every part of the Designing world, precision perfection is essential. When it comes to publishing the need is more intense. And the best way to achieve is by using the Rulers and Guides to arrange the elements of your design in a perfect alignment.
Turn Rulers on & off
By default, InDesign opens a document with the rulers turned on. But working with rulers on is not always comfortable and not essential when you are not working with them. You can turn rulers on and off in the following ways
Toggle between Rulers on & off options by using Ctrl + R shortcut You can manually do the same by
View > Show Rulers
View > Hide Rulers
Change Units
It is essential to change the units of your ruler as per your requirement, especially when you are working for print-based job or publishing jobs.
To change the units of the rulers choose one of the following methods
Right click on the rulers bar – You can see a pop-up window with the list of the units mentioned in it – Click on the required unit to change the rulers as per your requirement. Do not forget to change the units of both horizontal and vertical ruler individually, as changing the units of one ruler is not applied to the other.
Edit > Preferences > Units & Increments >
It will take you to the Preferences window. Under the Ruler Units > Change the Horizontal and Vertical unit.
Zero Point
By default, the 0 point on the ruler is arranged to the top left of the document. InDesign perceives that your document starts the top left side, and it is where the ruler should start counting the width and height.
In case you want to set your preferences of where to start counting the documents follow the below methods
Click on the top left corner, where both horizontal and vertical rulers intersect and drag the rulers to the point where you want the units to start.
Guides
If you have an idea of Photoshop or Illustrator, there is not much to know about the Guidelines, as they work much like the same in every software.
Guidelines are used to align objects precisely in your work area. With the help of guidelines text, objects and every other element can be placed uniformly maintaining the coherency within the design.
To show the guidelines click on the ruler and drag it onto the required area. A horizontal ruler sends out a horizontal guideline, and a vertical ruler sends a vertical guideline.
To know the X & Y coordinate values of the document while adjusting the guidelines, press ctrl/cmd and drag the lines to see the unit values of the guide position.
If you are working with the facing pages in InDesign, your guideline will cut through both the pages. Some designers do not like it as guidelines can obstruct designers works diverting their concentration. In such cases, you can limit the guidelines to one page where you intend and use for both pages where it is required.
Setting the guidelines is very simple task
To set a guideline across the facing pages, click and drag the guide outside the document.
To set a guideline on a single page, click and drag the guide inside the document area.
Importing Type
Importing type content is never seen as a complex matter. In fact, the text is the only object that can easily flow from one platform to another without any obstruction. Simply copying and pasting the text is one step everyone knows and saves ample time. However, it is not the only way to copy the text in InDesign. It opens more possibilities with import options through which the user can have total control over type.
Importing a text document
If you already have your typo readily from a word doc file, you may choose to place it directly into your InDesign document.
Follow the process to copy a word doc typo
File > Place
Start navigating towards the word file you want to place.
Before opening the word file in your document, select the file to activate the show import options. Check the box and click open. A new window appears on your screen with a variety of importing options mainly divided into three parts.
Include
It shows the options what parts of the word document do you want to include in your InDesign document.
Options
Checking the box will allow the curly quotation marks in with the typo
Formatting
It is common to format your word documents in various styles. Importing the document as it is may cause several obstructions in the typo, especially in the places where there is formatting that InDesign may not decode.
In case you want the clear text to be read, deselect the tick options and gain total control over the text.
Once you passed through this stage, you are ready to import the type into your document with a single click. You can already observe the change in your cursor as you find it much sharper with few lines beside it. Click on the area where you want to place your type and start adjusting it as per your requirement.
Importing Images
Indesign can open all popular formats of images as JPEG, TIFF, EPS, PDF and every Adobe format. But what you think you are importing and showing on your document is not a copy of the image you created, but it is only a preview that is taken from the link you obtained from.
Importing Images is a different process in InDesign compared to Photoshop and Illustrator. We will discuss few of the methods you will use to import images.
Before you start creating a document, you should remember that Adobe InDesign is software used for publication, typesetting and layout designing and it is not possible to create professional graphics in this software. Whatever be the image of graphic you want to input into the layout should be prepared in other software like Photoshop, Illustrator or Coreldraw and brought into InDesign readily. So keep your images and graphics ready before you reach the layout stage.
You can places an image by using the shortcut Ctrl + D or by following through
File > Place and navigate the folder where you graphic is located.
You will see the cursor changed into the face of the graphic. Click the icon where you want to place it and adjust the size.
You place the image directly to the size you want to obtain. Click and drag the image in the layout as much as you want. This avoids the burden of resizing your image in the case of larger image sizes.
Threading Text in InDesign
Before InDesign introduced the Threading Text feature, playing with text is a huge task which needs numerous type frames. With threading text, Indesign links text frames and allows the text to flow from one frame to another as soon as the former frame is filled. The process is controlled manually by drawing the following text frames in the shapes and sizes as required by the designer.
Create a new document and draw an empty text frame.
Go to Type > Fill with Placeholder Text
Shrink the text frame to half its size
You will immediately observe a red box on the lower right corner of the text frame. It indicates that there is more text to be displayed and overflowing out of the text frame.
Click on the red box and observe the change in the cursor. You will see the cursor changed into a paragraph. Click and drag the cursor where you want the remaining text to appear.
InDesign is a comprehensive software with a whole bunch of important elements that you can use at every corner. It is not possible to define and fit the best tools in a single post. This is an attempt to give the fundamental information, which is required for every fresher to start with. We hope you find the article helpful and start your InDesign with the tools mentioned above.
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