Adobe InDesign CC – Advanced Training

1. Introduction: Hi there, my name is Dan. I'm an Adobe Certified Instructor... and Adobe Certified Expert in InDesign. I was named MAX Master at Adobe Max this year... which is Adobe's big conference they have every year. Now this course is about the advanced features in InDesign. We're going to talk about productivity, speedy work flow techniques. So, this is not for people brand new to InDesign. It's for people that already have the fundamentals. If you are okay placing images, working with text... then this is the course that's going to take you to the next level. Now even if you consider yourself a pretty heavy InDesign user... I promise you, this course is going to blow your InDesign mind. We'll learn advanced font tricks using Typekit and OpenType fonts... as well as font grouping and font pairing. You'll master color features like the Color Theme tool and Color modes... as well as techniques for professional proofing of colors for print. We'll set them as defaults like fonts, colors... and turning the integrated hyphenation off once and for all. We'll explore tricks for creating, aligning, and distributing shapes... as well as more advanced drawing tricks. Even tricks on how to magic up more background, or completely remove it. And what we'll learn in Advanced InDesign course... we will have tactics to control our paragraphs fully. Fun tricks like expanding text boxes... splitting and spanning columns. We'll become a Styles Master using Nested Styles... Grep Styles, Next Styles, Advanced Object Styles. Your work is going to become... super amazing, super fast, super fluid. We'll make beautiful charts and graphs in InDesign. You'll finally learn all the pros and cons... for all the various digital distribution methods... including things like Interactive PDFs, Epubs... and amazing new Publish Online. You become a master of long text heavy documents... as well as interactive forms, and scripts. There is just so much we cover. I want to cover it all here in the intro, but there's just not enough time... so for a detailed list... go through the video courses, that will outline everything that we cover. So if you are one of those people... who knows there's a better, faster way to work in InDesign... follow me, we'll go from... good at InDesign to super amazing at InDesign. Excited. InDesign's awesome. 2. Getting Started with the Adobe InDesign CC Advanced Course: All right, so time to get started. The main thing is to download the exercise files. So, there will be a link on the page here somewhere... to download those exercise files. The other thing to do is... I have what's called the completed files. That just means, on every video you'll see a link... and it will just be where I'm up to, end of that video. So the InDesign documents, the INDD file, so you can download it. If yours isn't working, just compare mine and yours. That's it, let's get into the videos. 3. Adjusting your workspace for maximum amazingness: Hi there, welcome to the Workspace video. We're going to start with just some housekeeping... to make sure we're all on the same page. Then we're going to move into some more advanced workspace features. So hang around for that, there's some gems in there. To start with, we're going to make sure... we've got our units and increments all the same. And you do it up here. On a Mac, it's under 'InDesign CC', 'Preferences', and go to 'Units'. If you're on a PC, it's under 'Edit'... and down the bottom here, 'Preferences', and 'Units'. So find here. The other thing to note, if you're changing your default units... from say millimeters, or picas, or inches... and you need to do it with no files open. If I have the file open and do it, it will change just for that document... and as soon as I close it down, and open up a new document... you go back to the default... and that can be really annoying. So nothing open, and let's go to our 'Units & Increments'. Now depending on where you are in the world... you might be on picas... it's an old school style from newspaper days. I never used picas, so I'm always switching mine to millimeters... because I'm in Europe most of the time... but if I've got clients in US, I'm switching it to inches. We're going to use inches for this course... just because most of the people watching these videos are based in US. So that's all you need to do. Click 'OK'. We never change the Stroke, it's always done in Points. So we're going to click 'OK'. Now that will change the default forever. The other thing I'd like you to do, is if we go to 'File', 'Open'... I'd like you to go to 'Exercise Files'... and in '01 Spring Flyer'-- if you haven't downloaded the exercise files... there's a link on the page here somewhere. I want you to open up the 'indd' file, the '01 Spring Flyer'. If you're using an older version of InDesign, and playing along... a lot of that stuff will still work... but you might have to use the 'idml' file. This will allow all the versions of InDesign, pre CC2018... to open them up, and work fine. If you're in CC2018 or above... just use the indd files. Let's click 'Open'. Hi everyone, I've paused myself quickly here... just to add a little update... about the new version of InDesign, just before we get started. So InDesign has changed one little thing here... that might be a little confusing, so I'll address it now. So in the very next part of this video... I'm going to ask you to go up to here... to go to 'Window', and go to 'Workspace'... and I'm going to say, go to 'Essentials', and then 'Reset Essentials'. The new update, what they've done is they've shifted Essentials... and they've renamed it called Essentials Classic. So that's the one I want you to go for. If throughout this course I say... go to 'Workspace' and click on 'Essentials'... actually, go to 'Essentials Classic', please. So that's it, not too big a deal... but it's easy to get it out of the way here earlier on... all right, carry on with the course. Now first thing is, I'm going to go to up the top here. This is going to change my workspace. So I'm going to make sure the tick is on 'Essentials'... and I'm going to click 'Reset Essentials'. That means everyone's going to look the same. The other thing I'm going to do is, see this little pop-up menu here? This little Chevrons. I'm going to pop mine out, and have this open for the entire class. It's up to you, it doesn't matter... but that's the way I'm going to work through this course. If you're on a PC, I'm pretty sure it's up here on the left. If you can't find it, the exact same thing is here. 'Window', 'Workspace', and you can see here, 'Essentials', same thing. So that's the boring housekeeping stuff out of the way. Let's look at some more advanced workspace features. And it's to do with this Pasteboard area here. This kind of like lighter gray in the background. Now a lot of people, me included... I like to kind of copy things, move it over here... and start working on like alternate layouts... but there's not a lot of room in here, watch this. If I start making a couple of versions... and if I start dragging it up, look, there's just no room there... there's definitely no room at the top. By default, only gives you a tiny Pasteboard area. If you're like me, and in Illustrator, it has a ginomous Pasteboard area... you end up doing lots of work, kind of all over the place. So we can adjust that here in InDesign as well. Now there's two ways to do it, per document. If I got this document open, I can say... just this document, 'Preferences', go to 'Guides & Pasteboard'. And down the bottom here is where the defaults are. So, mine is 8.5"x1". It's got this 18", and over here, by maybe 5". Click 'OK'. You'll see, it has a much bigger Pasteboard area. Some people love a big Pasteboard area, some people don't. One of the other things though... if you make it really, really big, say it is 15" on the vertical... if you have another page, they're actually quite physically far apart. It's not a big deal, but that's just something to be considered. Now though, if I open up a new document, any random document... you'll notice, my Pasteboard area is back to the teeny tiny size. To get around that, have nothing open, I'm going to close both of these back up. Close, close... And have nothing open, and if I change my settings now... it will change forever. So you can go in here, change it up to a bigger size. I'll leave mine as default, just to match my students' when they come into class. So we're going to leave that there. Before we get out of here though, I'd like to show you... under 'General', this thing here, 'Show "Start" Workspace'. This is the new workspace in 2018... where it kind of shows you the documents you've been working on. Some people don't like that... they want to see all the panels like it was before. You can just turn that off there, click 'OK'. And it means, when it starts up, it goes to this view. But that's totally up to you, it annoys lots of people. Under 'Preferences' again, we're going to go to-- I'm going to turn that back on. I've grown to like it, but I know a lot of people don't. One of the other things people don't like working with is Interface. Over here, you can click through, and just change it back to old school InDesign. Up to you. I'm going to go to this default here of this Medium Dark. Let's click 'OK'. Next thing we can do to make your starting a job a lot smoother and a lot faster... is to adjust the default pages... because whenever you go to 'file', 'New', 'Document'... you've got 'Print'... and you've got some defaults. So US Letter has defaults... but there might be things in here... like you might always be using two columns... and the margins, you might be changing. So you might have things you do every single time, and you're like... "Man, every time I have to do that." So what you can do, to change this by default, is go to 'Close', 'File'... come down to 'Document Presets', and click on 'Define'. We're going to double click the 'Default'. And I'm going to be working under 'Print', and pick your 'Page Size'. You might be A4 or Letter, whatever you want to adjust. And in here, you might be saying, I'm using Landscape all the time. Nobody is using Landscape the whole time... but down here as well, 'Columns', I want two columns... and I want to 'Gutter' that, so it's kind of nice and full, like that. What I tend to do as well, is 'Margins', I break this little link here... so that, down the bottom... I always have like a thicker piece down the bottom of my margins. Contains the page numbering and the document title. Say you're always working, and you need to have your Bleed... you could type in '0.125'. Cool thing about that now, is if I click 'OK', click 'OK'... and when I go to a new document, and I pick 'Print'... 'US Letter' now, you can see down here, I've got two columns. My Margins are set, 1" there, and my Bleed is all set for me. You might have two versions, okay? And you can have more than one, under 'File', 'File Definitions'... and you can click on 'Define', and you can just create your own. So you might create a new one... you can call this 'Letter Alternative1', or 'Letter for specific client'. And it will appear in your new documents. You might be in charge of a larger studio... and you can grab your default, and save it. Save it on to the network drive... and people can come into the same option, and load it in. So you've got some consistency across documents. Before we go out, I'm going to edit mine, and put it back to normal. So I'm going to go change this, and we'll cut this out, and I'll see you in a sec. One last thing to make your life a little easier in InDesign is the Pages panel. So let's open up any old document, I'll open up my 'Spring Flyer' again. In my Pages panel here... I'm actually going to push that all out so I can see everything... and in the Burger menu in the top here... you'll notice, if I actually add a bunch of new pages... they kind of stack vertically, and that's fine... but it would be lot more better use of space... if they're kind of stacked side by side. You can do that easily, under the Burger menu... then go to 'View Pages', and go to 'Horizontally'. It just means they stack side by side. Especially if you've got a nice big screen, you can have this out... and you can see, you can have actually quite a few on the screen at one time... rather than have to scroll up and down. The other nice thing you can do is you can go to the Flyout menu here... and you can go to the 'Panel options', and these thumbnails are quite small. You can adjust them, to say Large or Extra Large... depending on your preference. There's Jumbo as well. Just makes some of the details a little easier to know which page to jump into. One thing though, if I go to 'Essentials', and 'Reset Essentials'... it's going to remove that. It will stay for all the new documents now, but if you ever reset it... it will go back to default. You can get around that by going into here, and just creating your own new workspace. I'm going to call mine 'Dan'. It just means that, it's going to look like this... and if I need to reset it, I can go to 'Reset Dan'... and it's going to stay the same. So I hope you found some useful paths in getting set up. I know that's boring, you came for some more exciting advanced InDesign. Let's move on to the next video now. Bring on the fonts. 4. Setting The Default Font Size For New Documents Adobe InDesign : So every time you draw a new text box... Type tool, draw a text box... it defaults to Myriad Pro, 12 points. With no space after, and hyphenation turned on by default. I never use Myriad Pro, and I'm never at 12 points. So how do we change the defaults? Trick is, just close down the document you have open, so you got nothing open. You need to switch from this kind of 'Start' work space at the top here... to any of these other ones, maybe use 'Essentials'. Make sure you're on your Type tool. And any changes you make up here now... will be the default for any new documents. So let's say, most of my work gets done in Roboto. So I'm going to pick Roboto Lite. And it's going to be 10 points. And in paragraph, down here, I want to turn hyphenation off. I dislike hyphenation, and I'm sick of turning it off. With that done, if I open up a new document now... I'll have this plain old empty document. Grab my Type tool, grab the Type box... fiddle with Place Holder text. And it's Roboto Lite, and it's10 points. And there's no hyphens. Thank you very much, InDesign, and goodbye, Myriad. All right, next font feature. 5. Special features for Typekit & Open Type Fonts : Hey there, in this video we're going to look at Typekit and OpenType fonts... and how awesome they are, because they let us do things like this... where this is a font, we've downloaded free from Typekit... but because it's an OpenType font, it allows us to do things like this. You can see, the S, there's an alternative S with a bit of a softer edge. You can see this G here, it's different from the one at the top. This A is kind of more like we draw hand drawn. This L, look at the descender. And also you can go bananas, and just throw them all in, and make a mess. Let's go now into InDesign to learn how to make that beautiful fonts... or like this one, a beautiful mess. First up, let's make a new document. We're going to use US Half Letter. So we're going to go to 'Print', and we'll go down to 'Letter-Half'. If you can't see some of