Adobe Certified Professional in Print & Digital Media Publication Using Adobe InDesign - Exam Guide

1. About the course: You ready to become a certified in design expert and take your creative career to the next level? Hi. Hi. My name is Martin Perime Adobe certified instructor with over 20 years of experience teaching Adobe design tools and working as a creative for brands like Disney, BBC, Unilever, and Nickelodeon. I am excited to introduce you to the Adobe Certified Professional in print and digital media publication using in design exam Guide. I know. That's a mouthful. But this course is your complete companion to prepare for the official Adobe certification exam, the highest industry recognized credential for in design users. You will get in depth video training about all the topics practice exams, exercise files, and detailed downloadable guides to help you review every important topic. Best part, you can now take the exam from the comfort of your home. No need to travel to an exam center anymore. Why should you consider taking this exam? Becoming an Adobe certified professional proves to employers, clients, and peers that you have real world job ready in design skills. It's an incredible way to boost your resume, your confidence, and stand out in a competitive, creative market. It also opens doors to freelance opportunities, career advancements, or even higher salaries. Whether you are just starting out or looking to solidify your expertise, this certification gives you a powerful, recognized credential that will set you apart. Whether you are already comfortable in in design or starting fresh, this course will help you build the skills you need to pass the 50 minute live in the app exam with confidence. Even if you are brand new to in design, you can be exam ready in less than a week by following this course carefully. It's important to mention that the certification exam isn't included and needs to be booked separately. But don't worry. I will walk you through everything you need to know to succeed. If you are serious about becoming a recognized in design pro, this is your first step. I can't wait to guide you on this journey, so let's get started. 2. How to prepare for the exam?: In this video, I'm going to show you how to best prepare for the exam using this course. First of all, the exam is divided into five main topics. You can see these on my screen. And for each of these topics, I prepared a study guide, which you can download from the resources here on Skillshare. Once you download these PDFs, you will be able to open them on your desktop computer or even on mobile devices. And I recommend using this throughout your entire preparation process to keep track of your progress. You can also search within the document. So if I just type something like scope, I will be able to quickly find all the matches, and I can jump over them. I can also highlight them if I need to. And, of course, you can also select any text from these guides, and you can copy and paste them somewhere else. I wouldn't recommend printing all these guides out because it's a lot of paper. So just one topic. This first one would be 18 pages, but altogether, the five topics, so if it's all the guides, probably would be close to 200 pages. Don't worry. You don't actually have to read through all these guides. That's why we have video lessons for every topic. So I actually cover everything that's written down here in each of these videos. And you will also see the numbering at the beginning of each video title, like 1.1 point A, which means it's from the first main topic working in the design industry. And within that, it would be the first subtopic. And then the A is an additional subtopic inside there. So if we look at the guide, it will make more sense. So that's the main topic. Then 1.1 is the identified purpose, audience and audience needs for preparing images. And then 1.1 point A is that first subcategory within this subtopic for the first main topic. So we can see that's determine whether content is relevant to the purpose, audience, audience needs, user experience, and design for devices. It sounds a mouthful. These are always quite long. But all you have to remember is that the video lessons in the course are all recorded according to this guide, and it goes through everything in the right order. So we will see 1.1 point A, then there will be 1.1 point B. And if we scroll further down, we can find that here in the guide as well. Then if I go further down, we will find the next subtopic, which is 1.2, starting with 1.2 A. So once again, that's the next one we can see here. Besides the study guides that you can find in the resources here on Skillshare, you can also find a link to access all additional resources like exercise files, project files, quizzes, and the final test. Now, once you click on this link, it's going to take you to this platform which we are hosting onsmdsigner.com. The reason why we did this is because it allows us to include quizzes and practice tests that currently is not available on Skillshare. It's important to mention that all the video lessons are hosted on Skillshare. So you only have to come here to access these additional useful resources, but you can complete the class without leaving Skillshare. Once you reach this welcome screen, all you have to do is to create a new account by clicking on the icon here at the bottom, and this is going to set up a new student account on our learning platform. Yes, I'm at designer.com. All we need is your first name, last name, your email address, and a password that you can set up. Alternatively, you can also sign up with any of these options. So LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, or Apple. Once you created your student account, you will be able to access all these additional resources, starting with the projects and exercise files. So you can download these from here. Then you can find the quizzes for each of the main topics from the exam. And at the bottom, you will also find the final test, which covers all the topics. But I will come back and talk a bit more in detail about this later in this video. First, I wanted to talk a bit more about the quizzes that we created for each of the topics. What I suggest is to do these quizzes once you completed all the video lessons for a specific topic, and then come over here and start the quiz for that particular topic to test your knowledge and to see how much you understood of all the things that we covered. And it is important to mention that there are a lot more questions for each of these tests than just 20. So each time you are going to take this is going to be different because it's going to randomize the questions from the available pool of questions. And when you are taking these exams, if you are choosing the correct answer, once you confirm, it's going to verify that it's correct once you finish all the 20 questions, at the end, you will get your results, and we set the passing rate to 70%, which would be the same for the real Photoshop exam. So until you reach the 70%, I would recommend to retake the quiz. But the best thing is that you can actually see a list of your wrong and correct answers. So it just gives you a summary of everything that you covered. To summarize, what I would recommend to do for each main topic is to go through the video lessons. First, use the exercise files to practice everything that we cover in these videos. Then go through or skim through the study guide afterwards just to remind yourself of all the important things that we discussed in that topic. And then when you feel ready, then you can take that quiz at the end of the topic, and we take it until you pass the 70% passing rate. Now in the real exam, besides multiple choice questions, you will also be tested using Adobe in design and performing tasks, and to be able to help you prepare for this particular part of the exam, I created projects. And you can access these projects from this area, which I mentioned already earlier in this video. Now, once you get to this point, all you need to do is to download the in design projects template file and complete the 12 projects inside it. There is no right or wrong order to go through this, so you can pick whichever you want to start with. Just make sure you go through all of them. Now, it's important to mention that some of these projects will be slightly more complex and more difficult to solve than others, and it's also important to mention that these are way more complex than what you would actually have in the real exam. While in this course, for each project, you have several tasks that you have to complete. In the actual exam, you will have individual tasks. For each project file, you will have to normally just do one single task. So in case of this particular example that we can see on my screen, there's five tasks that we have to do here. That would be five separate tasks in the real exam. Now, once you completed all of these projects and you also watched my solution videos, and you feel like you are ready to try a final test, you can come here at the bottom and choose all topics final test. So instead of 20 questions, here you will get 30 questions, which again is aligned to the real exam, where you will have 30 questions in total. If you complete all of these projects and then you go through this final test at least once, it should give you a very good idea of how the exam is going to work. And once again, most of the things that I'm asking here in this course is slightly more complex and harder that you will end up having to answer in the real exam. 3. What to expect during the exam?: This video, I would like to show you the tutorials that you will be greeted with when you are taking the exam. So these won't actually be taking up the time allocated for your exam when you're doing it live. You will have 50 minutes to complete 11 questions and 19 tasks. Before even getting to those, you will need to go through a couple of slides, which just simply explains how the exam is going to work. Now the reason I included this video is just so you can familiarize yourself with these already even before actually taking the exam. And I will walk you through these quickly. First, you will have a couple of things that they will ask about you. It's more about your background and while you are taking the exam. But then this is the slide that explains it well that you will have this first initial tutorial with a couple of slides. Then the first main segment of the exam starts where you will be asked questions. So this segment will include 13 questions. They are all multiple choice questions. If they want you to have multiple answers selected within a question, that would usually be mentioned. But most of the time you would just need to choose one answer. Then once you are done with that section, you will be moving into another short tutorial, a couple of slides about the next segment, which is going to run directly in design. So that's the more exciting and interesting part where you actually have to perform tasks. And once you are done with those, you will still have the option to go back and revisit any of those tasks that you are not sure about. But once you're ready, you can just submit your answers and you will get the score report straightaway. That's a great thing. You don't have to wait around. You will know exactly what your scores are. Now, on this next slide, we can see that you will be able to track how many questions you've answered so far out of all the questions that are coming up, you will be able to keep an eye on your time, the remaining time that's available. And any question can easily be reset. So if you quickly just want to go back to how it was before you made changes to it, you can reset it. This applies to both the questions and the tasks. And probably the most important option here is the mark for review check box that you can check at any time whether you already completed the question or task or not. Checking this option is going to add a little flag, and it will make it easier to come back to that particular question or task at a later time. This is how it would look like when you get to the end of a section. Let's say the section about questions, and there's the little flags showing or indicating which questions were marked for review later. And by clicking on the questions here in the summary, you will be able to quickly jump back to them. And once you finish reviewing that question and you make sure that your answer is final, then you can just go back to the summary, which will take you back to this page. And when all of your questions are done, you can just say submit section. That's going to finalize that first stage about the questions, and you will move to the second segment or second part, which is going to be about the tasks. But first, for the tasks as well, it will give you a short tutorial, a couple of slides, and again, explain where you can find the important elements within the user interface. For this part, the exam will actually open in design, and of course, in design has to be installed on your computer for this to work. And the exam will set the interface up in a way that you will see the certification questions on the right side in a dedicated panel. So that's what we can see here, and it will always give you the task there, explaining what you need to do. And on the left side, you will have your document where you can work. And the great thing about this part of the exam is that you are completely free to use whatever you want. As long as you complete the task that they ask you, you will get points for it. Now it mentions that a few features will be blocked during the exam, which is listed here at the bottom, like the help option because they don't want you to learn about the features during the exam. But you don't have to worry about these missing features because they won't be necessary to complete the exam. Now, you are actually also free to move panels around and change the interface. But if you ever want to reset it back to the way it was, just go to the window menu, choose workspace and then reset the certification test workspace. I recommend to dock the layers and the properties panels right next to the certification test panel, and to keep these two always visible because these will mainly be needed to complete all of these tasks. So this is my recommended layout. Then similarly to the questions during this task segment, you will also be able to reset the tasks at any time. You will also be able to track how many tasks you already went through and how much of them we still left. You will also be able to mark any of the tasks for review later. You will be able to see your summary as well. And in case you wanted to leave feedback about a particular task, you can also leave feedback here. Now, feedback that you give won't be considered for your final result. It's more of a feedback that they can use to improve the exam if you have the time for that, but I wouldn't worry about that most of the time. It's important to mention that during the tasks, there will be a couple of them where you will also be able to click on Exhibit to see the final result. And that's always useful to check first before you even read the question because sometimes it just makes more sense what you need to create. On the left, you will see your document. On the right, you can check your exhibit. And then once you see the before and after, you will know already what to do. After that, reading the question will make much more sense. Whenever you see something underlined and set in bold and italic, that means simply just by clicking on it, you will be able to copy that text. They just want to make sure that you can quickly put in any text that they ask you to use, for instance, for a layer or a layer group or some other things like saving a file with a particular file. Now, there is an important thing mentioned here on this slide that you should always only do the things that they ask you to do and nothing else. So, for instance, if there is a dialogue box where there's a lot of options and they only ask you to change maybe two or three of those, then all the others should always stay the default value. So don't mess around with anything else. Always only pay attention to what they ask you to do, and you don't have to do anything else. Once you get to the end of the task segment, and you also make sure that you reviewed everything that you marked earlier on, then you can just click on finish that section as well. And with that, you will be done with the exam, and you will be getting your score report, which will tell you whether you passed or not. So the required score is 700, which essentially means 70%, and out of the 1,000 points, you will see your score just below that, and on the bottom right corner, you will see either a pass or a fail. But most likely, you will get a pass if you complete the entire course and you go through every. But that is all you need to know about how the exam works. So now, hopefully you are eager to get started. So move on to the first topic, and I wish you good luck preparing for the exam. I am confident that if you go through everything that we cover in this course, you will nail it and you won't have any trouble passing. 4. 1.1.a Identify the purpose, audience: For every design project, in the beginning, it's very important to clarify a couple of things like the purpose of the design and also the target audience. Now for the purpose of an image or design, first of all, you need to talk to the client and find out more about their business goals and what they want to achieve with that image that you are creating for them. Here is one of our recent design contest briefs, for example, for a charity called Amazon Aid, and they required a series of posters created for the river of Gold curriculum. And this is intended for college students. And here are the topics, the impact of gold mining, rainforest ecology, and so on and so forth. And each of these topics will have a focus, objectives and key activities. So as a designer, the more you know about the intent and purpose of a design, the easier it is going to be for you to understand what elements you should use or how you should frame everything in a composition. And if the brief is not detailed enough, you should always ask additional questions from the client. You can ask questions like, what is the main message that you are trying to convey with this design? Or what action do you want the viewer to take after seeing the design? And also importantly, how is this image going to be used? Is it going to be printed? Is it going to be a small print that people will hold in their hand? Is it going to be a larger print that is going to be on the wall of a classroom? And in case of this brief, we can find that information here in the size. So we know exactly the print size and the color mode, which is intended for print, the resolution that is 300 pixel range. But like always, if there is something not clear in a design brief, you should always consult the client. Now, the target audience of a design or image is just as important as the purpose of the design. And again, that's something that is very clear here in this brief. So we are creating this for high school students aged 15-17. In case of this project, it's very important to know because older kids obviously will be able to understand more complex graphics and designs. So things that we can see here like this infographic would be hard to understand for younger kids younger audience. Maybe for younger kids, something like this would work better, which has a little bit more color and a bit more vibrant and more characters on it. While for a more mature or adult audience, we can have more statistics and information that they will be more interested in seeing. 5. 1.1.b Requirements based on video, print, and web: Another important aspect of the design brief is the deliverables. And that means what are the actual files that you will need to supply to your client at the end of the project? And the type of files or deliverables really depend on the output. So whether the image or design that you're working on is intended for print, web, or video, and the easiest way to compare these and to see the differences is by going to the New Document dialog box in Photoshop. So this is something you can find by going to File New. And then here on the top, you will be able to choose these different categories. So when you choose print, you will see the preferred or suggested settings for it. And most importantly, here, the resolution should be set to 300 PPI or pixel Pyrne by default. Now, the color mode is set to RGB because Photoshop is best to be used in this color mode. Most of the features will be available here. While if you choose CMYK, it will be slightly limited. Some features might not be available. However, this is the file format that is best suited for print, where the four color channels are the four inks that we use for print cyan, magenta, yellow and black. K stands for key color in printing. The best file formats to save into when it comes to print would be PDF, TIF or EPS. And there's one additional thing to remember when it comes to saving for print from Photoshop, and that's how to set up the bleed. It's very rare that they would ask you to do this, but you would have to go to the print options. So the file menu and then choose print. And only here you will be able to find the option for the bleed for which you need to scroll down. And on the printing marks, you will be able to choose corner crop marks and then go into functions as well and choose bleed. And normally we would use 3 millimeters bleed, once we click Okay, this should be all that you need to do to have those crop marks showing up with the right bleed settings when the image is going to be printed out. Now coming back to the new document dialogue box, when it comes to creating images for the web, you would want to use 72 PPI resolutions through a lower resolution and RGB color mode. But besides that, you have to also remember that these files should be saved by using the exports or save for web options from the file menu export dropdown. And the most commonly used three image file formats for the web would be JPAG PNG, and GIF. And we will be discussing these options and all the exporting options in a later topic in this course. For now, is just enough to remember these three options and perhaps one additional file format, which you would be able to find if you go to the file, save a copy option, and then just choose on your computer. And here you will be able to find the web P image format. This is starting to be used more and more on websites, and it's a more modern file format compared to the other three that we mentioned before. And last but not least, from the new document dialogue book, let's just take a look at the film and video category. So here you will see a couple of presets, like the 1080 P or 720 P. These all refer to the size or dimensions of the images that we create. We can see that there are different abbreviation used like HDV, HDTV. This would be considered the full HD format. The 920 pixels by 1080 pixels. But if we click on view all presets, we can also find the four K standards like UHDTV, which would be four times as large as a HD image. So here we can see 3,840 pixels by 2160 pixels. Additionally, it's also important to mention that under the advanced options, you will be able to change the pixel aspect ratio. Most modern video file formats would use square pixels, but some other file formats like NTSC would require a 0.91 ratio between the width and height of a pixel. And we can see these ratios varying here, even having a two to one ratio, which is called the anamorphic format. Just so you can see what this actually means, if I create this document and then click Okay, once I zoom closer in this document, and we start to see the pixel grid, we can actually see that individual pixels are rectangular instead of being squared. So here's a good comparison of the three different outputs that normally we work with in design projects. So whether it's video, print or web, the following considerations you have to keep in mind. First of all, the type of image, whether it's a roster or pixel image or a vector image, which would be resolution independent and can be scaled up and down without losing quality. And that's very useful Fool print because sometimes you need to print in a very large format and you still don't want to lose quality. For color mode, it would be either RGB or CMYK. Resolution would depend on the screen size for video. For print, we would normally want to stick to the 300 dots per inch or DPI resolution. While for web, we normally work with 72 PPI or Pixel per inch resolution. The most commonly used file formats, you can see here for web, print and video, and the key adjustments would be the pixel aspect ratio for video that's unique. For print, it would be whether we want to use or utilize scalable vectors. These file formats like EPS and PDF will support that. And for web, the crucial thing is to think about the compression because we want the images to load faster. So the smaller file size possible is always ideal without obviously compromising on the quality of the images. 6. 1.2.a Key Components of Project Communication: There will be a couple of questions in the exam was about project management, and you have to be familiar with a couple of important terms. So let's just discuss these. First of all, you need to know the three key components of project communication. The first is the project scope, then the due dates, and then the third one is the possible impacts of delays. Already mentioned having a brief for a project. That's essentially what you need for getting the project scope documented and make sure that everyone agrees what are the deliverables that the designer has to produce and what are the expectations from the client? Now, when it comes to this topic, one, I know it will always come up in the exam, and that is the scope creep. So scope creep in graphic design refers to the gradual and often unapproved expansion of a project's goals, deliverables or requirements beyond the original agreement. It usually happens when clients request additional revisions assets or features that weren't part of the initial brief. And it happens more often than not that the client would do these things without adjusting the timeline, the budget, or contract. So obviously, scope creep is something you want to avoid, and that is why documentation and clear communication between all the team members and the client is crucial. It applies to pretty much any type of project management, but it's true also for graphic design. A very typical scenario for scope creep is when an individual, a freelancer working remotely for a client, and they agree on the initial terms, but maybe the brief is a bit vague on some aspects. And then after the designer delivering the work that they were expected to create, the client would request repeated rounds of minor tweaks that will turn into hours or maybe even days or weeks of unpaid work. Unfortunately, this can happen to anyone, even if you're familiar with the term and even if you know how you should manage a project, if you are on your own and if you have a new client that you don't know how to work with or how to manage a project together with, then you can also easily end up suffering from scope creep. The main problem is not just that you will be overworked and you will be frustrated because you will be working on things that were not agreed in the beginning. But it can also strain the relationship between you and your client, mainly because anything that wasn't discussed or agreed on in the beginning will lead to lots of question marks and unclear expectations, and it just makes things confusing. So the way we prevent this to happen is that we always set clear project scope and deliverables in writing. It's highly recommended to always have signed contracts between the parties. And in case the client wants to have a couple of rounds of revisions, that should also be agreed on in the beginning, like limit the amount of revisions that you will allow, and that should be already considered when you set your rate or the price for the project. So if you allow the client two or three rounds of revisions, you should consider how much time that is going to take, and if you get compensated for it, then there won't be any frustration. There's also another term called change order, which again, another signed document that you can have between you and the client whenever they request additional changes that were not agreed on in the beginning or maybe if they change their mind about a crucial part of the project, like the direction they want to change. For these, again, it's good to have documentation you can easily refer back at any time. I Bush comes to shove and the client is not happy with something, these things like the change order will always support and protect you. Now for toDates, there's lots of different tools that you can use like Google Spreadsheets. You can use Notion, Monday, and there's so many other tools out there, especially if you have a team, it's even more important to keep track of everyone's work and what and when they are supposed to deliver. So here's a simple example from our team, the way we manage the publication and advertisement of video tutorials that we publish on YouTube. It has a simple weekly timeline. It also has the tasks broken down and assigned to team members, and there's a clear indication of the status of each of those tasks. For the exam, it's important to also know the term Gang chart, and that is simply just another visual representational method for tracking the tasks and also the deadlines. And you can also be asked a question about what's a critical path analysis or critical path method. This is another visual planning technique which can identify the sequence of dependent tasks that directly impact the project's completion. Both of these methods are useful. Like with the Gen charts, just coming back to them, it's easy to visualize the timelines and how the tasks overlap and again, depend on each other. And there is no right or wrong way to manage the due dates as long as there is some kind of tracking method you are using and you are sharing with everyone involved in the project. Last but not least the third key component of project communication would be the possible impacts of delays. So it's very important to recognize any potential bottlenecks, such as limited resources, like a single graphic designer working on multiple projects and also client availability for approvals. So even if you are the designer and you deliver your work on time, but you obviously need to get feedback on it, and based on that feedback, you have to progress further. If you don't check the client's availability in advance and maybe the client won't be available to look at the work for a week or two, then of course, that is going to delay everything. And you might not feel like it's your fault that the client wasn't available to get feedback. But usually what this leads to is that, again, you will have limited time for the revision that you have to do. And there is another term for this called feedback loop, which means the entire process of you the designer, sending your work for review the client looking at the work, reviewing it, and sending the feedback back to you. And then you, again, the designer looking at that feedback and trying to address it and make the changes. So that would be considered one feedback cycle. And each of these cycles, for instance, could have a separate version name like version one, version two, version three. And it's best to also maybe create separate subfolders within your main project folder where you're storing all the deliverables and files for the project. 7. 1.2.b Basic project management concepts: You also have to be familiar with the five key stages of project management, starting with planning and analysis. Now, we already covered most of the key actions that's required for this stage, like identifying the target audience, finding out the demographics, the preferences and behaviors, also identifying the client's goals, like what is the purpose of the design? What's the main thing that they want to achieve with this design? And the most important documents for this stage would be to get the contract agreement and also the design brief, of course. If you're interested to learn more about the stages of design project, I actually covered this in much more detail in my graphic design theory series. But for the exam, don't worry, you don't have to have an in depth knowledge about this topic. You just have to know the individual stages and what's the order because you might need to put them in the correct order. After planning and analysis, we move on to scheduling. Here, the main objective is to establish a realistic timeline based on the deliverables and the project scope. And we already talked about the different ways we can do the planning, like using a gain chart or timeline. And most importantly, we need to set the due dates or deadlines for all the deliverables. Third stage would be the building part when we begin creating the assets and starting the initial concepts and working our way to fully detailed prototypes or the final designs. And usually the beginning of the building stage would be considered the ideation stage where we come up with concepts, and there's many different techniques that you can use, like mind mapping is a common one where you map out and connect all the important words that you can associate with the brief. And, of course, sketching is something that most designers would utilize, whether it's very simple or more detailed sketches when it comes to web design or user interface design, you would be using wireframes, sketches. And the main purpose of all of these techniques is to save time and to make sure again that you are on the right track so you can check with your client before you invest too much time into producing final artwork that you both agree on what's the best direction moving forward. Here's another nice timeline showing how an idea can start with a simple rough sketch, which then is turned into a more refined sketch with more details than later to include the color palette as well. And only once the composition and visual direction is clear and agreed on, the designers can start working on the final output for which in this case, a three D model was necessary. And from that three D model, once all the lighting and materials are applied, a nice fully rendered image can be created or even a nice animation like this one. After the building stage, we move on to the review and evaluation stage. Here, we first usually would have an internal review to check if we manage to meet the original brief and all the requirements are met. In case a freelancer is working on their own, it's worth asking someone else's opinion before we send the work that we created for the client. So if you have another visual artist or designer that you know, it's always worth to ask for their opinion because they will be looking at things with a fresh eye, and they might notice things that you've overlooked. When you feel confident that everything is ready and you want to show it to the client, you have to make sure that your presentation is going to be top notch. So it's very important to impress the client not just with the work, but also the way you present it, whether that's just a PDF or a PowerPoint. And also, in case you are presenting life, whether it's online or in the same room as the client, it's also important to prepare and rehearse how you are going to talk about the project and what you've created. Once the client is happy and approves the work, then we move on to the last stage, the implementation and publication, where the main objective would be to deliver the final product in the format and medium for which it was designed. 8. 1.3 Copyright, permissions, licensing and how use specific content: During the exam, you will also be asked a few questions about the legal aspects of graphic design work, which mainly focuses on the type of copyright permissions and licensing required to use specific content. Not only, you don't have to be a lawyer to understand these terms. They are fairly simple and straightforward. And there's only a couple of key terms that you need to be familiar with which keeps coming up in the exam. First, let's just clarify what is copyright. It is a legal protection that gives creators ownership over their original work, including designs, illustrations, logos, and layouts. As soon as you create a design, you automatically own the rights to it, and others can't copy, use or modify it without your permission. So why does this matter? Because your work is protected from being stolen or reused without credit or payment? It also means that you as a designer will need permission or a license to use other people's work. So, for instance, if you want to include a photo, use a font or an icon or a template for a project that you're working on, you always have to make sure that you have the rights or the permission to use them. So in a nutshell, if you made it, you own it. If someone else made it, you need permission. Now when it comes to generative AI, right now, there is no clear protection for the copyrighted work that is shared online because for these generative AI models to work, they have to scrape the Internet and devour anything that they can find. So we are talking about billions of images. And most of the big companies like Mid Journey or Open AI, created Chet GPT, will either ignore or try to hide the fact that they included millions of copyrighted work in their training data. The reason why they can get away with this or still continue to do this is because it is very hard to trace back the original copyrighted work because they are not sharing or being transparent about what was used in the training data. Don't worry in the exam. They won't ask you questions about generative AI. It's just something that I am quite passionate about, and it's a gray area really when it comes to how copyright is handled. Let's move on and talk about the next important term public domain. So this refers to creative materials not protected by intellectual property laws, such as copyright, trademark or patent. And in this case, the public owns the work, not an individual author or artist. And compared to copyrighted work, anyone can use a public domain work without obtaining permission. Derivative work would be considered something that was altered or was based on some other original work. So that means that you've taken an existing piece like a logo, artwork, photo, or layout, and you modified it in some way, like change the colors. You addit some elements, or you combine it with lots of other elements to create something new. But here's the catch. Even if you change something, the original creator still owns the copyright. What that means is that you need permission to legally use or share the new version unless that original work is already in public domain, or you own a license that allows you modifications. So again, to put it simply, changing a design doesn't make it yours. If it's based on someone else's work, it is still protected. Now, fair use, another important term to be familiar with, is a legal rule that allows limited use of copyrighted material without permission. But only in specific situations like for education, commentary, news reporting or parody. But fair use is not a free pass to any image or design just because you are not making money from it. And courts would usually look at four different things to decide if something is fair use or not. They would look at the purpose, so what it is intended for, the nature, so is the original work factual or creative, the amount or how much of the original work is being used? And most importantly, the effect, whether you work will affect the original creator in any way, but most importantly negatively, like, financial so fair use is limited. It's case by case, and it's also not guaranteed. So the best thing to do to avoid any complications is to get permission or a license to use someone else's work. Now, I mentioned licensing a couple of times. This is another term you should be familiar with. So it is a way you can legally use copyrighted material by paying a fee established by the copyright holder or stock image provider, for instance, you can use the copyrighted material or stock image for a specific time and in a certain way as outlined in the terms of conditions. Might also be asked about creative commons or CC for short, which is a system that lets creators share their work with the public while keeping some rights. So instead of saying all rights reserved, a designer can use a Creative Commons license to say, you can use this, but here's how. So this is a way to make sharing easier, but you still need to follow the rules of each license. Similarly to licensing, you might also need to get signed release forms if you want to use a person's likeness or a landmark in your composition. You will also need a release form if you want to include a brand name in your project, especially if that brand is not owned by the client that you are working for. And there's two types of specific releases that usually they ask about in the exam. One is the model release, which you need if a person is recognizable in your work and the location release, which is required for landmarks or private properties like Disneyland. 9. 1.4.a File formats: It's also important to know the differences between the file formats that we normally would use in a print design project. Now, it might be a bit tricky to categorize the file formats, but essentially they would be falling into three main groups. First is the working or project files that allows you to go back and make changes to a design. So for Photoshop, it would be the PSD or Photoshop document. For Illustrator, it would be AI, and for in design, it would be a DI and D D file format or in design document. Next category are the assets that you would use in a design project. And these would be predominantly image file formats, including both pixel or roster and vector images. But there can be also text files or Excel files in case of a catalog, for example. And last but not least, the final category would be the print ready files. And most of the time, these would be PDFs or EPS files. Now, I'm not going to spend too much time comparing these to each other because you can just use this chart from the Milanotbard for that. So instead, I'm just going to highlight a few important things or tips that you should keep in mind. When it comes to Image five formats, you have to be aware of compression and the loss in quality. So that is especially important when you work with JPEG images. And it is something that you can best understand when you're using the Export as feature in Photoshop. So in this case, we can see a detail from a design on the left and the right side. And at the moment, I am using the same settings, but I'm just going to switch to JPEG for both of these, and I'm going to change the quality. So here on the right size, I'm going to set it to very poor, while on the left side, I'll make sure it is set to the highest quality option, which is great. If I zoom even closer, you will be able to see the artifacts even better. So I'm sure you can spot all of these messy pixels here on the right side. So that is due to the JPEG compression, and this is what we would call a compression artifact. Advantage of using lower quality JPEGs is that their file size will be lower. So while this one here on the left side is around 350 kilobytes, the one on the right with the lowest quality setting is only around 50 kilobytes, so considerably smaller. Most image file formats, including JPEG, also supports embedding color profiles, and this is something that you should always make sure to include for a correctly color managed workflow. And color management is actually our next topic that we will be covering in more detail. Besides JPEG, another very commonly used image file format would be PNG, which has the advantage compared to JPEG that it can also hold transparency detail. So this is something that you can again disable or keep it turned on here on the top right corner. And the bit depth of PNG files by default is 24 bits. But you can always reduce the file size if you choose the eight bit version PNG. Bit depth is a way of measuring the amount of colors that you can use in a five format. So eight bit, for instance, means two on the power of eight, which is 256 colors. Compared to that, the other format, 24 bit would actually mean eight bit for each of the color channels RG and B, and that also applies to JPEG images. But there is also another five format, GIF which can also include animation. But the main limitation of this five format is that it cannot go beyond eight bit depth. So the maximum amount of colors is 256. To better see what that means, instead of using the Export as command, I'm going to choose Export, save for web, where for the GIF file format, we also get the color table. And here, we can actually reduce the amount of colors. And if I go down maybe to four colors, in case of this design, it wouldn't make much difference because it uses already a very limited color palette. But by using less colors in a GIF file, of course, you will have a smaller file size. And file size in general, doesn't make much difference in print projects. It's more important for web and mobile design. In case you are wondering, where can you find the other type of file formats? You will find these under File Save as in most of the design applications. And in the latest version of Photoshop, for instance, it will only show you a very limited list at first, and you can only see the additional Five formats if you choose to save a copy option. Once you do this, you will see a much larger list. And here you can actually find all the formats that you would normally be able to save from the export or save for web features, but accompanied by a lot of additional specialized file formats, which most of the time you won't require in your work. Another common way we can categorize image file formats is whether they are roster or vector based. So JPECPNG and Gift files are all roster based, while the most common vector file formats would be EPS and SVG. Out of these two, EPS is mainly used in print, while SVG is a vector file format that is designed to be used on the web, and it's an abbreviation for scalable vector graphics. Now, there's one other important file format that is worth mentioning. And even though as a graphic designer, you most of the time won't be required to work with this, but it's still good to be aware of, and it is the camera raw format. Now, this is something that most photographers will be familiar with. And the name Row comes from the fact that this is the unprocessed information that the camera records. And this simple comparison shows really well how it can be different or better than a JPEG image. So if you have your camera set to record JPEGs, that means that the camera will automatically compress and process the information and turn it into a flat image. Compared to that, a afile will record and keep all these layers of raw data and will allow you to access all of those layers later on when you are developing the images. And this is why a camera file will always be much larger in size compared to a JPEG, but it's going to give you a lot more freedom when it comes to editing images. The biggest difference you will notice in the tonal range, which is the range between the darkest and lightest details in an image. In case of a raw file, you would have a much wider tonal range, allowing more details to be captured in the brightest areas and also in the darkest areas of the image. In case of a JPEC file, these brightest or darkest details will be completely washed out or burnt out, so they will become completely white or completely black, which means that there won't be any useful color information recorded. So when you are trying to make adjustments, you are going to start introducing a lot more noise into your images compared to developing a raw photograph. And in case you are wondering, the best way to display the tonal range of an image is by using a histogram, which lists the number of pixels in each tonal region from the darkest blacks to the brightest whites, and reading a histogram is actually very easy. When you look at these three examples at the bottom, you can see an under exposed image would have most of the values closer to the left, while an overexposed image would have most of the details in the histogram on the right side. If you see a peak on the far right edge, that means you will have clipping in the brightest details. And the same can happen with the darkest details. Once again, if you see a peak there, that's also not a good thing. And in general, the easiest type of images to work with and that will provide the most information are these neutral exposures where you have most of the details in the mid tones range. And just so you can see and appreciate the difference that you can achieve by developing a raw photo. Here is the original one, and here is the refined and developed version. And you can really see the amount of details we managed to recover in both the darker and brighter areas. Once again, that's before, and this is after. 10. 1.4.a Resolution: Every print designer has to be familiar with image resolution because this is one of the most important limiting factors when it comes to deciding the size and the quality of a print. And essentially what it means is that how much detail an image can hold. When we refer to higher resolution images, it means that there is more detail in them compared to low resolution images. And it's important to differentiate already in the beginning when it comes to digital images, we divide them into two main categories pixel or roster images, and photographs would also fall in this category and vector graphics, which most of the time would be illustration or type. Now, generally, in graphic design projects, you would be using a combination of pixel images and vector graphics. But the weakest link in terms of resolution and print quality will always be Pixel roster or sometimes also referred to as bitmap images. Better understand the difference between pixels and rosters, here is a very close up look of a photograph showing an eye and magnifying a roster image this much will reveal the actual building blocks, the pixels or rosters, which looking this closely, makes it look like it's a mosaic. But zooming way back, we will start to see this as a continuous image without any pixelation. Good thing about pixels, especially when you have a lot of them, is that you can capture really complex visual information, and it also allows a lot of subtlety that you might not be able to recreate with vectors. Now, the biggest advantage of vectors is that they are resolution independent, meaning that they can be any size you want them to be without losing any quality. To demonstrate this to you, here we are in Illustrator with a simple illustration and no matter how much I zoom into it, we will never see pixelation. So these curves that are used as the building blocks in a vector graphic compared to a pixel image are all made up small anchor points. Everything is mathematically described instead of relying on that roster that we've seen earlier or the columns and rows of pixels. If I move one of these anchor points around, all that has to be registered or recorded is the actual new location of this anchor point. That's simply just these two coordinates that we can see here. The computer will very easily be able to connect two anchor points with a linear straight line, but it can also connect anchor points like these two with a curve, and to be able to describe the curve itself, all that is necessary is this handle that I'm dragging around, and it's relative distance from the original anchor point. This method of visualizing vector graphics and shapes in general is what we refer to as Bezier curves. It's named after the mathematician who invented this method. Another important advantage of vector graphics, apart from them being resolution independent, is that their file size is also smaller compared to roster images. But what's clearly a downside with them is that it's very hard to make things look photorealistic, and that is why we're still relying on both pixels and vectors in our work. So as you can see, they both have their strengths and weaknesses and their use in a graphic design project. There's a couple of ways that you can measure resolution, and you may have heard of some of these units like DPI, as we can see it in this example, 300 DPI would be like a standard that we would be considering a high resolution image or a high resolution print. And DPI actually stands for dots per inch, which refers to the number of dots of ink on the printed image. But when it comes to the design phase, so even before we end up creating something that's ready for print, we would normally measure roster of pixel images in PPI or pixel per inch. And what's great about this comparison is how it shows that resolution on its own doesn't really matter. What matters is the amount of pixels in combination with resolution. So when you have a lot of pixel information recorded in your digital image, you will be able to print and keep high resolution image, even in a large format like a zero. We can see the size of this in millimeters here. So this is a fairly large sized poster. Compared to that, when you have less pixels to work with, you can still have a high quality print, but you will only be able to use a much smaller print size. So pixel print, again, just simply means how much of those pixels of the image will be printed on an inch distance. And the higher the resolution, the more compressed those pixels will get on the printed image, which will result in a higher quality print. 11. 1.4.a Image Size: The best way to understand the relationship between the amount of pixels, the resolution and the print size is to use the image size feature within Photoshop. So in this case, we can see that this is the original amount of pixels that we are working with. So around 3,000 pixels width and 4,000 pixels height, which is roughly around 12 million pixels or megapixels. I don't want to confuse you, but in case you want to be specific, a megapixel is actually slightly more than 1 million pixels. It is actually two on the power of 20 pixels, which is 1 million, 48,576 pixels. But to keep things simple, one megapixel you can think of as 1 million pixels. I took this photo with an iPhone, which has 12 megapixels roughly, and that's why we get this image size. Notice how the pixel dimensions automatically paired with the resolution, which is by default, set to 300 PPI or pixel per inch. But what if I change? And to be able to see the print size, all I have to do is to switch the pixels to either inches or one of these other measurement units. But let's just go with inches first. So you can see that it can be printed in the high resolution standard 300 PPI with a size of roughly ten by 13 ". And that, in case you are wondering is between an A four and an A three paper size. So even though it's a 12 megapixel image, it still won't give us a huge size when it comes to printing it with 300 PPI. But what's also very important to understand, and this is actually very rarely discussed is that the quality requirement of a print also depends on the viewing distance. So strictly speaking, 300 PPI or DPI is something that you require when you are producing a print that is going to be held by people like brochures, magazines, books, business cards, so on and so forth. But compared to that, a large banner where people will be just walking by or maybe even seeing it from much further away. When they are displayed on top of a building or by the side of a motorway, the required printing resolution will be much, much lower than 300 PPI. And here is a great comparison where we can see the viewing distance on the left. And the required resolution for it on the right. And you can see that even when a print is displayed 1 meter away from the viewer, it already can drop down to 180 PPI, which is almost half of the original requirement. But as you are getting further away from the viewer, like five meter away, that already results in the requirement going down all the way to 35 PPI, which is around ten times lower than what we started. I don't think you would ever have to design something that will be displayed 200 meters away from people, apart from if you are doing exhibition design, and it's a huge exhibition hall. But in those cases, the resolution could even be all the way down to one PPI. Now, of course, that is a fairly extreme scenario. But don't forget that the minimum required resolution always depends on the viewing distance. And in case you ever need it, there is also a formula to calculate the minimum resolution based on the viewing distance. To make sure that the relationship between print size and resolution makes sense. Coming back to our previous example in Photoshop, when I turn off resampling, meaning that we are not planning to change the size of the image, so we are not introducing new pixels at all. I I now start lowering the resolution, at the same time, as you can see, the print size is increasing. So what this means is that we are just distributing the original pixel information, and it will be printed less densely on the paper. And, for instance, if I go down to 150 PPI resolution, that will give us exactly twice the size of a print compared to when we were about to print this with 300 PPI. Of course, similarly, if we were to go above 300 PPI, which most of the time wouldn't be necessary. But just for the sake of argument, if I go higher and we check, again, the size either in centimeters or inches, of course, it's going to keep dropping because once again, all we are doing is condensing all that original pixel dimensions into a smaller space. Besides PPI and DPI, you may have also heard of SPI and LPI, out of which SPI mainly refers to scanners and how high resolution they can scan images. And it stands for the samples taken in one linear inch, while LPI or lines per inch is used mainly in commercial printing, which describe the distance between the printed lines of dots. To keep things simple, as a graphic designer, you mainly have to worry about PPI or pixel per inch, because that's something that you will be working with in most of the design applications. 12. 1.4.a Aliasing: Now another term which you most likely will come across is aliasing, which is most noticeable on type when the resolution is too low. We will start to see these hard edges on the curved details on type, which is also referred to as stair stepping. And the method of antialiasing is what can help us to improve this by averaging the colors on the edges and smoothing them out. Here is another close up look which shows this stair stepping perfectly. It even looks like a stair in this case, and the result of anti aliasing and how it can smooth it out even at this close up view. When you are working with type in Photoshop, for instance, you will see that antialiasing is automatically applied. But of course, it's something that you can take off. If I select this text here and change the type of anti aliasing from the default sharp to no we can see the result immediately, and even from a distance, this will be noticeable. But if I zoom a little bit closer, we can probably see it even better. So this is without and with anti aliasing, without and with. You probably notice that there is actually no aliasing going on on the horizontal line. And in some cases, it would also not show on the vertical lines. And that is because these details can perfectly align themselves to the pixel grid. So for them, there is no need for anti aliasing. And I can just show you this. If I zoom closer, eventually, we will start to see the pixel grid, and we can tell that this sharp horizontal edge doesn't need any smoothing. It already looks perfect the way it is. Last but not least, I just want to mention that there is a very interesting new area in digital imaging where artificial intelligence is used or utilized to increase the resolution of raster images. And Photoshop has its own neural filter called Super Zoom, which is powered by the Adobe Sensei Artificial Intelligence. And with this, you can increase the size of an image, I think, up to nine times as large as it is originally. At the same time, you can enhance image details, remove JPEG artifacts, introduce noise reduction and shopening and even enhance specifically phase details. And to give you an example, even a four times increase in size would mean this much difference between the original image and the one that went through the neuro filter. And to see the details, I'm just going to zoom a little bit closer. So around 100% view or actual pixel size view would show the original image quality. And if we jump to the resize version with the same Zoom ratio, this is what we will see. This technology essentially is guessing the information that is missing in the original and tries to make up new pixels. Out of all the AI tools used for resizing images, the most effective one, in my opinion, is Let's enhance, for which the link you can find on the board. And here you can see a comparison of the original image on the left, the result of neuro filter, we've seen in Photoshop in the middle, and the result of the Let's enhance AI on the right. You can see how much better the clarity is on that version and how much details were recovered or added to areas like the eyes and the lips. I predict that these type of technologies in a couple of years will make roster images also feel resolution independent like vector graphics. But until then, keep checking the resolution of every image that you're using in your graphic design project. 13. 1.4.b Color spaces: The ultimate goal of color management is to match the colors that you can see on your screen to the colors on the final printed product. In an ideal color management workflow, you would have all the devices that take part in the design and printing process to speak the same language, which will result in predictable and accurate color results. One of the most important components of a color managed workflow is the use of ICC color profile. We can see, everything starts off with the designer having a color profile created for the monitor that they are using. And later on, we will talk about the calibration of the monitor as well because that's also important. But then for the rest of the process, there is always going to be a color profile attached to the designer's files. So no matter where they show up, the original color information should be carried along avoiding any unwanted transitions and shifts in the colors. A color profile is essentially the description of the color space, gameut and behavior of a calibrated device. Printers will have both their offset and digital presses calibrated, and they will be able to supply you the graphic designer with their ICC color profile. ICC actually stands for International color consortium. It was established in 1993, and it's the internationally accepted cross platform architecture and system for color management. The color topic, we already talked about the differences between RGB and CMYK color modes and mentioned that the main difference between the two is how the colors are combined. So while in CMIK that we use for print, we are working in a subtractive color model, which means black is the most intensive color. In case of RGB or on screen, we are using the additive model where white is the most intense color. So with CMYK, when you're combining colors, they are getting darker. It's the opposite with RGB. As you are combining the colors, they are getting brighter. But the main reason why you will see a shift in the colors from RGB to CN YK is not because they describe colors in a different way. It's because they have a different color gameut. So each color space, and in this case, we can see four of them here on the top right, will have their own color gameut which is essentially the subset of colors that can be represented by that color space. As you can see, SRGB, represented with the green triangle has the smallest area covered, which means that it offers the smallest color gamut. Compared to it, the standard CNK color space is slightly larger, and it is this polygon that we can see here with a pink outline. So even though these two colour gamets overlap, there is still quite a lot of difference between them, especially as you are getting into these more vivid and saturated colors. These cannot be translated into CNK correctly. But SRGB color space is actually more designed for b. While Adobe RGB, which is a much wider color gamet is the standard that we would use for print design. You can see it here in the diagram that it is a much larger triangle than SRGB, meaning it covers a lot more colors. And the largest color gamet in this chart is the P photo RGB, which is mainly used in professional photography workflows. You may have noticed that when you're using the color picker in Photoshop, sometimes when you select a color, you get a warning here on the right. Now, this actually means out of gamut for printing. We can see that the color that I selected is described in many different ways, including RGB and C and K, and also LAB, which we will discuss shortly. But in order to see the closest color to this that can actually be printed with the four colors, C and K, we can just click on this little war the color picker immediately jumps to the actual color that was described with the CNK values. So once again, if I click somewhere up here, we can see that these are the values, 430 hundred zero. And if I click on the warning icon, even though the color sample shifted quite a lot, the CNK values didn't change. That is because essentially all of these very vibrant colors cannot be represented with ink, and that, of course, not only applies to the green hues, you would have the same issue with most of the other hues. So for example, if I come up somewhere, let's say, here, again, moving to the top right corner where we have the most intense colors, I can click on the warning, and once again, we will have a huge shift, which shows the nearest possible color that can be achieved in printing. Once again, from here, all the way down there. Unfortunately, there is no magic formula or feature that will save you from dealing with this difference between RGB and CMYK. But by following a color managed workflow, you can be best equipped and work and see the right colors throughout the whole process that eventually will be possible to be printed. 14. 1.4.c.1 Key terms related to multi-page layouts - Inks and Bleed: Print design is a subset of the broader field of graphic design, and the easiest way to explain how it differs from other types of graphic design areas is that in general or in most cases with print design, you would get a tangible product at the end of a project, whether it's a book, a business card, or even a cap with a print on it. Design projects vary in size and complexity. You might be designing a tiny sticker, but you can also work on the full branding of an airline and all the designs that will eventually end up on actual airplanes. Now, of course, there are a lot of overlap between digital or web design and graphic design because you might be working on projects for clients where you are required to do a bit of both. But whether you are planning to be specialize in print design or whether this is just something that you also want to have in your skills there are a lot of aspects and important things to know how you can effectively prepare your work for print. And that is exactly what we will be covering in this topic. So let's start with the most essential one. What does four color print mean? Well, it means using cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink, and black is referred to as the key color that we are using K in the abbreviation. And CMYK is also referred to as a color mode, similarly to the RGB or red, green, blue that most screen devices use. And color management is a topic that we will be going into in much more detail later that essentially means is the process in which you can guarantee that the colors that you are seeing on your screen will end up looking as close as possible in the final printed product. As a print designer, it is crucial to be aware of the limitations of this color mode and ways that you can achieve richer colors whenever it's necessary. Again, this is something that we will go into much more detail later on. There is one other term that's worth remembering, and it is color separation, which is the process of turning a full color digital photograph or image and separating it into the four color components that we already talked about. So in this case, we can see the actual image here at the bottom. And once this color separation happens, it will allow the final print to be built up from these components. And again, we will be discussing all the different types of printing processes in more detail. But in this particular case, we are looking at an offset print in detail view where we can see the roster or the little dots of these four different colors which are using four different plates, printed on top of each other on paper to make it look similar to the original color image that we've seen on our screen. Also another term that printers would often refer to, and it's part of the pre press process. It's RIP or RIP, which stands for roster image processor, and it is essentially the process where all the digital images, including vector graphics, converted into the final format that the actual printing machines will be able to work with. In case you are wondering, the roster in RIP is coming from the rosterization process, where all the vector details including type is turned into rosters, which are essentially these little dots that we will see in the final print. The quality of the print has a lot to do with the original resolution and the resolution used during the printing process. But this is again, something that we have to discuss in more detail in the next video. Since we already established that in print design, we are working towards getting a tangible product in the end. Similarly to how important it is to get the colors right, it is also important to get a professional looking print. And one of the obvious signs of a low quality or cheap print project is when you don't even have bleed on a broochure or a poster. So what does a correct bleed used in a graphic design project essentially, what it means is that the product in the end won't have any visible white edges because the printed image completely covers the piece of paper. And the way you can achieve this is by using a slightly larger piece of paper or sheet and print a slightly larger format than what you want to end up as the final product. And then once the print is ready, you are trimming or cutting off that excess part to achieve the actual size that was needed. And the reason why it is called bleed is because in this case, the image is bleeding off the edge of the paper. Here's another quick example where we have a business card already set up with the bleed. We can see that the logo doesn't need any bleed, while this shape at the bottom, to assure that it's going to be printed all the way to the edges is already increased in size slightly. And once those additional details are trimmed, we will get the final trimmed business card, which will guarantee to have no white gaps around here and it will make sure that the red color is bleeding off the edges of the paper. I'm sorry, if things starts to sound a little bit more surgical, having red bleed and cutting in one sentence. And to better understand how to set up bleed in your documents and how it relates to all the other areas, here's a simple explanation where we can see that the final print size, which we also refer to as trim size is usually indicated with a black outline. So that is going to be the edge of the final product after the bleed gets cut off. Immediately around the trim, we have the bleed usually represented with this red rectangle. The most common size that we would use for this area is 3 millimeters on all edges of one eighth of an inch. However, in some parts of the world, I think in Australia, it would normally be 5 millimeters. But the size of the bleed is always best to check with your printer, and it is going to be either you or the printer who is going to include the crop marks, which will indicate where the bleed edge is going to be trimmed. Important that these crop marks should never overlap the actual trim area, otherwise, then they will end up showing in the final print. So it is perfectly fine for them to overlap the bleed edge because that is just an excess print. We don't actually need it in the end. And they normally also overlap another area which is just outside of the bleed, which is called slug. And this can be either on one edge or on all the edges, again, outside the bleed. And usually this is indicated with a blue line. Is an area where you can add additional printing information, including registration marks, color consistency charts, and additional instructions for the printer when necessary. And last but not least, there's another area worth talking about, and that is the margins, which is represented usually with purple line inside of your trim. And that is, of course, a non printing detail. So it is an invisible guide that helps you to align the content and assure a minimum distance from the edge of the page on all sides and sometimes the margins can be different on each of the sides, and they are mainly important when it comes to text. So you wouldn't want to end up having text too close to the edges of the page. And you can think of both margins and bleed as a safety precaution in order to compensate for the occasional inaccuracies that you will get in a final print. It can easily happen that the trim is slightly shifted, but as long as there was bleed and also a generous amount of margin, you can be certain that none of the text will be chopped off, and you will also have no wide borders around the edges. Now, jumping into in design, I just wanted to show you these couple of terms in action, and also we will look at a couple of other definitions here. So first of all, when I zoom closer to one of the corner points, we can see that black edge, which as you remember, is the trim edge, and then the red edge is the bleed. If I press W on my keyboard, I can quickly preview how the final product is going to look like without that excess bleed. And we can also see the margins, so the purple lines, which is used to align the text, especially visible when we have justified text or right align text. In terms of the importance of the bleed, we can see a better example with an actual image. As you can see, this image is not aligned to the trim edge but moved slightly beyond it. And that's what guarantees that in the final print, we will have the colors bleeding of the edge from this image. And most of the time, it won't be an issue and you can easily sacrifice some details from the edges of an image. You can see, for instance, here at the bottom in this layout, I actually have even more detail for the image than 3 millimeters. So it extends even beyond the bleed edge. But that doesn't really make any difference. However, if you want in in design, you can obviously always align the image frame to fit perfectly to the bleed edge. But bleed is not only used for images or background colors. It can also be used for simple design elements like this line here at the bottom, which is used in combination with the page number. So once again, we can see the final print will look like this. But to make sure that this white line shows up properly in print, it again, has to be also included in the bleed section. In case you are wondering in design, whenever you start a new document, you will always be able to set up all of these settings, including the margins, the bleed, and the slug details here on the right side. And as long as you have this preview option on here at the bottom, you will also be able to see these updating live. So when I start increasing the bleed, for instance, we can immediately see it showing up here in the background. And in case you already started the document and you forgot to set up the bleed, you can always go to the file menu and then from document setup, you will be able to find the same option here. 15. 1.4.c.2 Key terms related to multi-page layouts - Magazines (Part 1): First and foremost, you have to always think about the full spread when you are designing something for a magazine. So instead of paying attention to individual pages, you always consider the full spread. So when a reader opens up the magazine, they will look at both pages roughly at the same time, so their eye scans across very quickly. And even if the spread has an article 0N one side and an advert on the other side, there should still be some form of harmony or consistency between them. Now, of course, when it comes to an actual article, the first spread of the article is the invitation for the reader to start reading that, and you have to really make a good job in combining those two parts of the spread. So there's three main factors with which you can grab someone's attention for your spread. The first one is the layout or the composition of the spread. The second is the image that you use or the main image, and then the third one is the headline. These three are obviously very related to each other. So your composition relies on a good placement of the image and the headline or a good combination of them. But out of all the textual elements, the headline is definitely the most crucial one on your spread. It is quite common for headlines to use display type, which is not just a single font, but it's usually a custom designed font or hand lettering that really suits the theme of the article. The placement of the headline is usually on the top left side, but it can also be on the right, in some cases, it can also be at the bottom or on the far left or far right. Reason why it's good to place it on the left side is because naturally we are starting to scan the spread from left to right and starting from the top left through the bottom right. That obviously can be different when you have your magazine in Arabic. You would probably have it mirrored and have things starting from the right. Headlines are usually really big. So in terms of the hierarchy within the composition, they should be really the dominant element, definitely larger and more robust compared to the other textual elements within the spread. In some cases, the headline itself can be using different formatting. Like here, the first word, yeah, is quite different, even though it's using the same font family to the rest of the headline, but this still forms a single unit when it's put together. When you have a short text above a headline, we normally refer to that as the kicker. So again, here, this would be the kicker. While below it, this is the headline. And in this example, you can see that a font pairing can also work for a headline. So two very contrasting different fonts combined together still forms a good solid unit that can work as the headline. Now, usually just below the headline. So in this case, this section here is what we call the intro stand first or D. This is usually covering in a nutshell what you are going to read about within the article, so it really entices you to start reading, but it also acts as a bridge between the headline and the body copy. So here's another example of the kicker the headline and below it, the intro stand first or deck. Now, remember when I said the two sides of your spread should be considered as one unit. Even though here we have a very distinct left and right side, there's still a lot of repetition that helps to unite them together, and unity in design is very important. So here we obviously see the color is used on the left and the right side. Then the same font is repeated again. And also, in general, the shapes here on the left side are quite blocky and squared, which again is repeated here on the right side. Usually there's one element that comes straight after or attached to the intro. That's what we call the Byline. It's just simply buy and then the author's name. Now, these elements that we already covered are very common, but that's not to say that sometimes you might have to leave one of them out. Like, in this design, I would say that this is the kicker this is the headline. There's our byline, but there is no actual intro. We can consider this section here, the intro, but it feels more like part of the body copy. And since we are talking about body copy, that is the largest textual element within your article. And here, the readability is crucial. So you have to pay attention to the line length to make sure it's comfortable to read the text. So two long lines or two short ones are not ideal. You probably want to set it to around 45 to 80 characters in each line, and that's already with the spaces included. Now, when there is no intro, the first paragraph can be considered the lead. And notice how that is emphasized with the bold formatting. So we wanted flying cars that really leads you into reading the rest of the copy. Now another term that you might hear mentioned when it comes to the first paragraph or even the lead of an article is not graph or not graph, which is an editorial slang for a sentence that summarizes the rest of the article without giving out too much detail. So it's almost like the thesis of what you are going to read about. And some may argue that the lead and then graph is exactly the same thing. Some people would say it's different. But generally, within your first paragraph in the body copy, you can include something that's, again, a little bit more elevated than the rest of the body copy. Another important thing that you need to keep in mind when you work with body copy is that you should have a standardized baseline throughout the whole spread, which means that the lines, even if they are in different columns, should match the position, so they should be aligned to each other. So here is another example, even though we have a gap here in this first column. So there's the gap between the paragraphs. We still have the alignment. Between the lines on the left side and on the right side. So that alignment is thanks to the baseline grid. This is a feature in in design that you can turn on within an individual text frame or even for the whole document. Now the next textual element in terms of hierarchy, would be the subhead, which is usually within the body copy columns or frames. And these help to break up large chunks or blocks of text. So here, exercise, for example, die health tests. These would be considered subheads, but there can be many levels of subheads. So even your 20s could be one if the article then goes on and shows your 30s and 40s, but there can even be third and fourth level subheads. Like this, again, serves the same purpose, dividing or breaking up large chunk of text, but again, creating smaller divisions within already a unit that was created by the second level subhead. Structure and hierarchy is extremely important with magazine design because there's so many elements, so much information. You really need to guide your reader through the spread to make sure that they can find the relevant information because believe me, most readers are not reading in the order that you want them to read. They jump around. But by having these subheads, for example, you really give them entry points into different areas where they can go. And they might actually read eventually the whole article, but maybe not in the order that it was set up to be read. Another very important distinct textual element within a spread is the pull coat, which we can see two examples of in this spread. These are usually picked from the body copy and highlighted as essential reads from the story and something that really is exciting and interesting. Once again, these are to draw attention to the article. Sometimes you might flick through the magazine and you see a pull coat that pulls you in to the article. They don't always have to be quotes, so it doesn't have to be that someone sad. It can be just a summary or like an interesting so it's really up to you as a designer to decide what should be highlighted in pull coats. Here is another very elegant pull coat placed within the center of the page. And here is another very eye catching, strong and bold pull coat within the spread. And of course, pull code doesn't always have to break up the structure of the body copy. They can actually be independent, so they can be on the side like here, a very sophisticated, subtle way of placing the pull coat on the bottom left. Another important part for giving structure to the magazine within a spread would be the header and Puta. In the header, you would normally place something about the article, whether it's a recurring part of the magazine, and that indicates that this current article falls in that category, or it can be something more specific like let's say the celebrity's name, who is covered within that article. This is especially useful if you have multiple spreads, and you want to make sure the reader knows that they are still reading about the same thing. Footer normally holds a little bit more information. One of the crucial elements is the folio or page number, which normally you would want to place on both sides. But if you only place it on one side, it's better to use the right side within the spread. The footer can hold additional information like the URL website, or it can also be the date. And there can even be notes and references placed here. In some instances, being playful with certain elements of your design can set the tone of the article 0R even the whole magazine. Short list is a really cool magazine here in the UK, and you can see how witty they are with their URL. So in this case, the footer is almost completely covered up. There's no page number visible, and also the URL icon read. However, this is an element that repeats on the other spreads, and it doesn't always have to be fully visible. But once again, that is about breaking the rules when you know the rules. Another term that you might sometimes hear is running head or running feet. Once again, this is an element that carries on throughout a couple of pages to indicate a chapter or section within the magazine. So here, in this case, that I could consider a running head because as we go along and go to the other page, we again have the same design there. 16. 1.4.c.3 Key terms related to multi-page layouts - Magazines (Part 2): Whenever you place in images, there's two important things that you need to remember. First of all, is to have a caption for them and to credit the artist, whether it's a photographer or an illustrator. In some cases, you would see captions individually for each image. But the common practice would be also to combine them together and just simply refer to images as left, right, bottom. So in this text, we have everything written in one block of text. To simplify the credits in case all the pictures were taken for an article by the same photographer, you can also include the name at the beginning within the byline section. So here, for example, we have words, which is the article written by a person, but then immediately after that, there's the credit for the photographer. It is quite common that other contributors are also named in the Byline section. So here, for instance, beside the author, we have the photographer again, but also the stylist on the right side. Now, there's many different ways of adding captions. They can be boxes overlapping an image, or they can be written over the images. And in these cases, usually, it should be at the bottom, where it's written not on the top, because it can get confusing if you move captions around, it's again good to have a system for them. This is, again, a rule that you can break if it makes sense. Like in this example, we have the text on the top left of that image, but that is mainly because the image on the far right corner of the spread where there's nothing else on top of it. So it is obvious that this caption refers to this image. And the reason why this text was placed there because that was the best negative space within the image. So it would have been hard to read it anywhere else. That is just another good example of understanding the rules. Doesn't mean that you always have to follow all of them. It's about being flexible and adapt the rules to the actual situation that you have in a spread. If there was another image on top of this, I would probably avoid adding the caption here on the top left corner. There's another term quite important to learn in print design. It's the bleed, which is usually important when you place images on your spread. Whether they are smaller images or they are covering the whole spread, you would most likely want them to go all the way to the edge. So like this image here goes all the way to the edge on the top, or this image goes all the way edge on the right. And this is where you need to make sure that you have bleed. Now, the bleed is usually additionally 3 millimeters outside of the final print size, which then gets trimmed. And whenever you set up the images in in design, you just have to make sure that the actual boundary or the edge of the image goes all the way to the edge of the bleed. So that 3 millimeters will be sacrificed to make sure that you get a perfectly printed edge. And, of course, bleed is not just for the images, it's also for the rest of the spread. Like, in this case, we have a very subtle blue color in the background, which means that you need bleed throughout the whole spread. Now there's a big variety of images that you can use, whether they are illustrations, infographics or photography, and it can even be a combination of these. However, once you pick a certain style, let's say, a style of illustration, like in this case, that should carry along in the whole article. So it is common if there is an illustrator commission to work on an article, they would be covering all of the graphical elements necessary. Again, this is about to assure the repetition and unity within your design, which definitely is one of the most important things to make it look professional. Now, for images that run across a spread, so it covers both sides, we normally call them double truck or run around. And here is a good example for or here is another one, which you can see doesn't necessarily mean that it's an image in the background, and then you put text on top of it. There can be clever ways of integrating your type behind and in front and create a bit more perspective or depth within your spread. And that's, again, a very important goal for you as a designer, because if you can make a two dimensional plane, which is the magazine spread into something that feels more three dimensional, your readers will be more drawn into entering that space that you create. And there's one more term about images worth mentioning, and there is photo package, which usually referred to a cluster of images combined whether into a column or even to a single row, or even when they are overlapped and stack on top of each other like here. When we refer to the save zone within the design, we normally refer to everything within the margins. And the margins are those invisible outside edges that make sure that text doesn't get too close to the edge. Once again, there can be exceptions like the running head in this case and the footer at the bottom with the folios. But apart from the outside margins, you have to also pay attention to the inner margins, which we normally refer to as the creep, and this is where you would have the binding or the spine of the magazine. So apart from keeping things away from the edges, it's probably even more important not to place anything important in the central section of the spread, and that applies to both the textual elements and also the imagery. So notice how here cleverly, the four characters within the illustration are placed on the left and the right side, but no one is in the center. This is why planning is so important, and the editor should always communicate with the illustrator who is commissioned to work on the same article. Now, of course, you cannot always avoid to have no important detail around the spine or creep. So in this case, this double track would have some details that falls into that spine section. But still, you can see that the designer paid attention not to have the text on the creep. It's both here on the left and the right side. So it's still going to be legible once the final print comes out. With this example, again, because the image covers up the whole spread, it's impossible to avoid details ending up near the spine or within the creep. However, all the textual elements are still safe and far away from the creep. Now, you might recall that I mentioned in the first part of this video that the main textual element within your spread is always going to be the body copy, and this is where the readability is the most important aspect of your design. So you would end up usually using columns to divide up the text, making sure that your line length is not too long. And when it comes to creating columns, you would end up also having a gutter or alli, which is the negative space within the columns. The size for this really depends on the text size and the line length as well. But essentially, what you want to assure is there's enough visual difference between the two sides. So your readers won't end up jumping from one side to the other accidentally. In some cases, you can push the limits a bit and use very narrow columns like this. It's not really comfortable to read. Once again, it's a little bit too short of a line length, but because there's justification used, which creates a very sharp edge on the right instead of having ragged lines. So in these cases, you might also be able to reduce the size of the gutter or alley between the columns. Remember, readability should be your number one priority and not the stylistic formatting of text. When it comes to dividing columns, you could also use a down rule, which would be a graphical element dividing the columns. So in this case, these are just simple lines. But you can also be a bit more subtle with your down rules. Like here, we have these vague dotted lines running down at the end of each column, so to the right side of each column. Now, there's another very common element within a magazine spread, which has several different names. This is what I'm talking about when you have an additional little article within the article. It's like a side story that relates to the article itself. There's many names for this, so it can be called panel, books out, box copy, sidebar, and also secondary coverage. There are slight differences between all of these, but essentially they all relate to these additional separated or isolated details, which usually helps to tell a complete story beside the main body copy. Now the should be visually separated and different from the rest of the body copy and the rest of the magazine spread. So that's just to make sure that the reader will know exactly when to read that. They can decide to read it first before they end up reading the body copy or afterwards. It's completely up to them. But you as a designer just have to make sure it's isolated. That can be by using a different font, a background color, and it can really vary in size. Sometimes it can even take up half of the page. However, the most common placement for these elements would be on the right edge of the spread. So this is an ideal placement for a sidebar. Panels can also be more graphic instead of just relying on text. Like here, we have more like a little infographic, but it still would be considered a panel. And although here on the left side, we don't have a distinct background color. This detail is still isolated enough by having those simple graphical elements here, creating a little frame, and once again, helping or assuring that this is isolated enough to become a panel or box. And since we are talking about frames, lines, of course, are also important elements within a magazine spread. They can help to guide the reader and direct their attention to certain details. Here we have a rule, for example, just underneath the headline. Or here we have an eyeline, which we normally call when a line runs across the entire spread. This is another way to visually unify the two pages. And remember when I talked about depth, here, there's a beautiful example of integrating the image that's in the background with that eyeline that seems to be behind the image. So even though most of the text is placed on top of it, there's still another element that feels like it is running behind the image. So that's a clever way of using masking techniques to establish more depth and perspective in the layout. And last but not least, we need to talk about white space or negative space, which is all the empty areas within your magazine spread. These are just as crucial as all the other elements that we already talked about because without a good balance between the negative and positive space, you would end up having cluttered and claustrophobic design. So even this massive drop cap we have here on the left defines quite a big negative space. And by the way, drop cap is another term that's used for defining these large first characters that can work again as a good entry point or focal point in the design. And if you are interested to learn more about them, I have a separate video on the channel, how to use Photoshop and in design to create exciting and engaging drop caps. But coming back to negative space by having a lot of it really intensifies the rest of the elements, and it gives a little more breathing space. So usually, the more you use negative space, the more elegant and luxurious your magazine spread will feel like. And even though with this photograph, we have a color in the back because there's no actual details, I would also consider that negative space. 17. 1.4.c.4 Key terms related to multi-page layouts - Common Typographic Issues: In this lesson, we will be talking about orphans, vedos, runs, regs, and rivers. Now, these terms might sound strange when you first hear them, but if you are familiar with typesetting, you probably already came across some of them. So let's see in in design how we first of all, can recreate these problems or issues with our body copy and then learn also how to eliminate. First, let's talk about reverse. This is something that you will mainly notice if you are using narrow column width and also justification put together, and you can make things worse if you are not using hyphenation. So this is something that you can control in the paragraph formatting options. Here, if you have hyphenation of and you have the alignment set to one of the justification options, and then you just reduce the text width or the text frames width, you will start introducing rivers. So here already, I can point out one and another section where we have these gaps in the text, and we call it usually verse where it affects multiple lines on top of each other. But even when it comes to individual lines, having these larger gaps in between words, it doesn't look professional. If I go even further and reduce the measure or the line length we will start to have even more of these rivers showing up and even larger gaps appearing. So the best way to avoid these rivers to show up is to assure that your copy has enough measure or line width, especially if you are using justification. And in those cases, I would recommend to also have hyphenation enabled because you can see even here, where we didn't really have many rivers showing in the copy, by adding hyphenation or allowing hyphenation to show, it already corrects the text a bit more and spreads things out a little bit better. Now, the other time I mentioned at the beginning of the lesson, ag is also something that refers to the alignment or the edges of your copy. And this is mainly important when you use flush left or flush right, also called left align and right align, which sometimes by default, if there's no additional features used, can have a very unbalanced or ragged edge. So in this case, it doesn't look too bad. So when we look at the site here on the right, it's a little bit going back and forth, but it's not too bad. And even here on the left, this is looking quite even. But if I start moving my text frame around, we might end up creating a more ragged edge, depending on the width that we create. Something like this doesn't look that great. So already on both left and right side of these columns, we have the lines going back and forth quite a lot. So once again, this is the line I'm talking about. And to be able to refine this or balance those ragged lines, we have an option in design, which you will find once you select your copy and go to these additional options here on the right side. So click on this icon and then choose balance ragged lines. And that will try to refine it as much as possible. So this was before and this is after. It certainly got a little bit better, so it's more evenly distributed. And this is an option that, of course, you can save into a paragraph style, which then will automatically fix these problems while you are editing the copy. So now if I move my text frame around, it will always try to refine that ragged edge, which would work the same way either I'm using left or right alignment. And of course, the ultimate solution or weapon to eliminate the ragged edges is justification. But remember, with this one, you might be introducing rivers. So in a nutshell, when you're using justification, watch out for rivers. When you're using left or right alignment, watch out for the ragged edges. Now, let's move on and talk about the other three issues that you might encounter, starting with a video, which we can already see here on this page. So a video is the last line of a paragraph in the beginning of a column. It got separated from the rest of the paragraph, and now it's completely on its own in that new column. And it can happen also sometimes, which is even worse if this copy is on another page or even worse if it's on another spread because then the video is even more separated from the rest of the paragraph. Similar to this, we call the first line of a paragraph, an orphan, which is separated from the rest of the paragraph at the bottom of a column or page. And the way you can remember it is that the orphan is left behind. So all the rest of the paragraph went ahead, but they left the orphan behind. Some designers wouldn't even make difference between these two terms, but I prefer to remember them as two distinct individual mistakes, which, luckily, within in design can be fixed with one simple setting. So all you have to do is to create a paragraph style from the Paragraph Styles panel, and within there, you will find a feature called Keep Options. Now I'm going to turn on the preview so we can see this updating. So here, all you have to do is turn on keep lines together, and the default setting is perfect because what it's going to do is to keep at the start and the end of each paragraph, at least two lines together. And that's already going to eliminate orphans and videos. If you want to be more generous, how many lines are kept together, you can increase this amount, and you will see it already updating here in the copy. So that was two lines at the end of the paragraph or a single line. But if we increase this, then it's going to be limited to minimum have three lines of a paragraph separated onto a new column or page. So keeping lines together is your ultimate solution to eliminate orphans and widows, and we can test this out if I click Okay. Now, if I try to change the copy here, and recreate the orphan that we had previously. So we still have two lines here at the beginning of that paragraph. But once I move this any higher, it won't let one single line, the first line stay on its own, it's going to automatically move both lines to the next column. So keep lines is like two birds with 1 stone. We eliminated orphans and widows, but there's still one term that we need to watch out for, and that is a run. Now, runt is usually these short last lines of a paragraph that just looks very unbalanced and not professional. And these things, unfortunately, are a little bit more tricky to fix because you have to do two things. First of all, you have to set up a character style, which will have a single option, and I normally just rename this as well and just call it no break. Within here on the left side under basic character formats, we have to turn on the no break option. That's all that we need to set for this character style. And then coming back to our paragraph style that we are already using here, we need to go inside it. And under grab style, we need to choose new grab style. Select our no break character style, which becomes a nested style in this case. And then under this, you have to type in the following code, full stop curly brackets, dollar sign. And within the curly brackets, you need to specify the minimum amount of characters you want to see in the last line of each paragraph. So if we type in, let's say, 15 here, and I just click AA, immediately, it fixes those short last lines in my copy. Once again, if I go back and set this down to five, then I can allow these shorter words showing up here in the last lines. And if I want to be even more strict, I can set it, let's say, to 25. And that means we will have much longer last lines for each of our paragraphs. Now, it is actually a good thing to have less characters in the last line of each paragraph because that also helps to create a visual break and interruption between the paragraphs. So it enhances readability, which as we discussed, is very important. But having two short last lines is something you want to avoid. And now with this technique, the nested character style using no break and setting up that grab function will automatically eliminate these runs to show up. So whenever you end up working with a longer amount of text, most likely, you would end up working in in design, and then you have to make sure that you set up a paragraph style, which will have the keep lines together, eliminating the orphans and videos and also this technique I just showed you with the character style nested in using grab style, and that is going to fix the runs. And then depending on whether you are using justification or left or right alignment, you have to remember to watch out for the reg and reverse. 18. 1.5.a Design elements and principles: The basic elements of design are fundamental visual building blocks used to create any composition. Designers use these elements to construct and communicate ideas visually, just like a writer uses words to build sentences and sentences to build stories. Each element has its own role. Lines guide the eye, shape, creates structure, color, evokes emotion, texture, adds depth, and so on. The principles of design on the other hand, are the rules or guidelines for how to organize and arrange those elements effectively. The elements are what you use, the principles are how to use them. For example, you might use color, which is an element to create contrast, which is a principle or arrange shapes the element to achieve balance, which is another principle. In short, elements are the tools and principles are the blueprint. Luckily, for this exam, you don't have to have an in depth knowledge of design elements and principles. However, if you're interested to find out more about these things, I have an entire training series dedicated to this topic, covering all of these terms in great detail. Just as an example, for balance, we talk about the visual weight of design, and we look at lots of different examples and also the types of balance that you can see in compositions like symmetrical, asymmetrical, radial and mosaic balance. We look at examples of alignment. Can be vertical, horizontal, diagonal or following a custom grid. We also look at lots of examples specifically on how grids can be utilized in visual communication. And for every term and topic, we look at hundreds of amazing examples, and we discuss them in great detail. 19. 1.5.b Rule of Thirds: Rule of Thirds is a very commonly used technique in visual arts. So before it was started to be used in graphic design, it was already applied for a long time in painting, photography, and even cinematography. It is a very simple rule that's easy to understand and also easy to apply to any of your projects. And there's only a few things I would like to discuss about it in this video besides again, showing some creative examples, but rule of thirds is used to align the focal points in designs because that is the best and most common way of using rule of thirds. But first of all, let's just understand how it works. So essentially what you need to do is to divide up your frame into three equal sections, both vertically and horizontally. And these horizontal and vertical division lines will result in four intersection points. And according to the rule of thirds, these are the positions where it is most effective to place a focal point. Now you might remember that we were talking about reading gravity when we were discussing layouts, and for the same reason that most viewers starts from the top left and then gravitate towards the bottom right of each composition and frame, even these four intersections within the rule of thirds are not equally powerful. So you guessed it the top left intersection point is the most effective placement for a focal point because this is what most viewers will first look at when they see a composition. And most people not only tend to look here first, but also keep their eye on this position for the longest time. According to statistics, the top left intersection point gets 41% of the attention, followed by the one below it, which is 25%, and then top right being 20%. And finally, the last one on the bottom right is 14%. So according to these percentages, we can think of these four points being the direction or general direction of viewers eye movement, which again, nicely corresponds to the reading gravity that we discussed earlier. Before we look at a few examples from graphic design, I just want to spend some time on these two photographs, which can help us to understand that not only the intersection points are important when it comes to rule of thirds, but also how we utilize the lines that are dividing the composition. So besides placing this boat here close to one of the intersection points, notice how the horizon is also aligned with one of the rule of thirds division lines. Photography and also in illustration and graphic design, deciding where the horizon line is will greatly affect the viewpoint and perception of your composition. And it is a common practice to align it with either the bottom or the top horizontal third line. So here is an example where once again, the horizon is aligned in this case, to the top third line. And in this case, the focal point would be this girl who is perfectly aligned to this vertical third line. And even though we can't see her face, the head is still aligned perfectly to one of these intersection lines. It is important to mention that you don't have to be extremely strict about using this rule. It is more of a guideline, and the general idea is that by moving your subject or focal point, a v from the center of your composition makes it more dynamic and interesting. While keeping your subject in the center of a composition can make it more idle or static. Of course, there are exceptions like when you want to achieve perfect reflectional or radio symmetry in your compositions or when you want to emphasize stability by aligning everything to the center of your frame. Let's see rule of thirds in action in these creative examples here. First, starting with this magazine cover. If I align this rectangle that I created to the cover itself, we can see that it is going to have the focal point, which is naturally the face of this woman and also the big round hat that she's wearing fall almost exactly on the top right intersection point. Besides having the woman aligned to this vertical third, we also have the main cover line aligned to the other vertical third line, and it might also be intentional that this group of text is actually sitting perfectly on the bottom horizontal third line. One other thing that we can spot on the skyline or strip here on the top of the cover is that the three words within it are also perfectly divided and distributed according to rule of thirds, where we have these little division points aligned perfectly with the vertical division line. So if I move this frame down a bit and zoom closer, you can see what I was referring to. By looking at this example, once again, we can see that the main title is perfectly aligned or centered to this first intersection point here. But its right edge, the G is also perfectly aligned to the second vertical third line. So even though this composition at first might feel a bit chaotic, you can see there is actually a lot of underlying structure used. Here's a really nice cover of the New Yorker magazine, which shows New York completely covered in snow and creating a lot of negative space or white space. But just like before, the rule of thirds, again, is used perfectly here to align the only visible building. And even though it is not a straight line, but a curve one, even the snow is aligned to one of the third lines, similarly to a horizon line, even though we can't actually see that in this composition. This poster of the movie Joker also utilizes the rule of thirds perfectly, where we can clearly see that the focal point is supposed to be this e, which in a very smart way is a combination of both the real person and the reflection of the character that he is becoming in the story. So that duality is represented in this particular alignment. And if we take our guide and drag it up here, we will see that it is almost perfectly aligned with this intersection point. Like with the previous examples, even the typography is aligned to the same vertical division line. Sometimes you can even utilize multiple intersection points. Like in this case, the rabbit is placed on one of them, while the ego is very close to one of the other intersection points. And if we connect these two points, they actually form diagonal, which creates a very dynamic composition. And in another video, we will see lots of creative examples, again, utilizing diagonals or diagonal arrangement of visual elements. And last but not least, here's another poster where almost all the intersection points are in use. So we have this person's face on this intersection point, another one here on the right, and then at the bottom, we have the text covering up the bottom two intersection points. And I'm not sure whether this was intentional or not, but even this letter D is aligned to the left vertical division line. And the text itself is perfectly centered to this bottom horizontal division line. So remember that rule of thirds is not a strict structure like a grid in a composition that you must align your elements to. You can think of it more like an aid or even a cheat that can help you to find the right placement for the most important elements in your design. 20. 1.5.b Typographic hierarchy, readability and legibility: Typography is the art of arranging letters and text in a way that makes it easy to read and visually appealing. Good typography helps guide the reader's eye, sets the tone of the message, and makes the overall design feel more professional and balanced. When looking at a poster or design, we immediately get an impression whether it's been done by a professional or not, and that's mainly to do with the composition, of course, but also the typography. During the exam, you will be asked questions about a couple of key terms when it comes to typography. Like visual hierarchy, which is a type of grouping and arranging the elements within the composition that will help the reader or the viewer to easily understand the message of the design. You can emphasize hierarchy between the typographic elements in many different ways. You can use skill, for instance, to emphasize the title or the most important and highest priority detail, or you can use color to differentiate important details and put them in focus. Readability should always be a priority whenever you place text in a design, even when it comes to hand lettering or more decorative uses of text. Let me demonstrate in this example, a couple of the most important typographic terms that they might ask you about in the exam. So as you can see, we have a title and the body copy under it. On both sides, it's exactly the same format for now. But I'm going to refine the version on the right. First, I'm going to apply kerning to improve the title. Right now, it just feels like there's a little bit too much space between certain characters like the W and O. If I click there in Photoshop and use option or old left arrow, I can reduce the space between those two letters. I can do the same thing between O and R, and probably I can do the same next to O and S, and then L and O as well can go a little bit closer. So that's already looking better. And if I just place this here above the other version of the text, can see it's very subtle these changes, but it does matter. So if we move this a little bit higher, you can feel that this is feeling a little bit more balanced and more professional than the other one. Now, let me just drop that back here. And then for the body copy, what I'm going to do is to first increase the leading or line spacing that I can do by holding down alter option key again. But now I press the down arrow on the keyboard, so I increase the leading. Then I will also increase the tracking, which is the character spacing. So that's alter option key right arrow a couple of times until I feel like it feels more balanced. And now, if we compare the text on the left and the right, we can tell that the one on the right feels much more comfortable to read, that's essentially what readability means. You might be thinking, what does legibility mean? Well, that just simply means whether it is physically easy to read text or not. So for instance, if I reduce the opacity of this text layer, it is starting to be difficult to read it. So the legibility is getting worse. Similarly, if I made the text size smaller to something like that, the text on the left, compared to the one on the right is definitely more legible. Even though the readability is not as good, legibility is probably always your first priority when setting text in a design. You might also be asked about the four main categories of typefaces, and you just have to know that they are Serif, sanserif script, and display. And to better understand each of these categories, here's a couple of slides. Serifs are fonts with decorative strokes at the end of the letters. So we are talking about these little details that would be considered the Serif. This is also a Serif. These details here are also serifs and so on and so forth. These types of fonts are usually associated with tradition, sophistication, or professionalism. But San Serif category derives from the French word sun, which means without. So without serifs, we get these clean, modern, simple looking fonts with no decorative flourishes. They have more clarity. They are more minimal, and usually they come across more contemporary compared to Serif fonts. Then there are the script type faces which try to emulate handwriting. Of these fonts, legibility and readability won't be as good as the other two main categories, mainly because of the fact that these fonts won't connect the characters as well as if someone is actually writing things by hand. So the continuity or flow between the characters is usually interrupted. And it is definitely not recommended to use these for longer amount of texts like body copy, but perhaps they can work well for certain cases where we would like to draw attention to a specific part of text, and we want to make it feel more natural or organic. And last but not least, we have the display type faces, which are highly stylized and the main purpose of them to really be eye catching and draw attention to certain details or to try to inject personality and capture the essence of the topic of a design. 21. 2.1 Creating documents: You can create a new document in in design either by going to the file menu and then choose new document or by choosing new file from the home screen. Once you click on this, a dialogue box will come up, and probably the most important option here to begin with is the preview. If you turn this on, the settings that you will change in the dialogue box will automatically give you a preview in the background, so you will get to see the document that you are creating. This is actually really useful because there's quite a lot of options that we will cover in this lesson. So as you can see, my empty new document appeared in the background, and we can first of all change the orientation just to see it updating. So we can also see here on the right side in the pages panel, we can see the portrait and the landscape version. And by looking at both the preview in the pages panel and also here in the document area, most options will make much more sense. For instance, if I increase the page number or number of pages, we can immediately see how they are created for us. And we can also see that the default facing pages option will keep the pages connected. So every two page will be connected into spreads apart from the first page. Now, if I change the start page number to two, then we will skip the cover page, and we will start straight with the second and third pages, which is already going to be a spread. So start page number is something that we can set. I'm just going to set it back to one that we will have a cover page, and of course, we can decide to turn off the facing pages that will keep all the pages individually set up. So we would consider this a single page layout or document. Now here we also have an important feature called primary text frame if you turn this on, not much is going to change in appearance. But what will happen is that in design is going to place a text frame on all of these pages, and that text frame is actually going to be also on the parent page, which we will talk a little bit more about later. And this feature is very useful for long format documents like books, where obviously you want to fill most of your pages with flowing text. And, of course, in design will automatically flow the text from one page to the next. So the text flow will also be set up on this primary text frame. Going to keep this option on just so you can see at the end how it looks like. I'm going to also keep on the facing pages option, and I'm not going to change the units. I just want to show you that, of course, you can set up the measurement units for any new document, and these are the options that we can choose from. And of course, we can also change the page size. That's something that you can find here. Currently, this is an A four size, and we actually have quite a lot of presets we can choose from which we can find here. We can also switch between print, web and mobile templates or categories and we can find, for instance, for mobile, iPhone and iPad sizes, and of course, a lot of additional ones as well. Now, I'm going to go back to recent, and it should remember most of the settings that I had here. Maybe I'm just going to type in nine pages like that. And then additionally, we can also set up columns for our document, and that will appear here in the background. So as you can see, now we have two columns or three or four, and the column gutter is something we can also control. That's the space between the columns. And these columns will be just guides. So they won't appear, of course, in the final print, but they can help you to align your content to these column guides. So it's up to you whether you want to use this. And if you set it up here, it's going to be utilized throughout the whole document. Of course, you can change that later, but currently, if you set this up here, it will be a global setting that will be applied to all the pages that you create. Similarly, if I change the margins here, that's going to change all of the pages in the document. And in case you want to keep all your margins the same size, you just have to link them together. And then we can see increasing and decreasing it will change all the edges or the margins on all the edges. Additionally, we also have bleed and slug. Now, this is something that you might not see by default, so you want to make sure you open this category. And bleed is something that you can set up, and we already mentioned this in the previous topic, but 3 millimeters is standard that we would normally use for the bleed. And we can see that red outline appearing now outside of the document. That's the bleed. And then for slug, I would normally use maybe around 13 millimeters because that's counted from the same edge or trim edge of the document. And in case you have already three millimeter bleed, then to have 10 millimeters of slug, you actually need to count 13. So that's like ten plus three. Because like I said, the first three millimeter would be the bleed, and then the additional 10 millimeters would be the slug. Slug, we normally use for additional information that we would like to provide to the printer. For instance, we can have fold marks placed here whenever we are creating things like a trifold brochure. And that is all the settings that you have to be familiar with whenever you create a new document in Adobe in design. Maybe one additional thing worth mentioning is that you can give the document a name even before you are creating it. So I can just call it brochure for now, but I can also save it as a preset if this is something that I want to use in the future. So if all these settings I need to reuse in the future, I can click on this icon here, and then I can call it maybe nine pages A four portray and then save preset. And you can see it will be in this additional category called save so that's where we will be able to find it. And you can see I have another preset already here that I can use if I want to. But now, I'm just going to click on Create. And there's one strange thing that you might notice when the document is created in case you use the same settings that I did. And that is the fact that instead of having nine pages, we actually only have a single page. And the reason for that is because we use the primary text frame feature, and there is an option or setting in in design that would automatically delete any empty pages whenever we have this primary text frame included. So if you go into in design preferences and type, or if you are on a PC, you would have to go through Edit preferences type. Here at the bottom, you will find the delete empty pages option. So if I turn this off, and then I click Okay, now if I use the same settings, once again, with nine pages, and I hit Create, now it's not going to delete those empty pages. And since we are talking about this, it's also worth mentioning that whenever you want to make sure that a setting that you change will be used for every new document that you will be creating in the future, it is always recommended to close any active documents first. So in this case, I'm just going to close this by pressing Command or Control W. And then go into the preferences and check whether that option is disabled. So if it's disabled, I can click Okay, and now I can be assured that any new documents that I will create will automatically use that feature. So once again, we can create this one with nine pages, create it. And as you can see, all the pages will be intact, so we can jump over them or zoom out, pressing Commando Control minus. And yeah, I can see all the pages in this document. 22. 2.2 Interface: In this lesson, we will be talking about the in design interface. So you have to be familiar with all of the definitions used for the interface because in the exam, they will be asking about this, and you have to be good at finding where these things are. So first of all, of course, we have the menu bar, which you can find up here on the top. That's just like with any other application. And below this, we have this large section called the Options bar, which you can actually drag and place somewhere else within in design. But normally you would want to have this docked up here on the top. So when you drag it up, you should see this blue line appearing. That's when you can dock it back where it was. And in case you don't see it, just have to go to the window menu and turn on Control. So I just show you without it and then with it. So it's either referred to as control or Options bar. And then finally, we also have the contextual task bar, which you can see on my screen. This is, again, something you can turn on and off from the window menu. And once it's turned on, you can actually change its behavior here on the right side. You can choose to pin it in a specific space within your workspace, or you can unpin it, which means it's going to automatically move around in the document depending on what you do. So, for instance, if I create a rectangle somewhere within the document, notice how it would appear directly under it. So if I move this object maybe here on the right side, the contextual taskbar will follow it accordingly. Not only the position changes, but also the available options. So depending on what you have selected, Indesi will always suggest the most likely features from this task bar. So, in case of an image frame like this one, we get the generative field feature recommended. But if I create a text frame, we will have the text options or text formatting options showing up straightaway, like the typeface, text size, color, and alignment. On the left side, we have the toolbar, just like in the other Adobe applications. This can be set to two columns or a single column, and it can actually be also floating. So if you drag it out, you can keep it floating or you can also dock it here on the right side. I'm just going to bring it back on the left and dock it back here and keep it in a single column format. And here, compared to Photoshop or Illustrator, we don't have that many tools. But we still have a few of them where you can right click and then find additional hidden tools. So they are grouped together like the type tool, and they type on a path tool. Each of these tools have their own shortcuts, so you can use those to access them from the keyboard. And right next to the toolbar, this big space here is called the document area. Where we obviously see the pages in our document, but we can also see the rulers. So if you press Commando Control R, you can turn on and off the rulers, and you can also right click on this to change the measurement units that we've seen when we were creating a new document. On the right side, I have the pages panel open, but we also have a couple of additional panels here, which I can extend by dragging these out. We can see their names. Again, if I extend these iconic panels, they will be visible with their names. Now, iconic panels can always be opened up or expanded, and then clicking on them again will collapse them back to the iconic state. So this is a way to take up less space on the screen, but still make them easy to access. And of course, you can fully customize panels, move them around, dock them, and close them if you don't need them. You can make them wider or thinner. In this case, I'm just going to reduce the size of the pages panel, for instance. And if I click on this double arrows here, I can fully expand these panels, and I can switch between panels docked together into a panel group these three links swatches and layers are in the same panel group now. But if I want, I can drag layers out, dock it into another panel column, or I can even dock it here. Next to pages. Now I can switch between the two, or I can drag it and place it or dock it above the pages panel. And that way, I will be able to see these both at the same time. You can find all the panels in the Window menu. So from here, articles to version history, these are all the panels. There's actually quite a lot of panels in design, and some of them include quite a lot of options. But one of the panels is probably the most useful one is properties, which would always give you options. Based on what you're currently doing in the document, a bit similar to how the contextual task bar works. So in this case, I just have an empty page. So I have the document settings visible here and things like showing or hiding the rulers, choosing which page I want to go on. So even if I don't have the pages panel, I can just use this little drop down to jump to the page that I'm looking for. But as soon as I select something like a text frame, the properties panel will switch to giving me transformation options and, of course, text and paragraph formatting options. All of the things that we can see in the properties panel would have their equivalent within the dedicated panels. Like, for instance, the character formatting options would be in the Type and Tables character panel, which I can open up. And once again, this opens up as a floating panel, but we can dock it anywhere we want it. Let's just say here. And now anytime I need it, I can just click on it to see it or click on it again to collapse it. If you want to make sure that in design, we'll remember a certain setup or arrangement of panels that you prefer to work with, it's recommended to save it as a workspace, which you can do from this drop down here on the top. So by default, it should say essentials here. And if you click on this, you can choose new workspace. And I'm just going to call it test. And I want to mainly capture the panel locations. But this can also remember any customizations I've done to the menus. I'm just going to click Okay, and you can see now it is saved. Then if I now switch back to the essentials workspace, you would expect in design to change the panels. But what you also have to do is to reset the essentials to go back to the way it was originally saved. So if I click on that, now we will see a much cleaner interface setup where we have the properties panel then next to it, the pages and CC libraries. Now I can just come here and choose test, and immediately, it will go back exactly to the same setup of panels and locations like when we saved the workspace. Now, although in the exam, they mainly would ask you about creating a workspace and save it in a certain way or load a specific workspace. They might also ask you about where to find a certain setting or preference, and that's why it's good to get familiar with all the preferences that you can find in in design. So this is something we've already seen before, but I'll just show it again. For Macuss, it's under in design preferences. On PC, it would be under edit preferences somewhere here at the bottom. And once we go into preferences, you can choose any of these because you will be able to switch between these separate subcategories. But if you just press General, for instance, you can see the lists here on the left side. Command or Control K is the shortcut, by the way, to get to the preferences, if you want to get to it faster. And most of the time, they would ask simple things like how to change the interface color. So if you go to interface, you can find the color options here. And they might ask you to change the live drawing setting from immediate to never or vice versa. Again, that's something that you can find here. They might ask you to change some settings for the guides or the grids. Again, this should be very quick and easy to find because they are using these names here in these categories. So very easy to find. Again, if there's some change that you have to do for the spelling or preference that you need to change, you will find it under the spelling subcategory. Also remember seeing a question once about the display performance. This is, again, something that can be used to decide how in design should render the images mainly in your documents. So you can change the default view and the adjust view settings in this section. So before you move on, I highly recommend to at least just read through the preferences and the settings on just so you have a vague idea where you can find things. You can also experiment, turning on things, turning them off, see what happens. But don't worry, you don't have to memorize anything because if there's a question like this comes up, you will be able to use in design, and most of the time, it's very quick and easy to find the setting that they are asking. If you're really struggling finding something that they're asking you to do, you can also just come to the help menu and simply type in here. So for instance, if I'm looking for display performance, I can just start typing that in, and immediately, it will tell me where I can find this. So it's in the preferences display performance, and there's even another way to get to the same setting through the object menu. So there you go. That's just a useful tip that you can rely on in case you really are lost, and this is something that you can use during the exam. 23. 2.3.a Navigate a document: For this lesson, I will be using a document that I created for one of our other courses. If you want to follow along using the same file, you can find this in the exercise files folder. And first off, you might notice that there's a lot of frames in this document. That's because we have a lot of images and smaller text frames on top of each other. Now, in design obviously allows you to work like this where you can see all of the boxes or frames, and you can easily identify the individual elements that can be modified. But if you want to see it in a little bit more cleaner way, then you can just simply press W, and that's a way to switch to preview mode. So instead of seeing it in normal view, you can see it in preview, which will only show the things that will actually show up in print. So W is a quick way of switching between these two views. And also you can notice the bleed, for instance, is going to be disappearing. So the bleed area, the space between the red line and the black outline of the document, that is going to disappear when we are in preview mode. So that's also a good way of testing whether you have all the elements in the bleed region or not around the edges of the page and whether it's still filled and it's going to print correctly. So that's one of the first and most useful shortcuts that I would recommend to get used to whenever you work in in design. Besides this, you can also use Shift W, which is to switch to a full screen view or presentation view, it's called. Here, you won't have any interface visible anymore. It's literally just focusing on the document, and you can use the left and right arrows to quickly go through the pages in your document. Now if you want to get out of this view, you can either press Shift W again or just press Escape. By the way, these views you can also find from the toolbar. So there's a quick and easy way to get to these. There's a couple of additional view options as well here, and of course, you can also get to these from the view menu. You just have to go down all the way here to screen mode, and this is where you can find them. Now, zooming in and out is very similar in Adobe design to the other Adobe applications. If you are used to those already, you will find this familiar. Command or Control minus is for zooming out, and immediately, you will see also that around your pages or spreads, you have the pasteboard. And in this document, for instance, I used the pasteboard to prepare some additional elements that I didn't end up using. So these are the elements. I can select these and move them on the other side or even on the pasteboard on the second spread if I wanted to. Command or Control plus will zoom back to whatever is currently centered to your screen. However, if you select something, like in this case, I selected this section here, now the Command plus or Control plus will zoom onto the selection. By pressing Command or Control Zero, you can fit the currently selected page to the window. And in case of facing pages layout, so where you have multiple pages within a spread, you should use Command Option zero or Control Alt zero. You can also zoom with the scroll wheel if you hold down the old or option key, and in this case, wherever your mouse cursor is, that's where you are going to Zoom to. Or if you temporarily want to have the Zoom tool selected, you can hold down Control or command space bar, and then with this tool, you can click and drag to the right to zoom in or drag to the left to zoom out. So this we would normally refer to as the scrubby zoom. And sometimes it's easier to just simply use by having the Zoom tool selected, which you can find here at the bottom of the toolbar, or if you press Z, you will have this tool permanently selected, and then you can just simply click and drag to the right to zoom in and drag to the left to zoom out. If you want to get familiar with all the zooming shortcuts, you can find them in the view menu, so it gives you a good list of the things that we discussed. And there's one additional very useful shortcut, which I call the bird's eye view, but I think that's the technical term as well that they use for it in design. And that you can access by pressing the H key on the keyboard. Actually holding it down. So this shortcut is for the hand tool. But if you press and hold it, and then you click and hold the mouse as well, that's when you get this special view where you will see a red frame showing your initial Zoom ratio. So that's how close we were to the document. But in design temporarily zooms out to show you the entire page or spread. And then when I let go either the mouse or the keyboard shortcut, it zooms to the previous Zoom ratio. So if I go even closer, let's just say we are working on a small section on one of these bubbles or text frames, and then I quickly want to move to the other one, I can just use this technique, press and hold H, click and hold a mouse, and then I can reposition my view to this one here. So it is a bit like using a navigator, but directly within the document window instead of using a separate panel like in Adobe Photoshop. Panning around, again, is very similar to the other applications. Just press and hold the space bar and then click and drag. Or if you press H on the keyboard, that will select the hand tool, and with that, again, you can pan around. And in in design, you can actually pen between pages or spreads as long as you go vertically, so either up or down. And there's also something worth mentioning that you can also use panning while having some text selected. And that's unique in design compared to other Adobe applications. So for instance, if I select some text here, if I were to press the space bar while I have that text selected, it would replace the text with a space. However, if I hold down the lt or option key, in this case, that's going to give me an alternative access to the hand tool or the panning feature. So that's really useful that you can do that in design. And remember, of course, you can also press Escape to remove your selection, and in case you have the entire text frame selected, then there's no issue in using the space bar for panning. In design, we don't have a rotate view tool like in Adobe Photoshop. However, we can rotate individual spreads or rotate their view. So if I right click on this page, for instance, I can go into page attributes and then rotate spread view, and I can use one of these maybe clockwise, 19 degrees clockwise. So now you can see that there is a little icon here next to the page thumbnail in the pages panel. That just tells me that the view is rotated. And if I want to reset this, I can just right click on that and choose clear rotation. So this is not going to affect how this document is printed. It's just a way to help you to be able to read text that is written in a different direction like this one here. It's obviously a little bit easier to read it the way it is right now. But once again, I can just right click and choose clear rotation. And I just wanted to mention this or clarify this that you can do this rotation individually on every page, and you can even have different rotations on certain pages, depending on what's the best viewing angle. 24. 2.3.b-d Rulers_Guides and Grids: Briefly talked about the rulers in previous lessons. I just wanted to talk a little bit more about them. So first of all, in the property s panel is probably the easiest place to find the rulers option. You can turn it on or off with this icon here, very quick and easy way to access it. And once the rulers are visible, you can right click on them to change the measurement units. Now, currently, I have millimeters for both my horizontal and vertical rulers. But for instance, if I change this one up here to centimeters, notice how the other ruler is not going to change automatically. So in design, you can have different measurement units for the horizontal and vertical rulers. That's just worth remembering. And you even have a custom measurement option where you can put in the exact amount of points that you would consider as a single measurement unit. So for instance, if I type in 50, then obviously I will have only a few divisions here on the top. And once again, I can go back and I can change this back to millimeters. And then I will see 297, which is the correct size for an A four paper. You can also press Command or Control R to hide or show the rulers. And if you click and drag from the intersection point of the two rulers, you can redefine the zero point or starting point. So, for instance, I can drag it here to the top left corner of the margins, and now that is going to be my origin or zero point. Both for my horizontal and vertical values. If I want to reset that, I can just double click here on that intersection point or on the top left corner where the rulers meet, and that will reset it back to the top left corner of the page, and that's not including the bleed. So it's always measured from the trim size of the page. Since we have often multiple pages within a spread in design, when you right click on the rulers, another important option is to decide whether you want to have a ruler per page or per spread. So in case you are using the ruler per spread option, then the second page in facing pages layout. So within a spread, that's on the right side, it's not going to restart the number going to continue from the left page. So in this case, if I had another page here, it would start at 297 millimeters. And the total width of the spread would be two times that, so it would be 594 millimeters. Just like in other Adobe applications, you can use the rulers, of course, to place guides on your layout. So I can drag a guide from the vertical ruler to place it here, and I can also drag another guide from the horizontal ruler. And later on, these could be moved and repositioned easily or with the delete key on the keyboard can be deleted as well. Just to be able to show you a shortcut, how this works when you have multiple pages within a spread, I switch back to this empty document that we created earlier. So if I start dragging from the horizontal ruler on the top and I reach one of the pages, notice how it's only going to place the guide either on the left or on the right. We can also say the verso or rector sites, left and right in editorial terms. Now, if you want to make sure that it goes across the entire spread, just make sure you hold down the command or control key before you let go. So notice how holding down the command key or control key changes the guide, and it actually goes even across the entire pasteboard. For that spread. So that's the difference there. And another useful shortcut, whenever you drag a guide from either the top or the left, if you want to switch the direction of the guide, just hold down the order option key. So even though I started this as a horizontal guide, I can switch it into a vertical guide. And like I said, this would work on both sides. And you can even combine these shortcuts if you want. If you want to quickly clear guides, you can just go to the view menu and go down to guides and then delete all guides on spread. Or if you just want to hide them, you can use this shortcut, hide guides. You can actually find this in the properties panel as well. So here we can quickly turn the visibility of the guides on and off. But notice that whenever you do this, you will also hide the bleed guides. So they will also disappear and also the slug guides that we normally would see. Besides guides, we also have two types of grids in design. So it's a little bit more complex than the grids that we would see in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. So here we have the document grid, which is similar to the other applications, but we also have a baseline grid. Now, baseline grid we mainly use for text. So that's a way to enforce the alignment of lines or placements of lines within our document. And the document grid is more for positioning elements within a layout. And if you want to change the settings for the document grid, just go to the preferences. That's Commando Control K, like we mentioned before, and then on the grids, you will be able to specify exactly how you want your grid to work. So you can specify both horizontal and vertical grid line distances and also the subdivisions between them. Is also a useful feature called grids in B, which means that the grids will always be behind the elements that you place in your composition. So if we switch back to the other document here, for instance, if I turn on the grid, notice how it's not going to overlap the design elements. So my images and the text, I can easily read and see without the grid overlapping them. So that's an extremely useful feature that you can again find in the preferences. Similarly to the other Adobe applications, we also have Smart Guides in design, which will help you with alignment. So for instance, here, when I drag this frame around, I can very quickly find where the center point of the pages. So I can align the frame to that. I can also find the center of columns easily, and so on and so forth. So for instance, if I duplicate this frame and I want to align it to the same vertical position, I can see that green line appearing telling me that now they are aligned to their top edge. Or I can also do align top edge to the bottom edge of the other object if I wanted to. And this option you can find from the view menu in case you don't see it, and it would be on the GID and guide, Smart Guide, where you can also use the command to control shortcut, both to enable or disable. By the way, the same feature you can also find in the properties panel is this icon here, so you can hide smart guides, and then when it's hidden, obviously, you won't see those line appearing whenever you move things around. Or if you prefer to work with it, just make sure that nothing is selected, and then you can find the icon here, turn it back on. And once again, we will see these helping us to align our objects. 25. 2.4 Importing assets: First up, we need to discuss how to create in design templates. This is something you can do by going to the file menu and choosing Save as. And instead of saving your file as an in design document, you want to choose the template option. So the main difference between an in design file and a template is that a template will automatically open up as an untitled document whenever you open it, which can help to avoid accidentally overwriting the original file. Obviously this is extremely useful if you are working, for instance, on a monthly or weekly magazine where you have to use the same layout and same setup, but each time you have to change the contents. So if you want to save a template, you just have to choose where you want to store that file. I'm just going to save it in here, and I will open this up by going to the file menu and choose open or open recent. And notice that the file extension is slightly different. So instead of in design document, it's an in design template. That's what the T stands for. Once I open this up, it's going to look exactly the same as the previous document, but as you can see, it opened up as an untitled document. Now, in case you need to update a template, what you can do is to make your changes and then go into File Save As and use again the template option. Use the same file name that you used before and simply overwrite the template file itself. So this is something that you accidentally most likely want to do. But if you are intentionally trying to update the template, this is how you do it. And this, again, is exactly the same way it would work to work with templates in Illustrator, for instance. When it comes to placing assets into an in design document, the most useful feature that you will be relying on would be the file place command. And for this, it's definitely recommended to learn the shortcut. It's Command or Control D. Once the dialog box comes up, you will have to just navigate to the folder where you have the files that you would like to place into in design, and you can place in pretty much any type of image file. And also, of course, you can import text files as well, and you can select multiple images if you want to place them in all at the same time. So for instance, here I selected three of these images and if I choose open, these will be loaded into my cursor. So this is called the Place Gun, and I can actually see the first image that will be placed in as a preview. But if I use the right or left arrows, I can toggle through these images. And I can also see that there's three of them. There's that little bracket telling me that there's three images loaded here. Now, if I just come across here onto the pasteboard, it might be easier to see what is going to happen next. If I just click, it's going to place the image in with its actual size, with its current size. However, if I click and drag, I can place in the image with whatever size I want to use. And if I'm not happy with the placement, I can even undo these steps and load the images back into the cursor. So command or control by default, would load them back in there and instead of placing them one by one, in design, you can actually also place them all in at the same time by using a shortcut, so click and drag, and then before letting go the mouse, press the right or up arrows to start dividing your frame into multiple columns and rows. This feature is called gridiPi. This is something that they might ask you about in the exam, so it's worth remembering it. So up arrow to add rows, right arrow to add columns. In this case, I'm just going to go with three rows. And by the way, if you press and hold the space bar while you are using the place gun, you can reposition the entire frame or set of frames that you are about to create. And once you are ready, you can just let go the mouse, and the three images will be loaded. No, they might not fit perfectly in the frames, and that is because the aspec ratio of the original images might not match the aspec ratio of these frames. However, we can easily fix that with the frame fitting options. We just have to click on the fit content proportionally, and then it will automatically fix each of those images. Notice that next to each of these images, we have a little chain icon, and that's the default way in design handles images and data in general, whatever you place in as assets into a document. So it's linking to the original source file. In this case, the original images. And we actually have a separate panel called Links panel. I'm just going to open now so we can see better. And this is going to list all the linked assets, and we can easily jump to their location by clicking on these little hyperlinks, so we can find them where they are. And if I hover over the name of a file, I can actually see the location of that file. So where it's physically stored on my computer, and if I want, I can embed this to make sure that even if I change the original file or delete it, this will still be able to show up here in the document, and I will still be able to make changes to it. So embedding a link is going to turn it into an embedded image in this case. And the main reason why in design is not doing that by default, so it's not embedded the images by default is because that is increasing the in design file size and it's also going to increase the load times. So that's something that you would want to avoid. And instead, the best practice is to always save your work as a package whenever you are ready to archive it or to pass it over to one of your colleagues. And that will assure that all the linked assets will be included, even including the font so this is something that you would do from the file menu, you would just go down to package, and that will include, in this case, as you can see, 11 links. And I believe it will also include some fonts, yeah, eight fonts in this case will also be included in the package file. We will talk more about exporting and publishing our work in the last topic, so I will come back to this later. But for now, I just wanted to make sure that you're familiar with the way all assets in in design are handled and how to use the Links panel. By the way, within the Links panel, there is a section called Link Info. So whenever I select an image, I can see more information there about that selected image. And probably one of the most useful and important information here is the resolution and specifically the effective resolution. So that's effective PPI. That means what is the current resolution of this image. And notice, if I hold down command or control shift and drag the size of this frame a bit to the top left that reduces the size of this image, and this will result in an increase of the effective PPI. So by making it smaller, I am compressing all the pixel information that I have in this image, and that is going to increase the resolution. While if I go and make it bigger, then the effective resolution is going to drop. Now, in case you don't see the link info section, just click on this little arrow here. That's to show or hide this section and you can decide how much of this you want to see by dragging it up or down. I just want to show you what happens if I change the file name of one of these images that I used. I'm just going to put an X in the filename for this image. And as soon as I return back to in design, I'm going to get this red question mark both in the Links panel and also here on the top left corner of this frame. And seemingly, we still have the image in here, but that is only a low resolution placeholder version of the original file. So whenever you see missing links, you would want to fix it. You can do this by double clicking on the question mark and then locating the file, or you can also choose the relink option here in the contextual task bar. So once I select that image, it's going to fix the missing link problem. 26. 2.5 Managing colors: It's important to know how to use watches and gradients in Adobe in design because it's a commonly asked question in the exam. So I'm going to walk you through all the things that you have to know in this lesson. First of all, from the window menu, the panels that you will definitely need will be on the color section, and you will need all three of these. So I'm going to open up color first, and I'll just drag this out here and then go back and open gradient as well. Let's just dock these together, and that way we can move it easier, and then we will also need the swatches. So let's just drop that here maybe between the two of these or even on top of them. All right. Now, I'm just going to close these panels and dock this here just so we can see them better. And then next up, we can already see that in this document, we actually already have a couple of custom swatches. So these were swatches that I created this green one and then this pink one, which is used to indicate the spiciness level. So these watches are stored within this document, and it can easily be reused, and we can be consistent about using them throughout the document. And we can see this also showing up on both of these pages. So we have that green color utilized here on the text, mainly and maybe on some background elements as well. Now, we also have these big shapes in the background that are using the same color, but as you can see, they look different in their intensity. So whenever I select these shapes, even this one here in the background, so that big circle, it is going to tell me that it's actually black but it doesn't look black because it uses a lower intensity. So this is the feature called tint. So it's basically reducing the intensity of the color. It's not making it transparent. So don't get this confused with opacity. It's reducing the intensity of the color. So the same thing here, we can see this is 43% tint value, and then we have this one here, which is 21% tint value. But again, if I were to move this higher up in the layer structure, and I would drop it on top of everything else, you can see that it's not see through, so we can't see anything behind it. So it's completely filled. It just has a lower tint value. Now, the fill and stroke are the main attributes of every object, and you can apply this on anything. Mainly we work with frames in design. So I'm just going to create a rectangle or maybe we can create an ellipse, and we can click and drag. And if we hold down the Shift key, we can place this here on the pasteboard or on the document page as well. And if I press D on the keyboard, that's a quick way to get to the default appearance of an object, which would be black outline and no fill. So it's slightly different from Photoshop here. The field would be set to none, and the stroke amount would be set to one point, but we can increase this and maybe we can even change the stroke color. We just have to make sure that the stroke attribute is highlighted first, and then we can apply the color. So pressing X on the keyboard is a quick way to target either the field, which is the interior color used within a shape or frame and then press X again to switch to the stroke, which is the outline of the shape. So having the fill selected, I can use this other swatch, or I can add white, for instance, or I can again just remove it to keep it empty in the inside. To apply a different color, something that is currently not available as a swatch. For this, we can switch into the color panel, and we can either type in the values in CMYK or RGB, HSB or lab color models, or we can just quickly pick a color from the spectrum here at the bottom. So that's like a color picker, and it will give us the values in this case, in CMK and in case we like this color and we wish to use it throughout the document, we can just click on the plus icon in the Swatches panel to add it as a new swatch. Now notice that these little icons here in the Swatches panel will tell us the color mood of that swatch. So this one, for instance, is made up of CMYK colors and this one up here as well, while these other three colors are RGB colors. If you want to edit as swatch, you can double click on and here you can change even the color mode, so we can switch it over to RGB if we wanted to, or we can even change it from a process color to a spot color. Spot colors are premixed inks, usually, but they can also be used to indicate other special printing techniques like embossing or foil stamping. I'm just going to click Okay just to show you that if you use a spot color, this little icon would appear here. These icons are important to remember because these can be questions in the exam. So they might just show you an icon and you have to know what it means. So definitely, you want to get familiar with the things that I just mentioned here so far. Besides what we've seen so far, we also have gradients that we can use in in design. And for this, we have the gradient panel. Just going to drop this here on the top just so we can see it better. So for instance, I can have the field color replaced with a black and white gradient by clicking on that, and we can even change this from linear to radio if I wanted to. I can reverse the order of the two colors that are currently used. And of course, we can change these color stops of the gradient by double clicking on them and then choosing any color from the color panel, or we can even drag a color onto the gradient from the Swatches panel, and we can drag down a color stop that we don't wish to use anymore. So we can reverse this once again just so you can see how it looks. Maybe we can replace the blue with white. And of course, we can move these color stops around so we can decide the actual location, and even the transition between them can be adjusted with the middle point. And whenever you are happy with a gradient that you created, you can also save this as a gradient swatch. So if I click on the plus sign, it's going to be saved as a new gradient swatch. Similarly to editing a standard switch, you can also double click on this, and there you will be able to adjust the type of gradient and also the individual colors that you applied on it. So you can move these up and down just like before and refine the gradient the way you want to use it. But not least, it's worth mentioning that you can group swatches. So, for instance, I can select these two by holding down Command or Control key and then click on New Color Group. That's going to place them in this group. I can even rename this group if I wanted to, and I can also filter the swatches if I want to. So instead of showing all swatches from this icon, I can just choose to show color groups only. Or I can just see gradient switches if I wanted to. Of course, I can switch back to all switches that will remove this filtering. Now, there's another important difference between Adobe in design and Illustrator, for instance, and that is the fact that we can apply colors from the swatches panel either to the container or to the text. So if we select the text frame, in this case, I'm going to select this text frame right here, we can see that the container is using this green color. But if I switch to the text, it will tell me that is white. So there's white text inside a green container. And you can actually have both a fill and a stroke on the container and also a fill and a stroke on the text. So in a way, for a single text frame, you can have four different swatches utilized at the same time. Like using X on the keyboard to switch between the stroke and fill color to be pre selected, you can also use J on the keyboard to switch between selecting the container or the contents, which in this case, is the text. So J, as you can see, switches between those two, and X is to switch between the fill and the stroke attributes. In case you are using this document and you are struggling to select the text frame that I'm using, you might want to use the Command or Control key when you click to make sure you select the right object. When you have multiple objects on top of each other, this is a shortcut to go underneath your selected object. So the first object might be the text frame, which is used for this text K here. And then when I click again, I will have this frame underneath it selected. You might need to click twice to get to. Once you see the green color showing up, that's when you know that text frame is selected. Of course, you can also use the layers panel to find what you're looking for. But the command or control clicking within a complex document like this is an extremely useful shortcut to dive deeper or dig through all the layered elements on top of each other. 27. 2.6 Using styles: Learning to work with styles in Adobe in design is probably the most important skill or knowledge that you can get. And the more you use in design, the more you will be relying on these to work consistently and to work effectively. Now, the three main categories of styles that you will be using are the character styles, paragraph styles, and object style. In this document, as you can see, I'm utilizing all three of these categories. Now, first of all, before we see how they work, I just want to make sure you know where to find them. So in case you don't see these panels, just go to the window menu, and on the styles, you will find them. And by the way, we also have additional styles like table styles, cell styles, and even style packs. But we don't actually have to go into these because in the exam, these won't be asked about. The most common styles that you will be working with would be the paragraph style. And also character styles because these are used for the formatting of text and to make sure that you can be consistent in using them. And even for a document like this, where we have a restaurant menu and it's simply just two pages, it still needs some consistency. So, for instance, we have these salad names like this one, Zabal, spicy situation, Caesar crunch, Kalia, and easy leaf. Just going to press W on the keyboard just so we can see the design a little bit easier or clearer. And I'm actually going to hide the contextual task bar as well for now. So when I select one of these text frames, we can immediately see that it highlights the currently used style, and it shows that it has the signature salad name, but also it utilizes the subtle shadow object style. But instead of focusing on object size, first, I want to show you what happens if I change the salad name paragraph style. So notice how I deselected everything. So nothing is currently selected. You can do that by just simply clicking on the pasteboard somewhere there's no objects or press Command or Control Shift A. That's also a way to deselect everything. And then right click on the paragraph style that you want to make changes to and choose Edit. You can also double click on the name of a style to make changes to and straightaway, here we can see the definition of this style. So what is currently saved into it, the font, the size, and the color. So if I want to change the color, I can easily find that down here, character color. And instead of white, maybe we can change to this blue swatch that we created in the previous lesson. And if I turn on the preview, this will immediately show up. And we can notice that the same style was actually used on the pricing as well. So that's a slightly modified version because it's smaller in text size, but it is still using the same font and the same paragraph style. If I click Okay, I can update this easily. And if I select that text, for instance, here, so I highlight the text inside the text frame used on the price, we will see that it relies on this paragraph style, but there's a little plus sign next to the name, which means that there are some local overrides or differences from the original style. When I hover over the style name, I can actually list the overrides. So there's quite a lot of overrides in this case. You can see a lot of changes. And if I want to clear these overrides, all I have to do is just simply press Alt or Option, click on this, and that's going to remove those changes. Now it also removed the text because it's too small, it doesn't fit in the text frame anymore. But if I make it bigger, now we can see that it reverted to exactly the same formatting as this other text here. I'm just going to undo these few steps and go back to the way the text was set up. And the good news is that pretty much the way you work with each of these style categories, so character, paragraph, and object style is going to be the same. So they all work in the same way. They just affect different parts of your contents or elements in your layout. So object styles, for instance, is going to apply things that can be applied on the entire frame, and that could be an effect like drop shadow, but it could be a lot of other things as well. And the easiest way to learn about all the different things that you can apply through a specific style is by really just going into one of these styles. So we can see there's a lot of options here, including the fill and stroke colors, stroke and corner options, size and position options, and then you can even embed a paragraph style into object style, and I'm actually doing that right here as well. And there's a lot of other things here we can find like text wrap and other options, even frame fitting options, and of course, then the effects where I have that dropshadow setup that we've seen in this document. Now, paragraph styles we've already seen. I'm just going to go back quickly and just to show and highlight the variety and extent of the options that you can save into a paragraph style. It's crazy, really complex, and there's so much things you can do here. And just like we can embed a paragraph style into an object style, you can also embed a character style into a paragraph style. So this is what you can do under nested styles. Here, you can say you want to have a character style. From this drop down, let's say, the green character style used throughout the first word. In each of the paragraphs, for instance. That's actually used here on the second page where you can see in each of these paragraphs, the first segment is formatted differently. So before the semicolm, we have the text set in bold, and we also have it in green. And this is actually done automatically by using the nested style feature. So this is the Bild salad text paragraph style. I just double click inside the text frame to see which paragraph style is used there. And then if I double click on that, I can see under the drop caps and neti style. I have the green character style applied until the first column symbol. So that's what I have here. And it's a really cool feature because if I wanted to remove the column from here, for instance, and I want it to edit instead here, you see immediately as it appears, it will affect the formatting. So it's completely automated and it relies on the text itself to automatically change the formatting of each of the paragraphs. Luckily, in the exam, you won't have to be a style visit and know all the complex and advanced features that you can achieve with them. You just have to understand and know the basics of how to work with styles and what they are used for. You might be asked to create a new style and save it or amend an existing style. So I want to show two examples similar to these scenarios. So let's just say we need to save this as a new character style. This text, the build your part. So this currently is not saved as a style actually here. So I would recommend to save this as a character style, which we can do from this plus sign here in the panel. And once you do that, it's going to give you a new style. You can double click on this to rename. Just going to call it heading and then double click again to see what's saved into it so we can see the signs, the leading and the font family are all stored in this. And then if we click Okay, we can see whenever we click on the texts that now it's connected to that character style. And I would just make sure that it's utilized on all of the other instances where we want this to be working. So I would assign that style heading to this text here, the soups, and then also on drinks. So now each of these will have that style connected to them, which means that if I now want to make changes to it, I can just right click and choose edit the heading style, and then I can go in here and maybe reduce the size. And as long as I have the preview on, it's going to appear dynamically on all three instances, as you can see. And yes, that's in a nutshell, how you work with styles, and we will learn a little bit more about them later in the other topics. However, if you want to really master working with styles and you want to be really effective using Adobe in design, I highly recommend to take our in design fast track course, where we use styles in very complex projects like creating an entire book or creating catalogs and even creating beautiful magazine layouts with a very professional typographic setup, fully relying on the scalability, flexibility, and efficiency of working with styles in Adobe in design. 28. 3.1.1 Layers basics: Working with layers in Adobe design is just as crucial as using layers in Photoshop and Illustrator. In this file, for instance, I have six layers, and the reason why we use layers is to make it easier to separate elements and easily select them and work with them. So as you can see, I have a lot of elements on top of each other. For instance, we have these balls here. We have the text wrapped around the circle inside. Have then the circle with some additional text on it, and already just having a few elements placed on top of each other makes it sometimes hard to select the element that you are planning to make changes to. So, for instance, if I wanted to make changes to the spicy situation text, I might end up accidentally selecting this text instead. So let me zoom a little bit closer here just so you can see what I mean. So yeah, this circle has text inside it, while this circle has text wrapped around it. So of course, I can use a double click to make selections like that, or, again, I can double click here just to make sure I select the right thing. But still, you might end up selecting things you don't want to make changes to. And again, it might be tricky to select the image if you have lots of texts placed on top. So this is why we have the layers. And as you can see, the layers that I have here are set up in the following way that I have first a separate layer for the dish names. So I can easily select that and turn it on and off just to see what's on it. But of course, when you click on the little triangle or arrow next to a layer's name, you can see what's inside it. So these are the objects or elements inside the layer. And I can see the names circle and text frame. So there's five of these because there's five dishes. And I'm just going to keep this turn off just to help you see what's on the other layers. So the more info is the additional information about each of these dishes. Again, I decided to put this on a separate layer once again because this is again using a circle and the text is placed on the path. Circle. So it makes it a little bit trickier to select it. Again, if I press W and we are in normal view, you can actually see that outline there. So that's blue line. By the way, any object that is placed in a layer will always have the same highlight color as the layer's color. So, for instance, with more info, we see this cyan or bright blue color, which corresponds to the layer's color. So if I double click on the layer's name or the color area, we can actually change that color. And let's just say we change this to orange. Once I click Okay, notice how the highlight color will also update. So that can sometimes be useful if you have a design where a certain color blends too much into the design itself, you can easily update the color as I showed it to you. And by the way, whenever you double click on a layer, you get the additional layer options. So besides the name and the color, you can also control things like whether this layer is supposed to be printed or not. So you can always disable that if you don't want to have a layer included in the print. So you can keep it visible in the document, but if it's turned off, that means it's not going to be incorporated in the print or even when you export to a PDF. So I'm going to just keep that on and click Okay. And by the way, any layer that is hidden or turned off is automatically not going to be exported or included in a print. So in this case, for instance, the dish names wouldn't appear in the print already because I turned it off. Now, more info, I'm going to turn off as well. Then we have the layer called icons. So if I turn this off, notice how this area here disappears, but also the icons on the dishes. Which shows the spiciness level and the knot warning, whether it contains nuts or not. So I'm going to turn that off as well. Then we have the text layer, which includes also the text in the middle on the top and the bottom left, but also these text frames. Again, they are circles, including the prices, and then we have the images, and finally, we have the background. I like to layer things in a way that doesn't get too complicated. So normally maximum six, seven or eight layers I would have in an in design file. But in some cases, maybe if you have multiple language versions, I might end up creating more than that. But as a general rule of thumb, it's best to keep the layer count low design, so you don't want to overcomplicate the structure, but it's still better to have more layers than just to work on a single layer. That's probably the worst thing you can do because it really gets complicated after a while if you decide to do everything in a single layer. So one useful shortcut, even if you don't have layers, you can always rely on, and that's the Command or Control key and clicking with the selection tool, with that, you can actually toggle through all the objects that are laid on top of each other, even if they are in different layers. Now notice, for instance, if I click on this bit here, it shows that I selected an item or an object from the dish names layer. How can I tell that? Well, first of all, I can see this dark blue highlight, but I can also see that dark blue square showing up here in the layers panel. Now, of course, if I open this, I can actually see which item is that that I just selected. But now if I commando Control click exactly in the same place, notice how that found the next item, which is the more info. And the reason why I found that specifically is because of the stacking order. So that's the layer directly under dish name. So if I command or Control click again, it would move further down in the stacking order. So the next one would be the text, and then I click again, and then it will find the images, and then if I click again, it will find the background because there is a big background image here, which includes all of these scribbles. Now, the only layer that wasn't selected was the icons, and that is because I wasn't clicking near the icons. If I start clicking up here, again, first we sag dish names, then Command or Control click will select more info. Then because I am near an icon, it will find that particular icon on that layer. Then I command or Control click again. We move on to the text layer, and again, move on to images, and then again, we move to background. And by the way, if I command or Control click once more, it would also go back to the top, so it can continue even when you reach the bottom, it will just loop back and start again from the beginning from the top of your stacking order. 29. 3.1.2 Managing layers: Now another very useful shortcut that you should know is that you can isolate layers, both their visibility and their locked status. So the way this works is that instead of just clicking on the icon to turn a layer on and off, let's just say we do this with the text layer. We can also hold down Alter option key and click on the icon. So this is going to show only that layer and hide everything else. So this could be a very useful way to again quickly check what's on a layer. So instead of turning off all the other ones one by one, you can just alt or option click on the icon of the layer that you want to check, and then you can do the same shortcut to reveal the other layers once more. Now if you want to a layer, the best thing to do is to click here next to the icon. So that's going to add the log. That means you won't be able to interact with any of the objects on that layer anymore. So for instance, I can just demonstrate this to you if I d click on the background layers visibility, and then I also lock it. Now, if I try clicking anywhere, I won't be able to move this around. While if I turn off the locking, now immediately, I can move that object around. So let me bring back all my other layers. I also wanted to show you that you can click and drag to add lock items. So you can lock layers quickly by just dragging over them. The same thing works with visibility. And in design even has a live view of revealing and hiding layers as you are scrubbing through them. Now, besides using the layers panel, you can also use shortcuts to hide and show objects. So, for instance, I can select this text frame here, and if I press Commando Control three, that's a quick way for hiding that particular selected object. Now you won't be able to press Command three or Control three again to reveal it because it's already hidden. You can just undo this step if you want to go back, so commander controls that. So this is the same as going into a layer, so opening up the layer, finding that selected object, and then turning it on and off. I notice, by the way, there is a hidden option here, a hidden object called Title one. And that is because I created two versions for this text. So that's my first version, and then that's my second version. Sometimes I like to keep unused options still in place. But, of course, for these, what you can also do is to move them to the pasteboard. That way you can still see them, but they won't end up in the print. So one other way of selecting something when you have them on top of each other like this, where it's not really clear which one you will be selecting if you click on it is to use the little square icon next to an object that will select that particular object, and then we can move this out here to the side. So that's our pasteboard, and this way, it's easier to find the two separate versions. So we don't have to hide it. We can just keep it there on the side. Now, in some cases, you might want to quickly select something from a specific layer, and the fastest way to achieve that could be to lock every other layer and just have that one particular layer available. So just the way we manage to hide all other layers and keep one layer visible, we can also use the alter option key and click on the layer you want to keep unlocked. Like this and notice how immediately all the other layers got locked. So now we will only be able to select things from the images layer. So if I click here, I will know exactly what I'm selecting. I'm selecting the image. So once I have it selected, I can alter option click again here and remove the locks from the other layers. But now what I can do while I have this selected is if I just want to lock this particular image, so not the entire layer, just that particular image, I can press Command or Control L, L for Lock. When an object is locked you will see a little padlock icon on the top left corner. And this also shows up here in the layers panel right there. Now, you can, of course, unlock it from here, but you can also hover over it here in the document area. And when you see your cursor changing to this, you can click on it to unlock it. It's a little bit tricky to use the cursor and find the right spot. So it's usually easier to just use the layers panel if you need to unlock it. Or I'm just going to undo this last step. You can also go into the object menu. And choose unlock all spread, which will unlock every item. I'm not going to do that in this case, I'm just going to unlock it from the layers panel. And before moving on, I just wanted to mention that if you're not a fan of using keyboard shortcuts, you can also select any layer and then go to the layers panel menu or drop down to access the Hide others or lock others options. So these would be the same as holding down the alter option key. So if I choose Hide others, you can see exactly that. I can say show all layers to show them again. It's also worth mentioning that there is an option in in design to delete unused layers. This would mean a layer that doesn't have any contents. So if there is nothing inside the layer, it would be considered unused. If I click on this, nothing happens because all my layers have something in them. But if I create a new layer with the icon right here, now I can see that there is seven layers in the document. Without selecting Layer seven, I can just click here and choose delete unused layers. Now, there's another important thing worth mentioning. This little icon here, this indicates the current drawing layer. That means if we end up creating something, whether that's a text frame or a shape, or we can use one of the drawing tools, that would be creating the new item on that layer. So if I want to change this, I can click on the layer. Anywhere, so I can just select the layer and notice how that little pan icon is moving. So that's the highlighted layer, and that's the one that's going to be used for creating the new objects. Now, although in this document, I really feel like the way I set things up having six separate layers makes the most sense. I might change my mind. And I might want to combine a few of these layers together. Maybe the dish names, more info, icons and text could be combined into a single text layer or text elements, even though icons are more graphic based, but they are also placed inside text frames. I can select all four of these quickly, either by using the Commando Control key and select them one by one or select one at the bottom and then Shift click on the top to select everything in between. And once you have multiple layers selected, you can right click and choose merge layers. Once you do that, notice how it created a single layer now. But inside this layer, we obviously will still have all the additional original objects, but we won't have sub layers. So it's not going to put them into groups by default when you're merging layers. I'm just going to undo this step. I also wanted to show one additional option from the layers panel drop down. The paste remembers layers feature. I don't think it will be ever asked in the exam, but it's still a very useful feature worth mentioning. So for instance, if I select this text spicy situation, obviously, it comes from the dish names layer. I can copy it, Command or Control C, then go to the second page in this document, and I'm just going to select the background layer at the moment. Can see, I have background layer highlighted. If I press Commando Control V to paste into the document, that's going to paste it in the currently selected layer, background layer. However, if I undo this step and go back to the panel menu and have the paste remember layers turned on, then when I paste it in, notice how it still will go on the dish names layer, even though I had the background layer selected. So this can be very useful, especially when you have multiple layers and several pages, and you want to assure that your document will be consistent and all the objects will be in the right layers across the entire document. 30. 3.1.3 Photoshop layers within InDesign: On this page, we have some items on the background layer. I'm just going to show you this. So these are the circular shapes in the background. And what I wanted to show here is that, of course, you can also change the order of layers simply by selecting them and then dragging them up and down. So if I drag this all the way to the top, of course, that's going to be closest to us, and all the other items will be behind. So this, of course, needs to be in the background that allows all the other details to show up above it. So this is when you want to move an entire layer up and down. You would want to use the layers panel for that. However, inside the layers, for instance, in the images layer, if I zoom a little bit closer and drag this object over to the left, we can see this is on top of the other image. So the cheese here is on top of all the other ingredients. We can tell that. Now, if I want to move this below the other one, I can just drag it down until it goes to the bottom. So similarly to dragging layers up and down, we can also do the same with objects. However, in these cases, it might be easier to use the keyboard shortcut, which is Command or Control left square bracket to move something backwards and the right square bracket to move it forward or in the front. Of course, you can also right click on an object and then choose range and choose bring to front or send to back, which both by the way, have their own keyboard shortcuts. It's the same as I showed before. Just adding shift can move it to the extreme, either to the very front or to the very back. Yes, you can see all the four arrangement options and their keyboard shortcuts here. So these are all features we use to change the stacking order within an in design layer. Besides the layers that you create in an in design document, you might also have layers inside an image in case you are using a multi layered file like a photoshop document or a TI so in these cases, you might have maybe an adjustment layer that you created or some text elements in your Photoshop file that you would want to access directly within in design. So I want to show you how this works. I am just going to select this image. First of all, I everything else to make sure I have the right object selected. And then I am going to right click on this and show you the option called Object layer options. So this is a feature you will only see if you have a multi layered image file. But right now this only has a single layer. So if I want to make changes to this in Photoshop, I can hold down the alter option key and then double click on the item for it to show up in Photoshop. And we can see this is an image that was masked out. I created a vector mask to crop out the background. But besides this, maybe I want to add an adjustment layer. And in this case, I'm just going to use something obvious like gradient map. Which I can then change from the default gradient to something, let's just say red and then pick one of these and maybe just invert or revert the colors like that. So that's obviously not the right color for this composition. But let's just say this is how I want to use it. All I have to do is to save this file in Photoshop. So save and then we could even close this if we wanted to. But I'm just going to jump back to in design, and you can see now we have this automatically updated here. And if we right click on this and choose Object layer options, it will also show that gradient map available to turn off or on directly within in design. So we don't have to leave and go back to Photoshop to change this. You just have to make sure the preview option is on to be able to see live the changes that you're doing. So technically, you are using the layers panel of Photoshop within in design. So it's a really cool feature, and it's worth mentioning that this Photoshop file, of course, is linked. So whenever there is a link between the source file and in design document, you can also decide on the behavior of these files. So by default, whenever you update link. So for instance, here, I turn off the gradient map, that will be remembered within in design. And even if I use that gradient map within Photoshop, it will still keep it turned off here inside in design. However, you can say use Photoshop's layer visibility if you always want to make sure that the version you see in in design is the most recent updated version directly from Photoshop. So it's important to remember to check this feature. I'm just going to click Okay. Now, again, there is just one minor thing worth mentioning. If you ever end up creating layers inside a file like a Photoshop file, and then you delete those layers. So in this case, I'm just going to delete this gradient map and save this file. So not saving in a different filename, just simply saving it back to a single layer version. And then I come back to in design, notice that it's going to turn into a missing link. So you just have to be careful. If you introduce layers in a multi layered file like PSD, TIF, and so on and so forth, and then you delete all layers but one, it will still have a missing link warning in design. That's just a thing that you have to pay attention to. So if I go back to the links, I can double click on the excamation mark here, or I can also double click on the excamation mark here, and then it will tell you that the file which we use, this Photoshop file has different layers than the imported version. So the link will be updated with the source files current layer visibility settings. We can click Okay. So this will only happen if you tell in design that you prioritize the layer visibility that you used in design over the actual Photoshop files layer visibility. Remember that option that I showed you in here, so if we use the other option, this warning and error message wouldn't happen because the design file would automatically update to the single layer version of the Photoshop file, so we wouldn't have to do this extra step. That's just a side note. Again, don't worry. If this feels or sounds a little bit complicated, they won't be asking questions about this, or at least the questions about layers won't be as complicated as it sounds. 31. 3.2.a.1 Document setup and Start Page Number: While in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, I would argue that the layers panel is probably the most important one to always keep an eye on. In Adobe in design, I probably would say the pages panel is the one that is extremely important, maybe even more important than the layers panel. And that's because in in design, most of the time you would be working with multiple pages. So multi page document and in case of a magazine, you might end up having more than 100 pages or in case of a book, you can even end up having hundreds of pages. And the Pages panel is the one that you will rely on a lot to navigate and move around the document, but also to make important changes. So first of all, for navigation, what you can do is to double click on any of the spreads or pages in your pages panel. So that's a quick way to move between them. And in some cases, you might need to wait a little bit, so it might take long to load if there's lots of high resolution images, for instance. And this file, by the way, that I'm using here, is a project that we put together from scratch in the Adobe Indesign Fast Track course. So if you are interested to know how to build something like this from scratch with all the advanced settings in design for magazine layouts, then I highly recommend to check that course out. But, of course, you can open the file and take a look at how it's built and how all the styles are set up. But what we are focusing on right now are the pages, and you can see we have four spreads, but they are not starting from page one. And there's also no single page or cover page, and there's already a spread to start with. That is something that I already showed in the previous chapter. I just wanted to make sure that you're familiar with this. So if I create a new document with Commando Control N, it's a setting that you can specify here, the starting number. So if that's set to number two, for instance, then we will have already a spread to begin with, as long as the facing pages feature is also turned on. So if I create this new document, notice how it already starts with a spread. Of course, this is something you can change at a later time as well. So coming back to this project, if I go up to the file menu, I can find document setup. So you want to come back here, and this will let you change the start page number. If you have the preview on, you can even see this updating live. So if I set this to 52 and I click somewhere else, immediately, the page numbering will update. I can just click Okay, before I leave this dialogue box, I just wanted to mention that we can also globally change the page size here and even the orientation if we want it to we can also globally for the entire document, change the margins and even the bleed and the slug. So these are all things that we specify at the beginning when we create a new document. But when you come back here, you can still change these, and even the intent of the document can be changed at a later time. So even though you started working for print, you can change that later if this project ends up being more digital 32. 3.2.a.2 Adjusting page size: I wanted to also bring your attention to another important feature called Adjust Layout. But before we check that, I just want to show you what happens if I change an attribute like the height. So if I change this to 350, increasing it a fair amount, and then I click Okay, you will see it updating and we can see throughout the document. When you use this feature, it just simply adds space to the document. So I increase the height. It will keep the original content in the center, and it will add the space on top and bottom, but nothing else will happen. So no dynamic adjustments will happen to the document. Now, compared to this, I'm just going to undo this step and go back to the document set up from the file menu. So compared to this, if I go to the adjust layout option, so I click on this button, it will have a different result. So I will type in 350 millimeters for the height again. And I will want to keep the margins the same and the bleed as well as before. I'm not going to ask to adjust the font size. I want to keep those intact. I just want in design to rearrange all the elements to this new taller page format. And I even want to adjust all the locked elements. So if there's something locked in the current setup, I want those also to be adjusted. So now if I click Okay, notice how we have this taller version, and we have a bit of the text missing here, but we can see that there is no white gap on the top and the bottom. So in design did a good job in general to reshuffle things. But it's even more noticeable here on the next spread. So it did a brilliant job reformatting everything. And then, again, here, and then once again here, the biggest giveaway that we have a taller page format is that the text now doesn't flow onto the last page. So our text flow ends here, and these are empty frames on the right side. That's just simply because we created more space vertically in the document, and that's why the text doesn't run all across the entire document. I'm just going to undo this and show you the last page. The text is supposed to end here. Adjust layout is a very useful feature, and there might be questions in the exam where you have to know the difference between just simply resizing the document or using the adjust layout option. You should also know that you can change the size of a particular page or spread from the pages panel. So if I come to the first spread, I can go down here and click on this second icon. Which is the edit page size option. And here, maybe I can choose a three, which is going to make these selected pages much bigger. So you can see the original size there and obviously the expanded space that we have for a larger page size. Now, if I have just a single page selected, let's say, the one on the right, and then I go here and change this again to a three. That's also possible. So you don't have to have an entire spread selected for this. Whichever page or pages are selected will be affected by this option. And by the way, this is a good example to show that you can have completely different page sizes even within a spread whether they are taller or wider, they can be attached together. And you can also use a tool from the toolbar to change the page size, so you don't have to rely on that icon in the pages panel. So the tool that you are looking for is this one called page tool. But this you can select either left or the right page in this case, and then you can start dragging it out. So for instance, here, if I wanted to make it wider, I can drag it out, but notice what happens if I let go, it snaps back to the original size. So what you want to do is to hold down the older option key while dragging and make sure you keep holding it down even after you let go the mouse, that's going to make the change permanent. So you now increase the size of this page, and we can actually see the size while it's being selected with the page tool here on the control bar or options bar. So here we can see the width is now 290 millimeters. I can change this and maybe I can change it to 300. However, one thing you want to make sure is before you change it from here, you want to change the reference point. And in this case, because it's aligned to the left edge or the spine is on that side. So we have this reference point selected. Now, it's going to increase the size towards the right. So the left side is locked in a way, or that's the reference point. So if I type in 300, it's going to increase it to the right side. Compared to if I have the center point selected, and I maybe add another 50 here, so 350. Notice how it's pushed the other page to the left as well, so it starts messing things up. I'm just going to undo that. I just wanted to show you one last thing and that is why this tool wouldn't automatically change the page size. Why do we have to hold down a modifier, the alter option key? So the reason for that is because there is another feature called the liquid layout behavior, which can be turned on from the layout menu. So if you go up here, you can choose liquid layout, and I'm going to actually undo this page size changes first. Then I choose scale. And now if I start dragging the page, notice how certain elements can update as I'm moving this. So this is just a way to preview how the elements would react to page size changes. But it would still snap back to its original state. So it's a good way to preview each of these liquid page rule options. So recenter is another one which works quite well. So it doesn't just scale, but it keeps the original center point of the page. Then we have object based. Again, works like that, similar to the previous one and if I choose controlled by parent, that again is going to give a little bit different option. And we can, of course, check this on these other pages as well. So I'm just going to choose re center here, and we can see how that works compared to scaling, for instance, where everything is updating in size as well when we are changing the size. I'm going to turn the liquid page rule off, by the way, you can also turn off from up here as well as long as you have the page tool selected. 33. 3.2.a.3 Moving and shuffling pages: One other thing worth mentioning about the page tool is that you can also use this not only for scaling pages, but also to move them around. So you can, for instance, move a page up or down and notice when you do that, the actual contents of the page is not moving. So you can reposition the page without the contents moving, which is a quite interesting feature as well. However, if I move this back up here and align it, and I turn on objects move with page, then we can also move them together. So in this case, it's going to move the entire page with the contents up and down. But in case you want to change the order of the page, you wouldn't want to use the page tool for that. Instead, you would want to use the pages panel, where you can select a spread like the cover spread, for instance, and we can drag it to the end. So when you see a vertical line appearing, that's when you can let go, and you will know that that's where the page is going to move. And if I zoom out with Control Command minus, we can see that now it's at the end of the document, while if I want to move it back to the front, I can just drag it up there. And if you're a fan of dragging pages around like this, you can also select them first. The pages you want to move and then right click on the thumbnail and choose move pages. When you use this feature, you can be more specific exactly where you want to move them. You can also just say you want to move it at the end of the document or start of the document. You can say after a specific page or before a specific page, and you can even specify to move these pages to a different document, so we could even move it into this other untitled document if I wanted to. And I can also decide to delete them after moving, which would mean like a cut instead of a copy. That feature, by the way, will only show up when you are targeting another document. So as long as you are moving the pages inside the same document or current document, the delete pages is not going to be available. If you just want to move to a specific page, of course, simply just double click on a thumbnail will take you there. However, with a large document, you might want to use a shortcut, which is Command or Control J, I remember it as jump to page, although the feature itself is called go to page. Here you can use this dropdown to find the page you are looking for. And, of course, besides the actual pages, we can also jump to parent pages, but we will talk about those in another lesson. So so far, I just wanted to show you we can easily jump to another page like this. But this dropdown is also available from the status bar here. So we can also jump to another page with that. It's important to mention that margins and columns can be changed individually on pages, so not for the entire document. So if I have a single page selected like this one, I can reveal the margins, so we can see the margins and also the columns. And if I come to the layout menu and choose margins and columns, so notice is different from the document set up, which would be a global change. If I just choose margins and columns from layout menu, this is going to be only affecting the currently selected page or pages. So here I can change maybe the top margin to only be 20 millimeters, and maybe the columns I'm going to change to two columns. Then immediately these changes will happen on this page, so we can click Okay, and we can see both the margin is now higher compared to the other page, and also we only have two columns instead of 14 columns that I had in the original layout. So again, between the pages, you can see the difference here on the left side. Just going to undo this and it's going to reformat the text accordingly. And there is another feature that is a bit confusing at first, if you have never heard of it before, it's called Allow Document pages to shuffle. So let me show you what it means. If I right click here on any of these thumbnails, I will see the option, allow document pages and also selected spreads to shuffle. This means whenever you move pages around in the document, it's going to still maintain the original structure of having two pages in a spread. So even if I move a single page, let's just say this one to the end, it's going to reshuffle the pages. That's where the term comes from. So it's going to realign them into a facing pages or spread format. So it's not going to affect the structure. However, if I right and turn this option off, so allow document pages to shuffle. Now, if I start moving one of these pages around, I can even attach it to an existing spread or put it completely on its own. So let's say I just drop it here. The notice that we now ended up having a single page in the middle of the document and another single page at the end of the document. So because we turned off the shuffling, it's not creating that consistent facing pages layout, but this allows to even combine multiple pages together if we wanted to. Like this page we could drag and attach to the right side of this existing spread, and maybe we could even drag this one and attach it here. So we could create this four pages long spread. So this will work as long as you have the shuffling turned off. Now what happens if I right click and choose Allow document pages to shuffle again, it's going to ask us whether we want to maintain the current number of pages of these spreads. If we say no, it will reshuffle them into two pages per spread. But if I say yes, it's actually going to preserve this combination of four pages in a single spread. But now, if I start moving this around, it will be able to maintain the rest of the structure the way it was. 34. 3.2.a.4 Alternate layout: I want to show you another important feature, the alternate layout. So this is not adjusting the layout. It's to create an alternate layout. So in some cases, you might need to have a different format or aspect ratio to adapt the document for a certain medium. And for this, what you need to do is to go to the layout menu and choose Create alternate layout. Once you choose that, you can then rename this. So the current name it would recommend is custom H, which I guess would stand for horizontal because currently we are using a more vertical or portrait format. And for this, it also recommends a landscape format or orientation that works, and the rest of the options, you can just keep the way it is. So we can just click Okay. Now what happens is within the pages panel, you will have two columns. You will have your original layout, which is the portray format, and then we have the new format, which is the landscape format. Now, when you use the default settings, which again, I can just show quickly here that includes link stories, this will allow you to make changes in one of the layouts, and those will carry on onto the other alternate layouts, not immediately, but it will allow you to quickly update them. So just to demonstrate this linking stories feature, if I come to this part here in the original layout, I can change this word to legends. So myths was the original word. I changed it to legends, and then I can jump over to the landscape format and notice how we have this little excamation mark on the text frame. If I click on it, it will update the text according to the original layout. There's one more thing that's important to mention since we now started creating alternate layouts that you can actually change the view of the pages. So if you right click here underneath your pages in the pages panel, you can choose view pages, and you see when you use the alternate layout, that's the one that's going to be selected. But still, you can switch to see things either vertically or horizontally. And if you do that, you will see all of the pages from both layouts listed directly beneath each other. So we will see them up here and below. So instead of having them split into two columns, you will see them like that. And in case you choose view pages vertically, it can even be aligned like a single column. So even though I have more space here, it's not going to move them anywhere, it's just going to keep them the same way. You would see them here in the document window, laid down from top to bottom. But there is one important reason why you would want to stick to using the alternate layout option in case you have alternate layouts in a document. And that is because you can click on this drop down either here or here and choose the option split window to compare layouts. So if you do this, you will be able to see them side by side. So we can see one version here and the other version there on the left. So this could be a great way to work simultaneously on both layouts. And of course, if you then change your mind and you don't need one of these alternate layouts, you can again, click on the same drop down and choose delete. So if I do that, I'm just going to say, Okay. And once that's deleted, of course, there's no point of splitting the view anymore. So we can just click Unsplit window. And that way we just see a single version of the document. Remember, by right clicking in the pages panel, you can go back to seeing them horizontally or vertically. Again, there is no point of seeing that drop down anymore if we don't have an alternate layout in this document. 35. 3.2.b.1 Parent pages basics: Use parent pages in Adobe in design for repeated elements that you would want to use across multi page document. And usually for magazines, that would mean footers and headers. And for instance, in this case, we have this footer here with the folio, which is the page number. And on the left side, if I just jump over to the left side, we have the same layout just mirrored. So we have, again, the folio and some text. And the most important thing to recognize is that a parent page element won't be directly editable within the document pages. So you will see a dotted outline around these parent page elements, so I won't be able to move them or make changes to them. I will have to find the corresponding parent page and make changes there. Now, in this document, I actually have a more complex setup where I even have based on parent pages. And it's a great example to understand why that is necessary. For now, I just want to show you that the main parent page is this one here on the top, the A parent, which will have every component in it that I would use throughout this magazine. So the A parent has the Foote section, which again, can show here at the bottom. And for instance, I want to update this to 2025. I can just easily change the date there, and probably I will have to change it on the right side as well. So let's just zoom in. Now, actually, there's only a URL there, so we only needed to change it on the left side. And straightaway, if we go back to page 36, for instance, in these document pages as well, it's going to show 25 and was on the last spread as well. So we only had to change it in one place, which was the main parent page. And because of the based on parent pages, this one single change will not only affect the document pages, but also the additional parents that are based on this current parent page. So the AA parent, you can think of as a variant of the original a parent, it includes pretty much everything, but these icons indicating the section within the magazine or the type of article, which in this case, he refers to experiences, but I can just zoom back. And if I switch to the variant or AA parent, then I won't have that detail there. Actually, in the AB parent, we don't have any of the elements visible. So even the footer section is empty. So we can see that once again, the original parent, which includes everything, then we have these variants that includes less and less details. So why was this necessary? Why would I want to have an AB parent where none of the elements are visible? That was necessary because of the cover spread or the main intro spread, where, of course, we wouldn't want to see most of the elements. But notice that we still see the text here at the bottom. However, here it's set to white. And if I go back to that AB parent option, even though we didn't see the text, it was actually there it's just set to white. So it can be a little bit confusing because, of course, white background and white text, but if I drag it down here on the pasteboard, you can see, actually, it's just white. So it's the same formatting, same elements, just set to white. And again, that's a variant of the original parent page. How do we create parent pages? The first parent page is something you don't have to create. Every new document is created by default with an A parent. So you can see that here in this empty document. We already have an A parent spread, and on all of the pages, these will automatically be applied. So if you see the little A icon on the thumbnails, that means they are connected to a parent. By the way, if you want to remove the connection, you can either drag this non thumbnail onto a page, or you can even select multiple pages and then right click and choose apply parent to pages and just choose none. That way you can very quickly remove the connection to the parent page. And even if you are not using parent page, you won't be able to delete it. You must have at least one parent page for each in design document. 36. 3.2.b.2 Overriding parent page items: Just to make sure that you understand how parent pages work in case you have never worked with them before, I'm going to use this empty document to practice this. You can just create an empty document with a couple of pages in it just so you can follow along. So I'm just going to add a container, maybe the ellipse frame tool, click and drag and draw a perfect circle by holding down the Shift key. And then I'm just going to give this color, let's say, scion. So we have a science circle on the A parent on the left side. And I'm going to alter option, click and drag and also hold down the Shift key to keep it aligned, move this on the right side, and I will also keep that scion so we know that these are the circles on these pages. And then if I drag a parent onto the first page, which is page number two, it can be applied only on that side. And if I drag it onto the right side, now it's applied on both left and side of those pages. Now, just like we've done before, if I select all the rest of the pages, I can quickly apply the same parent page to all of these by using apply parent two pages and then choose a parent to pages 4 to ten, and immediately the circles will appear. And directly within the document, I won't be able to select these shapes, just that primary text frame that's on top of them, but the shape itself I won't be able to select. I would have to go back to the A parent to do the change and move one of these shapes around and notice how immediately all of those shapes will update in all of the pages wherever the master page or parent page is applied. By the way, parent pages used to be called Master pages. So if I ever say that, that's because for a long time, they used to be called Master Pages, then they decided that it is not a good time anymore, and they changed it to parent pages. Before I create another parent page, I wanted to show you that you can actually create a local override of a parent page item. So I'm just going to come here and I'm going to make sure that text frame on this page is locked. So there is a primary text frame that I don't want to interact with. But I'm going to hold them command or control and shift together, and then click on this object. So that is a way to override a parent page item. And by the way, you can also do this by selecting the page from the pages panel, right click on it and choose override all parent page items. This is a little bit more crude, though, because if there's multiple items, it would affect all of those, and they would be all overridden. But if you want to use this often, you can even remember the shortcut for it. So if I do this, once again, that circle is now accessible. And by the way, notice, if I undo this step, that circle just appears out of nothing here in the layers panel as well. So it's not just locked or hidden. It's not even accessible at all. It's not even visible in the layers panel until it's over ridden. And the reason for that is because once you do this, it actually physically copied from the parent page onto the page itself. So now, this can easily be moved around. And notice whenever I move this around, it will only move here, but not in the other pages and also not in the parent page. So I'm not affecting the source. I am just making the changes here in this current page. And if I ever change my mind and I want to reset this to go back to the way it was, the easiest thing to do would be to reapply the original parent page, which you can do either by right clicking and choose apply parent to pages or drag the corresponding page onto the page thumbnail. So that will reconnect it and again, remove that circle that we saw here in the layers panel while it was overridden. 37. 3.2.b.3 Multiple parent pages: Now, you can, of course, have multiple parent pages in a document which we've seen already in the previous example. So how do we do that? You can just right click here in the parent section, which by the way, you can extend or collapse by dragging this line. And when I choose new parent, I will be able to choose a prefix for it. By Dfault it would be B. And the name as well can be changed from parent. You can give it some name that will help you to remember why you created that. And you can also control the amount of pages for the spread or parent spread. And of course, you can also set up the size and orientation. But also, we will come back to this option here, the based on parent. For now, I'm just going to keep it none, so there won't be any connection between a parent and B parent. Just to see a difference here, I'm going to create a rectangle frame. So I'm going to click and drag and hold down the Shift key. This is going to create a perfect square, and I'm going to use red fill color on this. And I will also alt or option shift drag this here on the right side. So now we have this B parent, but currently this is not used in the document at all. However, I can start putting it in. And notice, for instance, here, on the left side, we have the B parent applied. On the right side, we have the A parent applied. So in in design, you can combine multiple parent page layouts in a single spread. And just like before, we can very easily reapply parents by drag and dropping whichever we want on each of these pages. Now, let me just make it clear that you can duplicate parent pages without having any connection between them by simply just right clicking and choosing duplicate parent. So this way, it's going to automatically be called C parent, but there won't be any connection between these two. So I can move these shapes around, maybe move them a bit down, and maybe change their color just like both of them. So now we have C parent. Although it's a square, it has no connection to the B parent layout. However, if I right click and choose new parent, and then in the dialogue box before I change anything, I'm going to say, I want to create a variant of B parent. Once I choose that, I can now say maybe this could be called B, B like this. So it's a variation or B A actually would make more sense. So this is the first variant of the B parent, and then I click Okay. This automatically will include those two red squares but they won't be editable because the source of these are on the original be parent. So in a similar way, you would have a child parent relation between a document page and a parent page. You can also have the same thing between two parent pages. And this way, we would be able to create an alternate version of this by adding maybe another additional shape here. Just let's add another square on top of this, and I'm going to give it another color, maybe yellow. And I can also do it on the right side. But most importantly, we want to also have this applied to some of these pages like that, you can see BA, that's the variant of B parent. But now if I come back to the original B parent, where we have these red squares, if I select these and start moving them around, notice how they can update not only here, but also on the variant. So I can move this down while the yellow squares will stay in the original position. So you can almost think of this as two parent pages applied at the same time. So the red squares are coming from the original B parent, while the yellow squares are coming from the variant, which is called B a parent. Don't worry. This might sound very confusing, and really you only have to understand this if you work on really complex long format documents. And in the exam, they won't go into this much depth. I just wanted to make sure we cover this properly to assure that they can't really give you any tricky questions about this, and you will always know what each of these features are for. But just to see an actual useful way of using parent pages, I also wanted to end this on a simple feature. So I'm going to use the type tool, and on the A parent, I'm going to create a text frame here on the bottom. And then I will go to the type menu and choose insert special character markers, current page number. So this is what you would normally use to have a page number marker. It's a variable that can update based on where it is in the document and I'm just going to make sure it's aligned to the right, and maybe we can make it slightly bigger, so let's just increase the size like that. Now, if we jump to page three, that's going to change to three on page five, it's going to say five, but it's not going to show up on these other pages because these parent pages and variants don't have that specific item on them. But the good news is that even if you created multiple parent pages and you forgot to base them all on the original a parent. You can still do this by selecting the parent pages. You can even select more of them. Hold down Command or Control or Shifke, select multiple pages or parent pages in this case, and then choose apply parent to pages and then choose a parent, then click Okay. But the good news is that in case you forgot to have a connection between the original parent page and all the additional parent pages, this is actually something you can fix later on. So for instance, I can come back to B parent I can right click on this and I can go into the options for it, and I can even change the based on feature at any point later on. So I can connect this to a parent and then I click Okay. Notice how immediately the folio or page number textbook jumped onto the page together with the blue circle. But now if I come to maybe page number nine, it will show up there. Also on page seven, it will show up, and we could do the same thing for C parent. We can right click on this and also connect this back to the original A parent. And once again, it will carry over everything that we had there. Maybe one last thing I wanted to mention that whenever you work with parent pages and you actually select them to work with them, if you zoom out, you won't actually see the other parent pages. You have to switch between these and work with them individually. So they won't be laid out on top of each other like your normal pages. But they are also surrounded by pasteboard, just like normal document pages. 38. 4.1.a Frames: Frames are fundamental building blocks of Adobe in design. Pretty much everything that you would create would be inside the frame, and the two main categories are text and graphic frames. Now sometimes graphic frames are referred to as image frames, but essentially, these are the two main categories. And you can also have unassigned frames. So I'm going to show you the tools that you can use to create frames first. So we have the frame tools, which we can find here in the toolbar. The rectangle frame tool is the main one, but you can switch to ellipse frame tool and polygon frame tool as well. But let's just start with the rectangle frame tool. I'm going to click and drag to draw this frame, and I can hold down the Shift key if I want to make this a perfect square, and I can also hold down the space bar if I want to reposition it while I'm still drawing it. Of course we can align it to existing frames in the document using the Smart Guides, and we can also see the size of the frame that we are creating on the bottom right corner where our cursor is. So I'm just going to create a size like this. Now when we select this frame, we can actually see that it is an unassigned frame, so it doesn't have any contents yet. So it's just the container, but no contents inside it. And we can see the position of it here on the top, the X and Y values, and we can also see the size, the width and the height now, in case you don't see these options on the top, just make sure you turn on the control area. So if I take that off, that disappears, but I can bring it back. But of course, we also have the properties panel where you will be able to find these options in the transform area. And what I wanted to just show here is that you can, of course, change the size from the values here. So if you wanted to have maybe 100 by 50 points, you can easily change the size of the frame. But you can also drag any of the corners of the frame to increase or decrease in size. If you down the shift key, while dragging a corner point, you can constrain the proportions. And if you use the frame tool and just simply click somewhere on a page, you can actually define the size of the frame that you want to create. So if I just type in maybe 100 by 50 again, you can see that it's created exactly the right size for us. Can use the selection tool, the main selection tool to move frames around. And the best way to see these unassigned empty frames, of course, is to be in normal view because then you can see a cross over them. However, if I press W and we are in the preview mode, if I deselect this frame, I won't even see it there because there is nothing assigned to it. So it's completely transparent. So how do we add content to a frame? It's very simple. If we use the type tool, for instance, we can just click on the frame. By the way, I selected the type tool by pressing T on the keyboard, but it's here in the toolbar. So clicking on this particular frame will turn this into a text frame. And now I can go to the type menu, for instance, and choose fill with placeholder text. And we can see that this turned into a tax frame. Now, one of the main differences between an unassigned frame and a tax frame would be that this will have automatically a tax flow, which is indicated by this small square here at the bottom right corner. And if I make this tax frame smaller, we can see the red plus sign showing overflow. While this frame obviously doesn't have that feature. If I load the overflown text into my cursor by clicking on that red plus sign, I can also turn this unassigned frame into a text frame by simply clicking on it. So this is going to load that additional text in here. And now we have a text flow between these two frames. To reveal the text thread between these two frames, we can go to the view menu and then choose extras and show text threads. There is even a keyboard shortcut for and once we have that, once again, we have to be in normal view for this to appear. We will be able to see that, but only if either the left or the right frame is selected. So that's the text thread, and the two squares which is connected by this thread would be called the outport. That's the one on the right side of this frame, and the inport which is here on the second frame. So it's called outport because that's where the text is leaving the frame and input because that's where the text is coming into it. It's important to be familiar with these terms, even if you know how they work. You should know the names for them because I've seen these being asked by just showing a graphic like this, and they would ask what's this particular thing called. Now we will talk and discuss how to work with text frames in much more detail later in this topic, but I just want to delete this and create another empty frame because I want to show you how to turn this into a graphic frame. So to place content into an unassigned frame and turn it into a graphic frame, you would want to have it selected and then press Command or Control D. And I'm just going to choose Open once I found an image, and this is now turned into a graphic frame. Graphic frames immediately, we can see that there is a little chain icon here on the top, meaning that it's a linked asset. And whenever you work with an image frame, you will also see this content grabber icon here in the middle. Once again, we will talk a little bit more about this, how to use it. But for now, I just wanted to make sure you can differentiate the three types of frames. So once again, unassigned frame looks empty like this, text frame which has some text inside it and a graphic frame which will have either vector illustration or a photo placed inside it. It's important to mention that you can also define frames with the shape tools. They look almost identical to the frame tools with the main difference that these would be created with some visual attributes assigned to them, whether it's a stroke or fill. So for instance, if I select the rectangle tool, the default setting would be no fill and black stroke. So if I just draw something with this, you see, it's going to be also a frame, but it will already have this stroke around it, which in this case is a special type of stroke attribute the thick thin, but we can change this back to solid. And of course, we can change the size of this from the properties panel. And even though this looks slightly different from a completely empty frame like this here on the right side, it would still be considered an unassigned frame because once again, it doesn't have any content. So even if I change the fill color, let's just change that to sin and I go to the object menu on the content, I can see this is an unassigned frame. So simply just having a fill and a stroke color assigned to a frame would make it into a graphic frame. That's also important. I don't think they will be asking tricky questions like this, but it's important to be familiar with the terms and the distinction between the different types of frames. So what happens if I want to turn this into a graphic frame or text frame? Well, I can also just right click on it and choose content and say, This actually needs to be a text frame. And once I do that, immediately, you can see the inport and the outport appearing. And if I use the type tool, I can just click inside it and start typing. Now, even though I turn this into a text frame, I can still change my mind and right click and choose content. Graphic. So now it will have that cross over it, meaning that it's ready to accept image that we can place inside it. And of course, if you have a frame that already has contents like this text frame here, these options won't be available. So I can go into content and you'll see these options are grade. The same thing would be for image frames. Once again, if I go here, I won't be able to convert it. So as long as you don't have contents inside a frame, you can easily change the type of content that you wanted to use. And last but not least, you should also know about the convert shape option, which allows you to convert an existing frame to another particular type of shape. So for instance, here, I have a rectangle frame. Maybe we can use the one which has fill and stroke around it. And if I want to change this, I can go to the object menu and go down to Convert shape. And you can see a couple of options here. Maybe let's change this into a ellipse. And the good thing about this feature is that it's going to keep exactly the same original width and height of the frame, and also, of course, the appearance of it. And by the way, this feature can also be accessed from the bottom of the properties panel under quick actions. So if you click on this, you can maybe choose rounded rectangle. By the way, the corner radius when you're using round corners can be adjusted with this little yellow square. So if you click on that, you will be able to edit the corners. If you hold down the Shift key, you can even adjust these individually. And if you hold down the alter option key and click on them, you can change the corner style. There's a couple of different options until you go back to having no corners applied. What you can also do, of course, if you want to be more specific with the size of the corner radius is to come here into the properties panel, and under appearance, you can find corner and we can just type in maybe 15 points, and we can also choose which style we prefer. So maybe I can just choose Bevel. If you want to be even more particular, you can click on the word corner, which will bring up the corner options. And here you can even have each corner specified independently or individually by taking the chain off. Now I can change maybe the top left to be fancy, the bottom right to be rounded, and so on and so forth. And of course, if you have the whole frame selected and you want to quickly revert it back to having no corner effects, you can just set this back to none, and that will revert it back to its original state. 39. 4.1.b Graphic frames: When it comes to working with graphic frames, the most important thing to learn is that you can make changes to the container itself without affecting the contents and vice versa. So it's almost like working with two entities that are linked. So the container is the frame itself, which I can use to change what I see from the contents or the image. So in a way, adjusting the corners or edges of the container, we are cropping the image. So we are revealing parts of it or hiding parts of it. You can also consider this mask so this is a very straightforward and simple thing that you just have to get used to if you haven't used that all being designed that much. Now, if you want to scale something or transform frame or graphic frame, you would want to hold down the command or Control key and start dragging that way, but this would end up also stretching or distorting the image. So you also want to hold down the Shift key most of the time to constrain the proportions. So this is changing both the container and the contents at the same time. We are increasing or decreasing their size. While if I don't hold down any of the keyboard shortcuts that I mentioned, I would be just adjusting the container without affecting the contents. So that's when it looks like cropping or masking. Remember, I mentioned the content grabber tool, this circle in the center of a graphic frame. If you click and drag this, you can very quickly access just the contents. And this way, the container or the frame will stay in place. So it's not moving. We are just adjusting the position of the contents inside the frame. Now if you click once instead of click and dragging, this way, you will switch to having the contents selected, and you can even resize the contents without resizing the container. So if I hold down the Shift key now, I can resize the image inside the frame. I can also reposition it a bit. And maybe resize it a little bit even more, and now it fits better the frame itself. However, you rarely will have to use this technique because of frame fitting options, which we will be covering soon. But first, I just wanted to mention that if you ever have the contents selected and you want to quickly switch to the container, just simply double click, and then you will have the entire graphic frame selected again. So you can either click once on the content grabber tool and then click twice to switch back. Or if you click anywhere on the image twice, that is also a way of selecting the contents quickly. Now, if you have the content selected and you press backspace or delete, you will be able to maintain the container or the frame and just simply remove the contents. And in case you have an image inside a graphic frame and you want to just replace it, you can use the same shortcut while it being selected. Command or Control D for place or go to File Menu and choose place. And if I choose a different image, you will see this is going to replace the existing one. So let's talk about frame fitting options. These you can find both from the control area here on the top and also from the property s panel on the right. Or you can also right click and choose fitting to see the list of options. So the most common out of these would be the field frame proportional which is going to make sure the image is not stretched, but it's going to fill in the frame and focus also on the center of the image. Now, this is an option that can easily be overridden by simply just changing the crop or changing the size of the container. So now I can end up having a frame bigger than the original image with or wider than the original image width, and again, having some empty parts within the frame. If I want to reapply this, I can again use the same right click fitting feel frame proportionally or the shortcut, or we can also click on this icon here, feel frame proportionally to fix that problem. However, if you keep changing the frame size and you want to make sure the contents always going to follow the option or preference that you chose for frame fitting, you would want to use the autofit feature. So once you choose this one, and then you start changing the frame size. Notice how it intelligently follows the changes, and we even get a live feedback of what's happening. So that's a very, very useful feature, and I often use this for most of my in design projects. Now, if you want to make sure that the entire content is visible and nothing is being cropped, then you would want to use this second option called fit content proportionally. So the content will now be fully visible. And it's going to also keep the original proportions. But now, of course, because of the aspect ratio of this frame, we will have a lot of empty space on the right and on the left side. Now, if you click on the options for frame fitting here in the properties panel, or you right click, choose fitting and then choose frame fitting options, you can also specify where do you want the content to be aligned to. Instead of being in the center, you can also set it to the left or the right. And by the way, here, you can also change the fitting preference and whether you want the auto fit to be enabled or not. Since I still have the autofit option turned on, it will be able to again, apply the changes live while I'm changing the size of the frame and keep all the preferences that I chose, so it will use the fit content proportionally and aligned to the right side of the frame. Next two options out of the frame fitting features are less useful, like fit content to frame and fit frame to content. They are similar to the previous two, but without keeping the proportions. So in this case, if I choose fit content to frame, it would stretch it out, and if I use fit frame to content, it would just snap the frame back to the current state of the contents. Is actually something you can also access and do quickly by double clicking on a corner point of the frame so that will snap the container to the contents. It's a quick and easy way to remove any empty parts within a graphic frame. And last but not least, we also have the center content option. So in case you change the alignment and you want to quickly recenter the image, you can use this icon here, centers the content inside the frame. Last but not least, we also have a feature called Content Aware Fit, which will try to guess what's the best part of the image that can fit into the current frame. So if I click on this, it's going to give us this option. But of course, it doesn't always give you the best results. Like, in this case, it looks very strange to crop here. We can't even see the person. I definitely would want to show a little bit more of her in some cases, this would give you fairly good results. So once again, if I crop into it something like this and then choose content a fit, it's going to resize the content to the current frame, and it will give us a reasonably good crop and composition. I also wanted to mention that if you are using the direct selection tool instead of the main selection tool, you can adjust the corners of your graphic frames individually. So for instance, here, I have only this corner selected, and I can start dragging it down and create a more unique frame, more abstract shape like this or trapezoid. And if I wanted to further customize this, I could even use the Pen tool to either add new anchor points. Around the edges of this shape, so I can click maybe here. And then once again using the direct selection tool, I can move this anywhere I wanted. Or if once again, I use the Pen tool, I could hold down older option key and drag out the handles from a corner point to turn it into a smooth point. So this is something that is similar to how you would work with pots in Photoshop and Illustrator. So if you are familiar with that, this should be fairly straightforward and easy. But as you can see, we can create very unique custom frames by using these techniques. 40. 4.2.a Text frames: We've already seen an example of editing text inside the text frame by using the Lum Ibsen placeholder text, which once again, you can find from the type menu filled with placeholder text. So that's what we can see in this text frame. And by the way, because there is an overset text warning here, I just wanted to show you if you double click at the bottom center point of the frame, that's a quick and easy way to quickly reveal all the overset text. So once again, if I drag it up here, I can just double click there and it will extend the text frame down until we can see all the text inside it. By the way, if you have overset text, there's also a way to visualize what is missing by pressing Commando Control Y, which opens up the story editor, and this separate window will show the overset text. Can highlight it here. We can read it, and we can make changes to the copy without being restricted by the currently available frame size. We will talk more about the story editor later. I'm just going to press Commando Control Y again to switch back to the normal editing mode. Now, one of the other important and useful shortcuts that you should be familiar with is simply double clicking on a text frame. Well automatically give you a way to access the contents, which in this case, is the text. So we switch to text editing mode. And if you want to leave the text frame, you would just want to press Escape. So that's the way to exit text editing mode. By adjusting the corner point of a text frame, you are resizing the frame itself, but the contents is not going to resize, so you are not going to affect the text size. However, thanks to the text flow, the text will automatically rearrange and it's going to happen live. So we can see how in Design is restructuring these paragraphs inside our text frame. Another main difference between a graphic frame and a text frame is that while changing the corner point or adjusting the corner point of a graphic frame, you are cropping into the contents. In a way, you can say that we are also cropping into the text just like cropping into an image when we are working with a graphic frame, but it's still slightly different because here, thanks to the text flow, it constantly changes and adapting to the available text frame size. Besides using placeholder text, of course, you can also bring in text from external files. And for this, you can again use the place command. So go up to file menu and choose place and selecting a word document or a text file, you can import that text directly into your selected frame. Just to show you, I have this frame selected currently, and even though it has some text inside it, I can still use file place. And I'm going to use this file called sample text. It's a plain text document, which is the TXT file extension. So once I choose Open, it's going to load that text in here and I can extend the text frame just to reveal all the text inside. And it's also worth mentioning that if you had some text inside the text frame, whenever you're using this feature, it's going to replace it just like with graphic frames. So the original placeholder copy is now removed or deleted. But if you have a keen eye, you may have noticed that not only the text was replaced, but also the font or typeface that was used. So if I go back a couple of steps, you will see that originally we had a Serif font here, while once we brought in this text, it is now switched to a Sunserif typeface called acumen, and that is because when you are placing in text, you also bring in the formatting of the text. Now, in case you wanted to keep the formatting of the text the way it was originally in in design and just replace the text itself, then what I would recommend to do is to copy the text. So open it up in a text editor and choose Command or Control C. Then come back here and select all the text inside the frame. That's Commando Control A, and then use the edit Paste without formatting feature. So that's Commando Control Shift V instead of just using Commando Control V, which would be the normal paste option. So Paste without formatting will bring in or import the text from that text file or from the pasteboard, but it's going to keep the original formatting that we had in this document. In case you are importing texts from more advanced document file formats like Microsoft Word, then you will have even more ways to control how the word styles will be converted to your new in design styles. But luckily, this is something you don't have to worry about learning for the exam. Besides having text inside the text frame, you can also have it along a path, and it could be around an existing shape like an ellipse, or it could also be along an open path, something that we can create with the pen tool, going to create a path like this. So the best way to add text along a path would be to use the type on a path tool. You have to right click on the type tool and switch to this tool here. So I can click on the perimeter or the edge of this shape, and then I can start typing, or I can even place in text that is on the pasteboard. And in this case, we would have a start point and endpoint of the text. So this is the start point that I can move around with the selection tool, and this is the endpoint. Once again, we can move around easily. And of course, there is overset text here, which we can see because of the red plus sign. And similarly to this, we can also add the text here on this open path using, once again, the type on a path tool. We can start now typing or place in the text that we had originally on the pasteboard. And of course, we can remove the stroke. So if we set this to 0 millimeters, we can now read the text better, but we can still see that it is following that path that we created. And by using the direct selection tool, I can easily select any of these points, move them around, and see the changes happening live to the text that's set along the path. And the same applies, of course, to the shape here as well. So we can adjust these easily and see the updates happening live to the text. Last not not least, it's also important to mention the text frame options feature, which you can see when you have a text frame selected. You can either press Command or Control B or go to the object menu and choose text frame options. And this is an extremely useful dialogue box with a lot of important features like columns inside the text frame. You can find here, also inset spacing, vertical justification, and there's a lot of other things like column rules, baseline options, auto size, and footnotes. Not going to go through these because in the exam, they most likely won't ask you to use these. But throughout the next couple of lessons, we might come back to it, and it's just important to know where you can find this feature. 41. 4.2.b Character formatting: Formatting text is probably one of the main areas where in design really shines. So you can expect a lot of options, both for character formatting and paragraph formatting. And first, we will look at character formatting options. Now, we could spend hours just talking about these, but I will be focusing on the things that they might ask questions about in the exam. So first of all, you need to make sure you select the text that you want to make changes too. And in this case, I'm just going to select the first sentence. So having this selected, I will be able to change things like the typeface and the style of that typeface. So I'm just going to choose Caslon in this case, but maybe change it to myriad, which is a sensory font, and we can immediately see the change happening here. Then we can change the weight or style of this maybe to black Italic, and that looks definitely very different from the rest of the text. Now this is already one important thing worth mentioning that character formatting can be applied to even an individual character or any selections of text, while paragraph formatting will be restricted to an entire paragraph. So the smallest selection that can be controlled with paragraph formatting would be an entire paragraph. Now besides the font and font style, we also see the text size, which we can control in the character area within the properties panel. We can then also control leading, which is the distance between the lines of text. So that's something we can find here, and it can be reverted back to auto, which will be adding a certain percentage to the font size to ensure enough space between the lines for good legibility. Next, we have the option called Kerning, which we would normally use between individual character pairs. So if there's a text set in all capitals, for instance, this might be useful, and maybe I can show this in a separate area. So if I type in maybe world and then select this text and change it to all capitals with this option here on the top, so that's going to make it all capitals. And if we zoom a little bit closer, you will see that the R and the L feels much closer to each other than the rest of the characters. So especially between the O and the other two characters, it feels like there's a lot more space. So we can either position our cursor next to the letter R and then use Alter option key and right arrow to increase the spacing. Or we can keep this closer and maybe this one slightly closer as well and then just reduce the space between the O and the R by again using or option left arrow key this time. So there is cning adjusted, and we can actually see now the urning amount here. So when I position my cursor between these letters, see how the curing is changing. So here is -20 while here is plus 20. So that means that I increased the cning here and here I reduce the kerning amount. So yeah, we can see the custom values everywhere. And if I select the entire word and I go back here and set this back to zero, that's how it looked before kerning. And by the way, if I just keep the custom kerning on this word and I just copy it underneath it, I can now reset this one back to the default value, and then you can better judge the two under each other. So the original on the top and the manually kerned version below. Learning is actually something that we would mainly use when we work with larger texts like headings or titles. It's definitely not something that we would have to worry about when we work with body copy, for instance. Now, the next option is called tracking, which is very similar to kerning. But this is something that you can apply to an entire selection of text to increase or decrease the character spacing or letter spacing. So if I increase it like this, you can see how it adds more space between the characters, and I can also go the negative direction either using this dropdown or using alter option left arrow on the keyboard. So it's the same shortcut, but we would call it tracking if it's on a larger selection of texts and not individual character pairs. Of course, also similarly to resetting kerning values, we can also reset the tracking by going back to zero. Besides the options that we saw here, we can click on this icon to reveal more options for character formatting, including scaling options. So we have vertical scale and horizontal scale. This would stretch the text. So this is something that I would very rarely use. It's not something that would improve legibility or readability of the text. So it's good to know where you can find them, but I would advise against it most of the time. Then if I select one of these words by double clicking on it, I can show you the next option, which is called baseline shift. I'm just holding down the Shift key to increase this faster instead of increasing it by individual points. So this is actually something that can move the selected text and lift it from its original baseline. So if I have my rulers, I can just drop the baseline here. So that was the original baseline, and now this word here is elevated or lifted from its baseline by five points. I can also go below the original baseline, so I can set this to a minus value. And once again, I can just set it back to zero if I want to revert it. Another feature that you can use to distort your text is called skew. Again, it's something that I would advise against and instead use italic text wherever possible. And only in cases where you are working with a font or typeface that doesn't have italics, maybe this could be a last resort. Again, skewing is similar to distorting text vertically or horizontally. Most of the time, I would avoid this feature. But not least, we also have the option to change the language of the text. And this is especially useful when it comes to hyphenation. So in design is going to use the grammar rules for hyphenation depending on which language you are choosing. But there's also a lot of other reasons why you would want to always choose the right language for the text that you are working with. I just wanted to also show how to change the color of selected text. So this can be done from the properties panel by clicking on the fill option, and then we can just change the color there easily. Now, in case you are using these drop downs from the control area up here, you just want to make sure that the text option is selected, so the formatting will affect the text, and then you can choose the color you want. In case you have an entire frame selected, it's even more important to check what you are going to affect with the selected color. So in this case, you can see currently we have the container selected, and if I choose a color, it's going to affect the color of the container. So it adds a backdrop or background color. While if I undo this last step or remove this color, I can switch to affect the text with my formatting. And then if I choose maybe Sian now all of the texts will be colored with that swatch. And last but not least, it's also very important to know how to save a character style because that's the way you can reuse certain formatting throughout your document or even multiple documents. So if you select a text that you set up the way you want to reuse, you can go into the drop down here on the top in the control area and choose new character style. Or if you don't use the control area, you can switch to character styles here in the properties panel, and you can just simply click on the plus sign to create a new character style. Then you can give this a name. I'm just going to call it test for now. But once that's saved, you will be able to find this from the character styles panel. And it can be applied to any selection of text. So if I just select this sentence, for instance, I can just click on this to reapply that style. And in case I select all the texts here by pressing Commando Control A, I can also reset the formatting by clicking on none. But this by default might not remove the coloring of the text that we assign. So we can also reset that up here, set it back to black. Usually, what I would also recommend to do is to go to paragraph styles and click on clear overrides in the selection to make sure that any custom setting will be removed, and we have the text set back to the default values. And now, just to test our character style once again, I can click on an individual word twice and then choose the style that we save. You want to see the settings that were stored in this character style, you can right click on it and choose Edit, and here is a list of the settings that we stored in this style. And of course, the style itself can be updated easily. So if I want the text to look bigger, I can increase the size, and once again, I can select another word and apply the same style, and now it's going to be exactly the same. Of the biggest advantages of working with styles in general in in design is that you can stay consistent. So if I edit this style once again, maybe go back and change the styling from black Italic to light, it will immediately update both of those words according to the changes that I made here. 42. 4.2.c Paragraph formatting: Whenever you select the text frame or you highlight some text, you will be able to find paragraph formatting options and controls in the Properties panel right below the character section. And similarly to the character section, you can also reveal additional options if you click on the little dot dot dot icon. So this is the paragraph panel embedded into the Properties panel. But if you want to specifically see all of these options in a separate panel, you can just go to the Window menu, then choose type and tables and then choose paragraph. As you can see, we have the same options here. And I'm just going to keep this open just so we can keep track of all of the things that we have to cover. And first and most importantly, there are the alignment options, and these are very straightforward and easy to understand. We have left alignment, right alignment, and center alignment. Then we have the same options, but we justified lines. So we can justify the text with the last line, aligned left, center, or right, or have all the lines justified. Besides the, we also have two options to change the alignment based on the text frames position compared to the spine, so we can have it aligned towards the spine or away from the spine. But of course, these features will only be available if you have facing pages enabled in a document. Next up, we have the indentation section. For this, again, I'm going to place my cursor inside the first paragraph, so that's the one that's going to be affected. And it's important to mention that you don't have to have a whole paragraph selected for these features to work, it's enough to have your cursor placed inside somewhere in the paragraph. So first of all, we can do indentation on the entire paragraph. So that's called left indent. Besides this, we can also do indent on the first line only, and these two can even be combined. So you can have an indentation on the entire paragraph and an additional indentation on the first line. We also have the same options for the right side of the text. So write indent and also last line write indent. These definitely are less common, but it's great that we have the option to change these as well. Now, we also have spacing that we can control between paragraphs, and the first option would be space before the paragraph. So if I start increasing that, if there was any text in front of it, this would work. However, because this is the first paragraph in this story and text frame, this wouldn't make any difference. However, the space after the paragraph would still work. In this case, it feels like there is more than five millimeter space between these two paragraphs, and that is because there is an empty paragraph here. And the way you can see this or the easiest way to spot this is by going to the type menu and choose the show hidden characters option. So whenever that's on, you will be able to find these empty paragraphs, and I can just remove this by pressing backspace. Now we can see this is the end of a paragraph here, and this is the end of the story. So these special characters are used that are hidden normally, but they can help us to identify what's happening in our copy. So once again, coming back to the first paragraph, we can change the space between the paragraphs back to zero, and then that's how it's going to look like. Besides space before and after, if you have more than one paragraph selected, you can also start using space between paragraphs, which could be even more useful. So this wouldn't add any unnecessary space at the end of the last paragraph of a story, for instance. So I can just choose 10 millimeters and it will only apply this space between these paragraphs. Further down in this panel, we have the drop caps options. So this one you will start seeing only after you set the drop cap number of lines to at least two. So that means that the first character within the paragraph will be increased to the size that matches two lines. Three lines or four lines and so on and so forth. Then the next option, the drop cap one or more characters can decide how many of the characters you want to turn into drop caps. I'm just going to keep this on one. And I just wanted to mention quickly that kerning can also be used to separate or increase the space between the drop cap and the rest of the text. So if you hold down alter option key and press right arrow a couple of times, you can increase the spacing between the text and the drop cap. Shading and border are two features that are very similar to fill and stroke colors on a frame. But the main difference here is that they are applied to an individual paragraph. So in this text frame, we have two paragraphs. And if I have the second paragraph selected and I choose shading, only that text will get a background color. And we can decide on the color, of course. We can adjust that, and we can also change more options on this if we hold down the alter option key and click on this icon here. So that's going to open up the paragraph borders and shading options. And here we can control things like the tint, which is the intensity of the color. So if I said that all the way up to 100%, then we get the full cien color. And I'm just going to set this back to 20, but we have also corner size and shape, offsets, and so much additional options. I'm just going to click Okay and show you how the border option looks like. Once again, very similar to a stroke option on a frame. We can change the color. Maybe I'm going to use red in this case, actually, because the frame is already red, let's just use green. And once again, if you hold down the alter option key, you can jump back to the additional options. And as long as you have the preview at the bottom, you will be able to see the changes. So we can change the size or thickness of the border, and we can even introduce offset if we don't want the border to overlap the text. So I can increase that and immediately, we can see it better. Last but not least, we also have hyphenation. So once again, if we have an entire paragraph selected, these will be applied on the entire paragraph. So by turning off hyphenation, you can see these hyphens are removed and the text is reformatted accordingly. And next to hyphenation, we also have the baseline grid option, whether we want this particular paragraph to align to the documents baseline grid or not. So these can be controlled here. It's like a toggle, you can turn it on or off. Let me just select this second paragraph here and let's say I want to apply the same style on the first paragraph. The easiest way to do that would be to save this as a paragraph style. So I can come up here to the properties panel, and under paragraph styles, I can click on New style, and I'm just going to call it paragraph. Test. And now if I select this first paragraph, I can just choose from the drop down paragraph test. And the cool thing that you can see straightaway is that shading and border will be continuous, so there won't be an interruption as long as the two paragraphs are using the same settings. But most importantly, the paragraph style captured all the settings that we saved here. And if we want to make any changes to it, we can just come here and choose style options. And here you will see the extensive list of features that can be stored in a paragraph style. So this is the most complex style that you will come across in an Adobe design application. There's lots and lots of options here. And again, you don't have to be familiar with all of these settings, but it's important to know how to create a paragraph style and at least be familiar with the basic features that we went through, including in dense and spacing, paragraph border, and shading options, and the basic setting where you can turn the hyphenation on and off and also the drop caps that we mentioned. Again, there's a lot of additional options here, and there are many ways that you can even connect character styles and paragraph styles, which makes things even more interesting. If you want to learn more about in design styles and really master how to utilize them, I highly recommend to check out our in design fast track course where I go way deeper than this, and we really explore a lot of other techniques where we really make the most of the advanced capabilities of in design styles. 43. 4.2.d Text to outlines: A common feature of in design that they like to ask questions about in the exam is how you can turn text into outlines and then maybe even use them as a graphic frame. So I'm going to show you this in this example, and you can open it up. It's called text to Image, the Indesign document. Once you have the text frame selected, which by the way, is editable text here, all you have to do is to go to the type menu and choose create outlines. The shortcut is the same as the same feature in Illustrator. So it's Command or Control, Shift O. And once you do that, the text is now more like a vector shape, so it's not editable text anymore. We can use the direct selection tool, for instance, and select any of these points and start moving it around. What I wanted to do here is to turn this into a graphic frame. So all we have to do is to select the image in the background and then press Command or Control X to cut it out, then select the text and then use, edit, paste into. So that's Command Option or Control Alt V, and that is going to remember the original position of the image and turn the text that we had into a graphic frame. So now we can use the content grabber tool and move this around if we wanted to find the right place where maybe this boat is more visible, and that looks quite good to me. What you need to remember is once you turn text into outlines, you won't be able to use any of the text formatting options. Like, for instance, if you wanted to change the tracking or kerning, you won't be able to do that anymore. However, you can achieve similar results by using alternative techniques like using the direct selection tool, I could select this letter, let's say, R, and then using the left arrows on my keyboard, I can move this to the left slightly. And that way, I improve the kerning in the text. While most features in in design are non destructive, meaning that they are flexible and you can make changes to them at any time, turning text into outlines is permanent, so you won't be able to revert it back to editable text. But of course, you still have the flexibility to change things like assigning a stroke to this or replacing the contents of this graphic frame. 44. 4.2.e Text flow: We already discussed how text threading works, but I wanted to talk a little bit more about it and show you a couple of additional features that you need to be familiar with. So first and foremost, in this document, there's quite a lot of things going on like document grade 12 or 14 columns on each page, which makes it really hard to see what's happening. So I'm going to just change a couple of settings first, going into the view menu, I'm going to choose grids and guides, and I'm going to hide the baseline grid. Then I'm also going to hide the guides once again from the same section. Just choose hide guides. And you can also use the Command Control semiclm that's the shortcut for this feature. And last but not least, I also want to see the text threads. To visualize this, you would have to go to view extra show text threads. So once you have that on and you have one of these text frames selected, you will see how the text is flowing from this first spread to the second. It's coming in here, then it goes from here to there, so on and so forth. So we can see exactly how this story is threaded throughout the entire document. The first thing I wanted to show you is how can you remove a text frame from a thread? So for instance, I wanted this text frame to be removed. All you have to do luckily is to simply delete the frame, but the text inside that frame is not going to be deleted in this case. It will just simply reformat the text or reflow the text and utilize the remaining frame. So we can see that now we have obviously overset text here because we don't have enough frames. But if I make this frame bigger, for instance, we will be able to see the end of the story right there. Now, similarly to removing or deleting frames from an existing flow, you can also add frames. By using the type tool, I can just create a frame here, and then if I want to join this into the rest of the story, what I can do is to click on the input or in port of this frame and relink it to this one right here. And automatically, you can see that it's going to continue the rest of the text here. So I managed to add this frame into the thread or text flow. Another important feature you should be familiar with is called text wrapping, and most of the time this is actually applied to images or graphic frames. So for instance, in this case, if I wanted this image to interact with the text, I would use text wrap on it, and you can see this is already working. So as I move the image around, the text is reformatting itself. So here on the left side, it's even more visible how the image is pushing away the text, and it doesn't allow overlap to happen between the two. So the way you set this up is by using text wrap, which you can find here in the properties panel, and you just want to make sure you have one of these options selected. So by default, it would say no text wrap, and that's when the text will overlap the image. The reason why we see the text on top of the image is because the image is on a layer underneath the text layer. So we can see this here. The images are under the text. Well, of course, we can change that easily. But more importantly, if I have still the image selected, I can now choose wrap around bounding box, which is going to push the text away already. And if we wanted to add more options, we can find offset here, which is going to make more space between the image and the text. Last but not least, it's also important to mention that although having separate tax frames can be useful when you want to create a layout where the tax frames have different height, so they don't have a matching height. However, if you wanted to keep them the same height, it would make sense to turn these two tax frames into a single tax frame using two columns. So if I, for instance, delete this tax frame here and I make this frame wider, then I can go back to the tax frame options from the object menu or press Commando Control B on the keyboard, and there I can just choose two columns like that. Now, we can even balance the columns out to make sure that they are completely even. So the text on the left and the right is even. I can then click Okay, and maybe we can just move these down a little bit around here. 45. 4.2.f Add special characters or content: You need to know how to add special characters to an in design document. And one of these special characters that we already discussed in previous chapter is the current page number markers. And these, as you might recall, should be added on a parent page to make it consistent throughout the document. So here, if I go to a parent, this here is a page number marker. Can be edited once again from the type menu, insert special characters, markers current page number. So once it's placed in a text frame on a parent page, it will automatically update to whichever page number it needs to be. Now, although you can find a couple of special characters or symbols from this list, like the copyright symbol, there is actually another way to insert certain glyphs that might be hard to find otherwise. And to access these, you would want to go to the type menu and choose glyphs. So from here, you will be able to find all the available characters from a font, including ligatures and punctuations. But of course, you can filter for certain things like ornaments, or we can look for fractions, for instance. And, of course, depending on the typeface, there might be much less options than what you can see in this case, because Miniam pro is a very extensive typeface with lots of variation and alternatives for glyphs. But to show you how to add the glyph, all we have to do is to position our cursor in the text where we want to place it, and then simply we just have to double click, and that's going to place that glyph. Let's do Tick maybe let's do also one of these triangles and star or asterisk, and you probably get the point. So these are all added now to our text. Now to insert a table of contents, most of the time you would want to place that on a separate page, and I can put this at the beginning of the document if I wanted to. But for now, I'm just going to keep it here at the end, and I'm going to press T on the keyboard and then create a text frame. So let's say this is the frame I want to use for my table of contents. Then I can go to the layout menu and choose table of contents. And here you would be able to specify which paragraph styles you want to track throughout this document. So I'm actually going to use the headline and add that. So these are the styles that I want to turn into entries in the table of contents. And then I can specify also what formatting. I actually want to use it to stylize these entries. And in this case, I'm just going to use the body copy. And then once I click Okay, I can just simply click into this text frame and we can see that being edited already here. Now, this paragraph style, the heading was only used once in the document on page 37. And we can actually see that if we jump back there. So it's this one here on the top. But if I go further down in the document, maybe we can include one additional style to be tracked, maybe the one that is for the days of this itinerary. So we can see day two is using the subhead paragraph style. And if I go back to the layout menu, table of contents, I can find that one, so I can go down subhead. And add this also into the table of contents. And if I click on more options, I can even decide the level, whether this is the first or second level within the structure of the table of contents. And it automatically set it to level two, which makes sense. So I'm going to keep it on then I click Okay, and the table of content has been updated successfully. I get the message. I can click Okay, and I can go back to the last page and I can see exactly what's happening here. So while the heading is on page 37, each of the days are now listed with their corresponding page numbers. Another important feature you need to be familiar with is how indexing works in design. For this, you would want to first open the panel from window type and table index. And once you have this panel open, you would want to go back to the text and find something that you would like to index. Maybe the place Santorini could be one. And once this is selected, you can just go to the Index panel and click on Create a new index entry and then just click Okay. And scrolling down in the panel, we will find this showing up under S. So there is Santorini, and we can also see that it is on page 41. Just to have more than one item in our index, I'm going to also add the word or name acropolis. So I will add this as well. Click Okay. And also maybe let's go to a different page like here. And again, let's find something that we can add like this Greek mesa so let me select this, turn this into an reference as well. And now, if we go to the last page, we can just use the index panel and click on this icon called Generate Index. And then there's a lot of options here as well, but I'm just going to click Okay using the default settings and then click and drag to generate the index. And now we can see that the word Acropolis is showing up Santorini, as well, and Greek Mesa and obviously the corresponding page numbers as well. 46. 4.3 Selections: Using selections in in design are much more straightforward and simple compared to applications like Adobe Photoshop. And we actually already covered all of the things that you need to know about making selections. But just to recap, the most important tools that you want to work with are the selection tool and direct selection tool. Now, when would you want to use one over the other? But most of the time, selection tool is the one that you want to use to select the frames that you created in in design. Why with direct selection tool, you can select usually the contents of frames. So if I click on this image frame or graphic frame, immediately I selected the contents instead of the container. But it's good to know that you can also switch between what is currently selected by using the object menu, select sub menu. Here you can see the container and the content option. So I can switch quickly to container instead of having the content selected. Another reason why you would want to use the direct selection tool is to interact individually with anchor points of objects. Like this line here, I can select the top anchor point and drag it around. While with the normal selection tool, I can move the entire line around. I also mentioned a shortcut that I like to use in in design, that's the select next feature. So if I have multiple things placed on top of each other like a text frame and an image behind it, using the Commando Control key, I can click on this again to select what's behind. And then if I use the same shortcut again, I can also come back to the object in front. Although the keyboard shortcut is easy to remember and is definitely the most effective way of switching between these elements, it's also good to know that if you right click and choose Select, you can actually find the same options here. Next object above and next object below or even last object below and first object above. And using the command key actually replaces or utilizes this next object below feature. 47. 4.4.a Reusing contents: We already discussed a lot of things about how to work with text frames and graphic frames. However, there was one tool that we haven't used so far, and this might be useful to know for the exam. And this is called the content collector and content placer tools. It can almost be considered a single tool, which has two states. So first, you would want to collect things and then you want to place them. It's similar to a more advanced version of the pasteboard. So we can use the collector to click on images. Let's just collect some of these images here and you can see it's being placed here. We can also collect text, maybe this caption or that caption and then this map. And then I can maybe go onto the last page of this document, and then I can switch to the place option or just simply press B on the keyboard. With B, you can switch between collection and placement. So once I'm in the placement state, I can choose which item I want to place by using the right and left arrows on the keyboard, so I can very quickly go through all the items. And let's just say I want to place this image, I can just click and drag. And once it's placed in the document, it's removed from the conveyor. This is, by the way, called the conveyor. If you want to use something multiple times and you want to maintain it in the conveyor, you can also switch this setting here, the place multiple and keep in conveyor feature. So once I have that on, I can have multiple instances of the same element without it being removed from a conveyor. Now, if you want to remove things from the conveyor, just keep pressing escape on the keyboard. And then if you want to quickly load all of the elements from your document into the conveyor, you can also use this option, load conveyor. And if you want, you can specify which pages you want to use. So you can type in maybe only from page 34, you want images and elements or all pages even including the pasteboard, which is the area outside of the pages. And if I click Okay, this is going to load everything in here. And this feature will automatically create sets. So we have the Photoshop documents here. We have just normal images and graphics. So if I choose this, I can scroll through it or use the arrows here, these are all the graphics, and then we can go back to the other categories and choose whatever we are looking for. So in a nutshell, that's how you work with the content placer and collector tools, which is probably one of the most efficient ways of using contents that already exist in a document. 48. 4.4.b Transformations: We already talked about transformations in previous chapters, but I would like to repeat these and make sure you know where to find things. The easiest way to do transformations is to use the properties panel or use the dedicated panel, which you would find in the window menu under object and layout transform. Once you have an object selected like this image, you will be able to see its coordinates. So we can see the X and Y value for its center point currently. But we can change the reference point to indicate the top left corners position in this case in the document or the bottom right corner. So it's always going to change depending on your reference point. And you can also see the width and the height of this object. So we have these two values here, and of course, we can make changes to these. However, if you ever use the transform settings, I would recommend to first constrain the proportions by linking them together. That way you are not going to distort the graphic or image. If I change the width to 50 millimeters, for instance, we can see it maintains the aspect ratio. And also, by the way, the top left reference point was also used. So that's an anchor is going to keep that point in the same place and resize towards that point. So if I use the bottom right corner, for instance, and I make this even smaller, let's say, 30 millimeters, now that point was fixed during the transformation. Similarly to using the width and height, you can also use percentage values for scaling. And this is again, something that is worth keeping constrained in proportions. So if I want to make this maybe twice as large as it is right now, I could use 200%, and it's going to increase in size. Once again, it was set to the bottom right corner point. It normally would be better to use the center point when you're scaling. So if I go 50% and then go back again to 200%, now it's scaling from its center point. Rotate an object, we can use these quick actions, rotate 90 degrees clockwise or anticlockwise, or we can also use this drop down where we can choose any angle we wish, or of course, we can also type in a specific angle that we wanted to use. And the good thing about these angles is we can easily revert them back to zero at any time. We can also flip the image horizontally and also vertically. What I like about in design is that it also keeps track of the original orientation of an image, before it was flipped either horizontally or vertically. And this little indicator here would tell us if it's flipped or not. So if I right click on this and choose clear transformations, it can very quickly reset it. And this is how it's supposed to look like. So it's a capital P. But as soon as I flip it around, we can see how that P is showing us that it was flipped horizontally. And if I flip it vertically, we can again see that sign changing. So let me just clear the transformations again and show the last option here, which is shear. This is similar to what we used on text. Here, we can also share the image itself. And luckily, again, these things are non destructive. So if I change my mind, I can just reset it back to zero. 49. 4.5.a Spelling: When you reach the revision stage of an in design project, you would definitely want to do spell check. And this is something you can find in the edit menu under spell check spelling. But there's a couple of additional options here we will be looking at in this lesson. So first of all, if you choose check spelling, it's going to scan the document, and it's going to try to track down any issues in the copy. I can just skip through this and see the next one. Yeah. So for instance, this one is actually the name of a place and it's not recognized in the current dictionary for this document, which is set to English USA. But if we see this word showing up and we can tell that it's written correctly, we can just edit to the dictionary. Once we edit, that's not going to be considered grammatic error. Similarly to this word taverens, again, if this is something that we feel like should be added to the dictionary, we can just say add. So another instance where it's spelled without the S, once again, we can add that, and it just keeps on finding all of these Greek names of places, which we can all add or Suvlaki which is a type of dish. And yeah, it actually will only find these issues. And as soon as these are added to the dictionary, next time they won't be flagged. And once you went through the entire document, you can be sure that all the grammatic errors are fixed. If you want to take a look at your dictionary, you can just click on this button here, and you will see a list of the custom words that were added, and you can always go back and remove these if you made a mistake. And in case you work with different languages, you can also switch between the dictionaries and you will be able to find those additional words added in other dictionaries that you're using. If you want to see any grammatic errors underlined in your text, for this, you would want to use the dynamic spelling. If you turn this on, these would automatically appear in the text. And even while you are typing, you will see the errors showing up. And one other really cool feature is, again, here called Autocorrect, which can be enabled. Now for this to work, you would also want to go to the preferences. So in design preferences auto correct or on PC, it will be edit preferences autocorrect. You will be able to specify misspelled words and their corrections. A good example to use this form would be the word Svlaki which is often misspelled like this. But of course, we want to use the correct spelling like this. So if I click Okay, this is going to work. And by the way, we can also auto correct any capitalization errors as well, so I can enable that. Now, if I click Okay and I go into the document and maybe just create a new text frame, I can start typing Suvcky and as soon as I press space, it will auto correct it to the right spelling. Now we can also test out the automatic capitalization. So if I just go in here, I can just start typing Santorini with lowercases. And as soon as I press space, it gets capitalized, but it also gets an automatic formatting on the text, and that is thanks to an embedded character style in this paragraph style that I'm using for the body copy. 50. 4.5.b Appearance: The appearance of objects in design can be adjusted easily from the property s panel. The most important feature would be their opacity or visibility. This can be very quickly adjusted with this slider, and you can see immediately how it becomes see through, and we can see both the images and any other items underneath them. Now, besides the opacity, we also have blend modes. And if you click on the word opacity, you can access these easily. We can choose the commonly known blend modes that we have in the other Adobe applications as well, like multiply, screen, overlay, and so on and so forth. We have the entire list here. These can be applied, and obviously, these are all non destructive changes. So we can always come back and reset this to normal. And one other option that you might not expect to find in design is the pathfinder feature. Which mainly we would use in Illustrator, but this is also available here. You just have to go to Window object and layout and choose pathfinder, and you will have basically the same operations that you would have in Illustrator. And these can be useful mainly when you create shapes. For instance, if you wanted to create a frame made up of multiple ellipses, you can create these ellipses next to each other. Or circles, then select them together. And then, in this case, it would make more sense to add them together. So it will combine those into a single frame. You can also by the way, find the convert shape options here that we used already in this course. So if I select maybe rectangle, I can quickly revert this shape back to a rectangle or a rounded rectangle and so on and so forth. 51. 4.5.c Story Editor: The story editor is a feature that is highly recommended to use, especially when you have complex documents and complex text flows. So in this case, we've already seen this magazine where we have the text threaded across multiple spreads and between multiple frames even within spreads. So I'm just going to turn on the text threads so we can see them once again. And so when it comes to editing the text, instead of having to go through each of these frames, you can just simply double click inside any of these frames and press Command Control Y to see the entire story in a separate dialogue box. So here we can scroll through it, and it looks more like something you would see in a text editor or even in Microsoft Word or Google document. And it just makes it much easier to make changes to the copy or find a relevant detail in the copy. For instance, if I wanted to jump to this Greek getaway to remember, I could just highlight it and then press Commando Control V to switch back to the layout editor, and you can see the text being highlighted there. Now, for the story editor, there's a couple of options you can find in the preferences. So just go to preferences either from the design menu on Mac or Edit menu on PC. And then here you will be able to change the story editor display options. So mainly you can change the typeface, but also a couple of additional stylization options. And I mentioned this before, but one of the other big advantages of using the story editor is that it's going to be able to reveal overset text, as well. So if we have some overset text in a story, once we see the story editor and scroll down to the bottom, we can actually see exactly how much text is in overset state. But we can also see the hidden characters like end of copy or end of paragraph, and even icons like this little anchor here for an anchored object or inline object. And of course, the story editor can be used to make changes to the copy, so we can easily select text and move it around. And here, by default, drag and drop works as well. So if I select that nested image, I can just drag it to the other paragraph, and then it's going to show up there. We just have to make sure we jump back to the layout editor, and then immediately we can see the icon showing up here. I only mentioned the keyboard shortcut for story Editor, but, of course, you can also find this from the edit menu. You just have to go down to Edit in story Editor. And by the way, there is a copy editor, which is currently in Beta, but this is supposed to be an even more advanced version of story Editor. But I am not going to go into detail on this because this is still not a fully fledged feature that they introduced. 52. 4.6 Effects and Object Styles: In design is not as popular for applying effects as like Photoshop or Illustrator, but it still has a couple of basic effects that we would call layer styles in Photoshop, for instance. So you can find these from the appearance section in the properties panel under the effects icon, and we can start with probably the most common one drop shadow. Now, once you have the dialogue box open, just make sure you turn on the preview, and that's going to show you a live feedback of what you are doing here. We can change the angle of the shadow, for instance, we can increase the distance if we wanted to. We can also increase the size of the shadow, and we can also, of course, change all the other settings that you can find here. I'm just going to keep this maybe around 5 millimeters in size, and maybe I will set it a little bit closer as well. So 5 millimeters distance away. Just so we can see how multiple effects are applied, we can also add Bevel and M Boss, which creates this three D effect on the image. And then once we click Okay, we will be able to see this text here saying multiple effects are applied. If we click on the effects icon, we can also see the checkmarks showing what are the effects that we are using. And in case you want it to quickly revert back to the original state of the image, you could just clear the effect. But in this case, let's say I want to reuse the settings and use it on another object. In that case, it would make sense to save it as an object style, which is a similar feature to character and paragraph styles. And you can find the relevant panel from the Window menu under styles. Just have to click on Object styles. And here, all you have to do is to click on the Create New style. Or if you hold down the order option key, it will also automatically open up the dialogue box, and I'm just going to type in shadow for this, and then I click Okay. Now it's going to be saved here, and we can just very easily reapply this on any other image. Let's just say this one here. I can just click on shadow, and that's going to include both the shadow and the Bevel and and boss effects. And just like with character and paragraph styles, the best thing about saving object styles is that you can update the source of the style or the definition, and that's going to be reflected on all of the instances throughout the whole document. So we can just right click and choose Edit shadow. And maybe we can go back to drop shadow, and maybe we can change the size down to 2 millimeters. Also, the distance can be set to 2 millimeters and maybe change the angle as well. Once I click Okay, this is going to look the same here on this other image where we originally defined the style. Besides the straightforward effects that you would find in other applications, we also have feathering options in in design, which are also considered effects. So I'm going to go back here and choose basic feather first. Once we have this turned on, we will see the feather effect around the edges. So it's a way of masking out the image from around its borders, and we can obviously control the settings here and refine I'm just going to turn this off because I want to show you the other two feather options. So we have directional feather, which can be set up from any direction. So you can have top, bottom, left and right, separately set up, or they can have all at the same time if you wanted to. And then last but not least, we also have gradient feather, where you have a little bit even more control over how the feather is applied and in what direction. So instead of using the edges, you can just specify the exact angle that you want to use, and you can create a gradient for masking this out. So you can control the endpoint and start point and midpoint of the opacity gradient. 53. 4.7 Interactive content: Adobe in Design has a lot of interactive features, which can be both used for interactive PDFs, ePubs, or for the published online feature. And I'm going to walk you through some of these that might come up in the exam. I'm not going to go through extensively all these features because it could be an entire course on its own just to cover everything about interactivity in design. The first and most important feature is how you add URLs, working URLs, so hyperlink and here's a good example having the link at the bottom in the footer should be set up as a hyperlink. So when I select this, I can then go to the Window menu, and from the interactive category, we can find hyperlinks. In this panel, all you need to do is to simply put the copy in that you want to use. So I just copied that text and pasted it in here. Since you are using a secure URL, I'm going to just add the S here as well. And when we click Away, we can see that this link is working. So if you see a green sign, that means it's an active URL and it's going to work. You can also just refresh to make sure that it's checked. Yeah, it's working well. And that's essentially how you set up a URL or hyperlink. There's another feature called cross references, which is similar to hyperlinks, but they are used to navigate within the document. So instead of going to external sites, you can link to certain parts of your document. So for instance, in this case, we could go to the last page, and we could create a text frame here, and we could go to the type and and then choose hyperlinks and cross references and choose insert cross reference. Now, from this dialogue box, we could specify which paragraph style we want to search for or link to and which instance of that we want to link to. So in this case, the cover title could be a good one or maybe the department title would be also good. So we can just say, Okay, and then we can see already our cross reference created here. We can obviously make this bigger if we wanted to. And essentially, this is going to work as a hyperlink, but instead of going to an external places going to link to page 36. And by the way, whenever you create table of contents, all the entries are also automatically interactive. So they work as hyperlinks or cross references when they are exported as PDFs. You can also create buttons in design for which you can again go to the interactive category and choose buttons and forms. And using this panel, you can essentially turn anything into a button, even an existing image. But in this case, I'm just going to create a new text frame and type in previous page, and I will maybe change the alignment of this to be horizontally centered, and also using the text frame options, I will center it vertically, and then I click Okay. By the way, this menu I got to with the Command or Control B shortcut. So now we have it centered, which means that I can go to the properties and assign a stroke around it, and maybe also add a bit of corner radius or round and maybe even a fill color. Let's just add a yellow fill. So this looks much more like a button. Now all we have to do is to actually turn it into a button. So from the buttons and Forms panel, we can choose button, and then we can decide what the action should be when someone is clicking on this. So we can choose the previous page command. But you can see there's a lot of additional actions we can use out of which all of these can be used in both EPAPs and PDF while the options here in this category would only work in ePubs and the published online feature, and these would only work in PDFs. So I'm just going to choose to go to previous page for this. And that's all. Now this is working as a button. But to be able to preview how this works, I'm actually going to place it here on the top left corner and then go to this icon, the Preview spread ePub. Once this comes up, it will open up a separate dialogue box. It's worth changing to set preview to document mode whenever you are testing out these features. And now, if I click on previous page, it's going to jump to the previous page, and I can use this go to next page icon at the bottom to test out also that cross reference that we created. So I'm just going to make this slightly bigger so we can see it. It's right there. Let me click on this. This should also jump to the first page where the source of that reference is the word experiences. If this interactivity preview doesn't work straightaway, try clicking on the play preview button and then test out the interactive features again. Another interactive feature that you can set up is the page transitions, which we can find here. Here you will be able to preview the transitions that you can choose from. So we have blinds, books, and so on and so forth. I will probably just choose push, which is going to push one of the page over the other. Maybe instead of up down, I'm going to use left so let's push this way or maybe right. That would make more sense, yeah. And the speed, we can also set maybe to medium. I think that's good. And then we can just click on this icon to apply this to all the sprends. Page transitions are not compatible with ePubs, only with PDFs. So that's why you won't see them also in the EPUB interactivity preview panel, where we were testing the buttons and cross references. So I just wanted to make sure you remember that. But we will see the transitions once we export this as an interactive PDF. First, I wanted to also show you a few additional interactive features like videos and audio files that you can add to your documents. For this, I am going to open the Media panel, and here you will be able to see any interactive elements that you placed inside a document. And to place a video or audio file into a document, you just have to use the same shortcut Command or Control D or file place. And I have this salad MP four, which is a generated video from Mid Journey. I'm just going to click and drag to create a frame for it. And I'm going to use the field frame proportionally option. So there we have our video, and we can actually see in the media panel how it looks like. So once we play it, this is how it looks. And we can set this up to play on page load and also to play in loop if we wanted to. And we can even change the poster frame, which is the starting frame that is going to show before it starts playing. And that's essentially how you add the video, and you can actually preview this here with the interactivity preview. So we will see the video playing here on the top. We can test it, stop it, and it's already set up perfectly for us. You can also embed HTML snippets in design, and a good example for this would be a Google map. So I just search for Greece in Google Maps, and I would choose Share embed a map and then copy the HTML code from here. And once we jump back into in design, we can find a spot for this map. Maybe we can go down and create a new page. And here, all we have to do is to press Command or Control V, which is automatically going to be turned into an interactive frame. We can make this a little bit smaller so it fits on the page. And again, we can check this through the interactivity preview. It's a working map where we can zoom in and out, and it's obviously going to rely on an active Internet connection. But this would work even better once we actually publish this online or use an interactive PDF for. Last but not least, there's also a way to add animations in in design document. So for instance, we could animate this text coming in from the left side. This you do by going into animation and having something selected, you can choose a preset. In this case, I'm going to say fly in from left and we can see a preview here in the panel, and we can even specify the distance where we want this to come from and also, of course, the duration and whether we want to have it looped. Also, when do we want this to appear on page load or on page click or roll over and so on and so forth. And once again, we can check it in the interactivity preview, and there is the animation. Now, there is a restriction that's worth mentioning about animations that they won't work in interactive PDFs, only in the published online and EPOp formats. So now that we went through everything, let's see how this is going to look in an interactive PDF first. So if I go to File Export and then choose the interactive PDF option, we can click on Save and then continue. We want to make sure all pages are exported, and I'm actually going to keep them as spreads. At the bottom, I want to make sure that all forms and media are included, not just the appearance, but they are actually interactive elements. And then I'm going to hit Export. And like I mentioned before, we won't see the animation showing up here, but we will see the hyperlink working at the bottom. So we could click on this to open the website. We can also use the button that will take us back to the previous page. And we also have the cross reference here on the right. She can click on to go back to the first spread. But let's just jump back into in design, and let's publish this document online. So we go to file and choose publish online. And this is the recommended way of utilizing all the interactive features. So I can just call this Grease test, and I want to export it as spreads, all the pages, and then we can just hit Publish. After the export is completed, we can copy the link or click on View document to open it up in a browser. And here is going to work perfectly even including the animations that we added. 54. 4.8 Tables: In Design has a lot of useful features when it comes to working with tables. And for this particular exercise, I prepared this file where we have nothing currently on the actual page in the document, but I placed this sample table contents here on the pasteboard, and this is just a simple text frame, and the text is placed in with tab separators between the elements. And in the first line, we have the column titles or header row. Now, whenever you have something like this, you can actually select all the text and go to the table menu and choose convert text to table, which is an extremely useful feature that can generate the table based on the settings that you choose here. So by default, I would normally use tab for the column separators and paragraph breaks for raw separators. You could also choose a table style, but by default, we won't have any of these, so we will just go with the basic table style. And once I click Okay, notice how it automatically generated this table for us. So that looks already perfect. But I wanted to show you, if I go back a couple of steps that if I just copy all of this text, I can also create table from scratch by using table, create table, and specify the amount of rose columns and heather rows I need. Then I can click and drag to define the frame which will be inside the margins here. And then if I click on the top left corner of this table, that quickly selects all the cells, I can just press Command or Control V to paste the text in. So whichever way you prefer to work, you can very quickly generate tables in design, and you can place in the contents. And, of course, you can then start formatting your table. Now, the first thing I want to show you is that you can easily change the column width. So if we want to make this first column a little bit longer, we can do that, and then we can also make the entire table smaller. If we hold down the command, the control shift key, we can drag it down to make sure it still fits in the page here. We can, of course, make the frame itself larger as well if we need to. Then we can format the text. If we just select the first line, either by clicking here on the left or click and drag over each of these cells. We can then change the formatting maybe set to center alignment, also vertical center alignment, and then I'm going to choose bold and condensed text and maybe increase the size. Something like that. So that looks already different from the rest of the table. And if I press W, we can see how this would look in print. Now, straightaway, one thing that's worth mentioning is that this would be considered a header rule because that's a feature that I used in the beginning when I created the table. And what that means is, if this table, for instance, doesn't fit on this first page, I can create a continuation of it on another page. So I'm just going to create this new page and just click here. Notice how immediately the header rule is edited here. So just according to the same style that we had in the first page, it is generated automatically here on the second page. There's a lot of ways you can customize the style of your table, including the fills and strokes. So for instance, we can again select the header row, and maybe we want to have a fill color here. I'm just going to add cin maybe 20% tint value. So that's how that looks. And again, if we jump to the second page, that's already assigned there as well. Now when you double click inside a table, you can go up to the table menu and choose table options, table setup. And here you will find a lot of additional features like the fills, which can be set up to have alternating pattern. And for this feature, I would normally use one row for both the first and next. And then we can just choose maybe the same sin color, just a lower value for the tint, something like that. Perhaps different color would work better. And now if I click Okay, we can again see how this looks if we extend this frame a little bit. We see more of this alternating pattern and it works really well. Now, just like with other features in design, when it comes to tables, it's also worth utilizing styles. And the first thing that you want to use is a paragraph style inside a table. So, for instance, if I want the dish names to be stylized or formatted in a certain way, I would save that first as a paragraph style. So, for instance, here, maybe we can set these to bold and maybe even all capitals and maybe change their size a bit. Let's just make them bigger and perhaps turn off the hyphenation from the paragraph formatting controls. I'm just going to turn that off. I will also add a bit of left indent, something like that, I think, looks good. And I'm going to save this as a new paragraph style. So let's just go in here and I'll call it dish name. And I will also apply this to the selection. So let's click Okay. Now, instead of applying this paragraph style directly to the rest of the cells, what I'm going to do is to select the entire cell. So notice the difference between just having the text selected and dragging a little bit further, I have the cell selected, the entire cell, and then go up here and choose a line center within the cell. So the text will be centered inside the cell. And then we can also maybe choose different stroke weight, like 0.5 and maybe change the stroke style also to dotted. If I click away and I press W, we can see how that looks. That might be a little bit too small, so I'm just going to select this again and increase this to one point. Yeah. So these dots look better now. So this is perfect. I'm going to keep this cell selected, and then I see if this is a cell style. So we click on this icon up here and then choose new cell style. And I'm going to call this dish name as well, and I will make sure the dish name paragraph style is nested or included in here. So I click Okay, and then I click Okay once again. Now, if I zoom out a bit, let me just bring in the entire table here, and then I can just highlight all of these additional cells that I want to stylize or form at the same way, and I can come up here and choose dish Name cell style. Now notice how this was applied without affecting the alternating pattern. Because within the cell style, we didn't specify the field color for the cells. Now I also want to show you how to save a table style, which would record all the formatting and styling options that you used here. So all you have to do is to click somewhere inside the table and then go to the window menu and from styles, choose table styles. And within this, you just want to hold down the alter option key and click on the plus sign, and there we can give this a name. I will just call it dishes. And here you would be able to see that using cell styles, you would be able to specify exactly how you want your head arrow, your foot row, the body rows, and even separately the left column and the right column to look different. For now, I'm just going to apply the dish name style that we created to the body rows, and I'm going to click Okay. So now we have this table style created. And let's just test this out with this text here. Again, I'm going to convert this to a table and then choose the dishes style that we created let's click Okay, and we can see that this is looking really good. The main difference here is that the header row is not following the same style we created on the right. That's because that wasn't saved as a cell style. But that could easily be edited and fixed later. However, there's one additional thing here worth mentioning these red dots which indicate overset text within a cell. So it's slightly different from the red plus sign that you would see on the outport of a text frame. These, again, can be fixed very easily. You just have to make sure that there is enough space within a cell. So either by increasing it vertically or horizontally, we can now see more of that text, and that already fixed that issue. So that's in a nutshell how you work with tables. In design, of course, there's a lot of additional features. Again, we could spend an entire course just dedicated on tables. Luckily, for the exam, this should already be more than enough. Most of the times they ask very simple questions or task that you have to complete when it comes to tables. 55. 5.1 Preflight: Adobe Designs preflight feature is probably the most useful way to detect any errors while you are working on a project and also at the end when you are preparing it for either print or for digital delivery. And the feature you can find easily at the bottom here in the status bar. So this is the preflight menu. And at the moment, you can see this document doesn't have any errors. So I have a green light, meaning that it's all perfect. But we can click on the preflight panel to see a little bit more options. And by the way, the panel can also be found from the window menu on the output pre flight. And of course, you can dock this panel here on the right side and keep an eye on it at all times. I'm just going to do that and maybe hide some of these panels because we won't need these in this lesson. So first and most important thing about this panel, of course, is to have the option turned on. So when it is disabled, it's going to say pre flight off here at the bottom. And when you turn it back on, it will automatically choose the basic profile. This is the default profile, which includes a lot of rules, which will have to be mat in the document for it to get the green light. Of course, you can create your own profiles. As you can see, there's one here called digital publishing we can choose, but we can create our own profiles. So if we go to the drop down, we can choose define profiles. And here we will be able to add a new one. I'm just going to call this pre flight test. And we can take a closer look at all the features here. So on the general, we just have a description. We can change this and describe why this preflight preset or profile was created. Then we can open up the links category, which includes these three options. So it means that the preflight will pick up on any missing links or links that are modified and also inaccessible URL links. Now, there's also another option here, which is by default disabled, and that is why this doesn't have a checkmark. Instead, it just say dashline meaning not all the available options are enabled. So if I click on this, all the options will be selected. If I take it off, then none of them are there. And if I just add a few of them, that's the sign that you see, meaning not all the options are enabled. Now under Color, we have a lot of additional options, even subgroups of options, and I'm not going to go through all of these because you won't need to know all of them for the exam. It's just important to know where you can find these options. They might ask you to create a new preflight profile, so you just have to know how to do. And maybe choose the settings that they ask you to use. One thing that I know they might ask you is that you would want the image resolution to be checked. So this would be under images and objects, and then you can open this additional group, turn on image resolution. And then here you can specify exactly what's the minimum resolution or effective resolution that you want to allow. And anything below that will be picked up as an error. So for instance, with color image minimum resolution, the default is 250, but we can increase that to 300 and maybe also gray scale images, we can increase up to 300 PPI. And then if we save this and then click Okay, and then we just have to make sure it's also selected from the drop down here within the preflight panel, so as soon as I do that notice that it picked up on one error. So it found one error, we can open this here, and we will see that this is the image on page 36 that has the problem. And if we open up the info area, it will explain exactly what the issue is. So it tells us that the current effective resolution of that image is 242, so that's below 300 PPI as we specified. Now if I click on the page number, that's going to take us directly to the image, and then we can check how large this image is. Well, at the moment, this doesn't meet that strict criteria that we set. So what can we do in these cases? Well, the easiest thing to do would be to resize this image. As soon as I make it smaller, notice that the effective resolution is increasing. So now it's 273. It's still not enough for 300 PPI. So let's just make it even smaller. I'm doing this, by the way, with Command or Control, Shift click and drag. And if I go all the way down here, I'm pretty sure it's going to be fine now. So yes, the error disappeared. And this is the cool thing about the preflight panel that it automatically picks up on changes. So immediately, it shows the error again as soon as I increase the size. And once again, we just have to select it, and we can see it's just a little bit below the required resolution. It's also quite cool that it gives you tips on how to fix the issue. So it explains that you need to scale the image to make sure that it's going to meet the criteria. Once again, I'm just going to make it smaller, and this would be a pass with the settings that we chose. Now, if you ever need to go back and make changes to your pre flight profile, just remember to go to the panel menu drop down, choose the define profiles option, and there make sure you select the one that you want to make changes to. And then, in this case, for instance, I want to show you that you can also look for things like bleed and trim hazard. So if we take a closer look at this, I can scroll down. You can what is supposed to be picked up as a bleed and trim hazard. So anything that is within 6.35 millimeters of the outside edges of our pages is going to be a hazard. So any images that would be placed that close to the edge would have to utilize the bleed area in the document. So we can even look for objects near the spine if we wanted to. But I'm just going to concentrate on the outside edges, and if I click Okay, yet again, we found another error. So if we go here, we can see on page 41, we have an image that needs to be checked. But when I check this with the normal view, I can actually see this is already utilizing the bleed area. But maybe if we just drag it a little bit higher like that, it's going to remove the error. So the pre flight feature in design sometimes can be a little bit overcautious and tell you things that might not even be an issue. But in most cases, it will give you a very good indication of potential errors and problem and although it is good to create your custom profiles and include options that wouldn't be in the default preflight profile, you have to be aware of the fact that the more options you include, the more likely you will have to constantly fix tiny errors that might not even affect the final outcome. So a healthy balance of features included in your pre flight is what I would recommend to do. 56. 5.2.a-b Saving: There are many different ways of saving your work in Adobe in design, and there's also different file formats you can use to export your work too. And you should be familiar with most of these for the exam, as they might ask you multiple choice questions or maybe you will have to match the right format with the corresponding description. So first of all, the in design native file format is INDD. This is what you would normally get when you use the file save command or saves on save a copy. This would all give you the in design document format, which is INDD file extension. Then we have these two additional options here, the template, which we talked about previously in another chapter. That's IN DT. This is extremely useful if you want to avoid overwriting an original template. So if there is a document that you keep reusing and you're creating, let's say, new issues for a magazine every month, then it's recommended to save that as a template, which will automatically open as an untitled document. That way you won't accidentally overwrite a previous version of that file. In design markup language format. This bottom one here, IDML is a way to save your work in a format that can be opened in previous versions of in design. So if you are using the latest version, but someone else needs to check that file, maybe at a print shop, they might have an older version, and to ensure that they can open the file, you can save it into the in design markup language format. So that's also useful. And by the way, we'll be talking about saving your work as a package in another lesson that will automatically also include an IDML file next to the in design document. So this will come back when we talk about packages. So these are the main file formats that we can store on our computer. However, there's also the option to save this in the Cloud. So turn this into a Cloud document. So if I choose Save Cloud document, I can decide what the name should be, and then I can just say Save. And then it will tell us that the linked assets, mainly the images, won't be uploaded to the cloud. So they will be showing up as missing links. So if you are opening up this Cloud document on another computer, you might have issues with that. So the best way to avoid that happening is either to keep all of the assets in your CC libraries or simply embed all of the images. So in case you are planning to use a cloud documented in design, it's advisable to avoid any linked assets. Actually completely the opposite recommendation, I would say, if you're working offline. So when you are storing your file on your computer, it's actually better to keep everything linked. So that's a little bit tricky to get used to if you are switching to a Cloud document format. But I'm just going to show you what happens when we do this. You can see that the file format is changing to NDDC. So in design Cloud document. And we can also see the little Cloud icon here. And we can check whether it's saved now in the Cloud by going to the Creative Cloud desktop app and inside files, we can see that there is the file that we just saved. By the way, if there's lots of Cloud documents, you can even filter for in design documents, and you can see I have a few of these here. And we can, of course, open this directly into Indesign. We can even preview it here in the Creative Cloud desktop app. And if we come back here, we can also open it in web. So that would open it in a browser. One of the biggest advantages of creating a Cloud version of your in design document is that it will allow other people to collaborate with you and access the same document. All you need to do is simply just send the link to your collaborator, and then when they open it up in their browser, they will be able to choose open in Adobe in Design, which will then open it in the actual application. There they will be able to make their changes and you will be able to work together with them. Once you start working with someone, especially remotely on the same file, it would be recommended to also use the Version History panel, which you can find here at the bottom of the Window menu. And this is going to tell you about all the changes that were made to the document. So currently, it's just me working on this. But if I have a collaborator, I will also see when they are making changes, and I would be able to even revert back to previous versions if I don't agree with their changes. Case you want your entire document to appear in a browser and make it easily accessible for everyone. For that, you should use the publish online feature, which you can also find in the file menu. So you just have to come down here, publish online, and here you can decide whether this is a brand new document or you just want to update an existing document. I'm going to choose publish new document, and I'm going to keep the default settings. There's quite a lot of options that you can choose here. Like we could say, we want to choose a certain page for the preview for this. Maybe the second page would be better or we could even upload an image if we wanted to and I'm just going to keep the rest of the options here the way they are, and I'm just going to hit Publish. And it's going to take a while, especially if you have a long document with lots of images. In this case, there's only eight pages, so it was fairly quick. And now we can just copy this link or click on View Document, and then it will open up in browser window. So let me just open this up. And we can see the thumbnails here at the bottom showing up as well. And one of the issues that I see straightaway is that it was saved as individual pages, not as spreads. So that's something that we need to fix. And if I jump back to in design, I can just go back to publish online again. And this time, I would choose update existing document. And the good thing about this is that it's not going to change the URL. So if you already send it out or shared it somewhere, people will be able to keep using that. But as soon as we make the changes, it will automatically refresh. So everything will be fixed. I'm going to change to spread. That's the one that I forgot to change. I can just say publish, click Okay, and then we just have to wait for the upload option to go through again. And now we can just jump back here and refresh the browser and immediately, I can see there's now only four pages. And if I see the thumbnails, yes, now they are set in spreads. And, of course, we can zoom in and out, and it's a very good way to review the work that you created within the browser. Now, there's also another option here on the top right corner called share. This is the share for review option. This is especially useful if you have other stakeholders or collaborators that you work with who you would like to review the work and give you feedback. So if you click on Share, here you will be able to choose the option whether this is going to be accessible only to invited people, or maybe anyone with the link will be able to comment on it. I'm just going to choose anyone with the link for now, and if I click on Create Link, again, this is going to upload it in my Cloud storage, but this is going to be a different URL, not the same that we created with the published online feature. So that one is just simply for viewing the document in a browser, while this one is actually allowing people to review it and add comments. If I copy this link, I can copy it from the review panel as well and then open it up here in the browser. We can see that we have a comments panel here on the right, and here we will be able to place pins maybe and just explain that this needs to be smaller. And then we submit that comment that is going to be visible for anyone with this link in the browser. But when we come back to in design, it's also going to appear here. So after a few seconds, we will see that command came in and we can check where this is in the document by simply clicking on it, and it will take us to where that pin is placed. And although it took me to the right page, it's important to mention that only in normal view, you will actually see the annotation, the little pin. So you have to press W in case you are in preview mode, and now we can see there is the annotation, which by the way, can be hidden as well if we don't want to see it, but that, of course, can be useful. And then we can reply to this, or we can just say it's already been resolved. So if I click on that, I am going to respond to this in a way that I fix it, so that can be taken. And I really like this feature. In a way, it works similar to the preflight panel that we talked about previously. But of course, here you are collaborating and working with maybe proof readers or people who are checking your work and helping you to refine it and get it ready for the final output. We can also export our in design document into various other formats, which you would find under the File Export feature. So if we go here, we will be able to choose the following options. So we have two types of PDFs, interactive and print. These are very commonly used. The interactive option would include additional features that would work well on things like a tablet, like a video or maybe URL, while the print PDF option has more options of converting colors and getting it ready for print. We also have EPS, which is an older version of PDF. That can be opened also in Illustrator and other vector editing applications. We also have two types of ePub formats, fixed layout and reflowable. We have HGML options. We actually have the in design markup language file here too, so that you can find both in File Save and file export. And then we have two image file formats, JPEG and PNG. And finally, we have XML, which is more for a structured list of all the components of your document. 57. 5.2.c Proof: In design offers various ways to test your document, how it's going to work in print. So this is what we call proofing before it actually is sent to the printer. You can do a couple of tests, and you will find this under the fire menu, mainly in the print option, but we will also take a look at print booklet. First let's start here in print. For this, all you need to do is to go to the setup section and you would want to choose thumbnails. Here you can decide how many pages you would want to see per page. So maybe I want to see two by two. And in that case, because we have eight pages, this would result in two pages in total once we export this. Now it's important to mention that there is no way to save this as a PDF, so this is only available for printing. Before we move on, I just wanted to also mention that just below thumbnails, we also have an option called tile. Now, this can be useful if you are planning to print something very large, so like a large banner that doesn't fit in your paper size that your printer can handle. And here you will be able to specify the overlap. So how much of the prints you would like to have an overlap on when you are aligning these printed tiles next to each other. Another option for proofing your document would be the print booklet feature. Once you choose this, you will be able to choose the bound or the stitching. So whether this is going to be a settled stitch or perfect bound, and you can specify the creep as well. So these are all print terms that in case you are familiar with how books are printed or magazines, you will be able to appreciate. However, you don't really have to worry about learning all of these for the exam because I've never actually seen this come up. The good thing is to know where you can find this feature. And just to familiarize yourself how these booklets would be printed. So it's just generally reshuffling the pages in the document. So we can see that next to the first page, we would have the last page. So 34, 41, then we would have the second page aligned with the seventh. Then we would have the third page here on the right, aligned with the sixth on the left. And then we would have five and four next to each other on the last spread. So in a way, the print booklet feature is just reshuffling the pages according to how these booklets would normally be printed. But like I said, you don't have to worry about this feature too much. But besides these print proofing options, you also have proofing for colors from the view menu. You can choose proof colors, and that's going to be enabled. And then going back to the view menu under proof setup, you can choose the color profile that you would like to proof. So in case you have the ICC profile specifically for a printer, you can actually show that here on the computer screen. So for instance, I could go down here and find a printer profile, like one of these, this, I believe is an absent printer profile. Let's just choose this one and click Okay. Immediately, you can see how the colors will shift, and that's just giving us a preview of the actual printed page. So if I turn off proof colors, this is what we saw on the screen, and this is a close estimate of how this would look like in print on that particular printer using that particular paper. That's a very useful feature, and it's important to know where you can find it. And last but not least, it's also worth mentioning that you can also proof spelling in your document for which you would want to go to the edit menu, and under spelling, you will be able to choose check spelling. When you click on this, it's going to run through the document and find any issues. So I can just click Skip and as you can see, it will find things that it doesn't recognize, like the name Santorini, we would be able to add this to a dictionary because that's a place. Then again, we have other names here that we can add. I'm not going to go through this, but this generally works similarly how you would have spell check in other applications. 58. 5.2.d Package: Once you checked for all errors and you've done all the proofing that was required for your in design project, it's time for archiving it, which means you want to save it in a format that can be easily accessed later on. So you can store it on your hard drive or on a server, or you can also send it over to someone else who might need to make changes to it in the future. So for this, without a doubt, the best format is the in design package, which we mentioned briefly previously already in this course, but I would like to show you where you can find it. So it's file package. And for this to work, the first and most important thing that you have to first save your in design file. Once you do that, you will be able to save the package. So I'm just going to show you if I click on package, and ask me to first save the document. And then I can show you that I already have here a package folder. So this is what you are going to get when you save a package. Inside it will be the Idsign file and also a links folder, including all the required images and graphics. In case there are any fonts used in your document, they will be stored in an additional folder called fonts, except if you are using Adobe fonts because they won't be copied into a folder. And for this particular document, I was only relying on Adobe fonts. That's why we don't see that here. I notice that there is actually a feature here with which you can disable the font folder creation if you don't want to use this. But by default, I would recommend to have all three of these options on and I also normally like to save an IDML or in design markup language file in the package, which is the backward compatible file format of in design. So again, that can be opened up in other versions of in design. And then the PDF print option is also useful to have. You can choose one of these presets like this one, which will also be saved into the same folder. So I'm not going to actually create the package because I already have it in this folder. I just wanted to show you where you can find this and how to save it. 59. Projects intro: Alright, so, finally, we got to the most exciting part of this course where you get to test your knowledge and see how much you understood from everything that we covered so far. This entire chapter is dedicated to giving you the closest experience to performing tasks during the exam using Adobe design. So besides answering multiple choice questions, you have to perform these tasks. And normally these tasks are simple, like flipping an image horizontally. Or moving something from one layer to another and so on and so forth. Now, to make things a little bit more organized, but also slightly more challenging, instead of giving you just individual tasks, I organized multiple tasks together into projects. So this is slightly different from the exam. There, you will have just individual tasks. But here, you have multiple tasks that you have to perform in the right order to complete a project. So for instance, here we can see the first project and we can see the five steps or tasks that we have to perform to get this completed. So just to be clear, if you complete maybe three or four projects, that's already around the same amount of tasks that you would have to complete during your exam. And like I said, in the exam, these tasks won't be connected to each other, so they will be completely independent from each other. So you don't have to complete them in the right order. When you feel ready and confident about all the five topics, what I would recommend for you to do is to open the projects in design template file and go through all the projects without watching the rest of the videos in this chapter because that is the best way to test and see how much you understood everything that we covered so far. So just to clarify, the rest of the videos in this chapter are the solutions to these projects. So I walk you through step by step how I would complete them, but you should only watch those after you completed the projects on your own. Now here's just a couple of useful things to keep in mind when you go through these projects. First of all, when you open the file, it should come up in the normal view, which will show you the margins and the outlines of objects. But in case you don't see them, just press W on the keyboard, and then it should switch back to that from preview mode. And the panels that are most useful that you should keep open on the right are the properties, the pages, and the layer panels. But occasionally, you will also need a couple of additional panels, which obviously you can find from the window menu. I don't recommend keeping a lot of panels open. So if you don't need something, just hide it into a dogged iconic state like this, or you can just close them and reopen them whenever you need them. There will be three layers in this file out of which two will be locked, the parent page and instructions layers. So I can just show you parent page elements there on the top and instructions on the left side. And the test assets is the layer that you are supposed to work on. So this is where all the elements will be, which you can work with. And each of these pages will have things that are log like the instructions and things that you can interact with. The projects finally set up as a template to make sure that you don't accidentally overwrite it. So in case you want to restart a project, you just open the file again into in design. It will come in as a fresh untitled document with everything reset in the state that I prepared for you. No right or wrong order to go through these projects, so they are not increasing in difficulty as you go along. So you can complete them in any order you wish. And for instance, if you come across one that is a little bit too challenging, you can just skip it, move on, and maybe revisit it a little bit later, maybe after you rewatch some of the corresponding lessons. And I would recommend to save your file at the end once you completed all the projects. And that way, you will be able to compare it side by side to my results that I am going to demonstrate in the following videos in this chapter. So good luck, and I hope you will have as much fun completing these projects as I had putting them together for you. 60. Project 01 Pink moth: Okay, so in this video, I'm going to show you the solution for the first project with this beautiful pink moth. But before I go ahead, I just wanted to make sure that you already try this project on your own, so you completed it, and now you just want to watch the solution. So the whole point of this chapter is not to follow step by step what I'm doing. It's just to check whether you've done things correctly. So in case you haven't done the project yet, make sure you open the file, do it, and only after that, you watch the rest of this video. Without the spoiler warning out of the way, I'm just going to go through the tasks. Okay, so the first step is to resize this image to 100 by 100 millimeters. For this, we can use the transform area here within the property s panel, or we can also use the values up here in the control area. I have the chain turned on already to constrain the proportions. That makes it easier because I just change the width to 100 and the height will adjust as well. The original aspect ratio was also square, so this keeps the aspec ratio the same. But notice that this transformation only change the size of the container, but not the contents to make sure that the two match or the content is resized as well. We should use the field frame proportionally or fit content to frame fitting. This is something we can do from here. I'm just going to click on that, or you can also find these options here in the property s panel. So I will use that option. Now, let's create a vertical guide at the center of the page. So this is an interesting one we know that vertical guides can be dragged out from the ruler on the left, and if I move this around, I will be able to align it to the image if I wanted to. I can align it to the margins and any other elements in the document. But there is no smart guy telling me where the center point of the document is. So the easiest way to place this into the center of the document would be to put it all the way to the far right edge of the page. So that's the maximum value, the 297 millimeters in this case. And if I select the ruler, I can see it here. So it shows it to me in the properties panel. And what you can do is to half this by typing in forward slash two and then press Enter. So in design can do the math for you, and that way you get your guide exactly in the center. Now, next, we need to create a horizontal guide at this particular position in the document. What I normally do is to drag out a guide, select it, and then type in the value. So 97.3 millimeters. That's perfect. And by the way, in case you are now seeing millimeters, you can right click on the rulers and change the units there. And finally, we have to align the top left corner of the image to the intersection of the guides. That's simple. We just have to drag this down here, and it should perfectly fit between the guides and also the margin at the bottom. So that's the solution for the first project. It wasn't that hard, right? And don't worry if you didn't do exactly everything the way I did it. As long as your final result looks like mine, you should be fine. Because even in the exam, you don't have to do everything exactly in a certain way. It's all about the final outcome. So if you set things up correctly, no matter how you do it, the test should give you points for what you've done regardless of how you ended up there. 61. Project 02 Table: Second project is about creating a table. Now this is something that almost all the time would come up in the exam. So you definitely need to be familiar with how to do this. And this project tests most of the things that they would normally ask. And once again, it would just be one or two of these tasks in the exam. It wouldn't be as complex as the entire project. So this is supposed to be a compilation of all the type of questions that you would normally have to answer in an exam. Oh, the first step is to create a text frame between the guide in the center and also the margin of the page. So I'm going to create my frame using the rectangle frame tool or the type tool as well, can be used. So I'm just going to use the type tool and then click and drag and make sure it fits inside here. Okay? So there's a frame ready. And I'm going to double click inside this just to make sure that that's where the table is going to be placed into. Now, before you go ahead to place the table in, just double check that you have no character or paragraph style selected. This is something you can see from the property s panel or the styles panels as well. So you want to make sure that the basic paragraph is selected, and also from the character styles, no style is selected. And then you can go to the table menu and choose Insert Table, and you will want to have ten rows, six columns, and one header rows as described here in the second task. Once I click Okay, this is how the table looks like. So it fits nicely inside my text frame. And then we have to place the copy from this text frame into here. So I just clicked inside the text frame and press Commando Control A to select O. And then we have to make sure when we select this table, we don't just select it with the selection tool, but you actually double click inside and then go to the bottom left corner and click once more on there to select all the cells. So this is actually described here in the task as well. So all cells needs to be filled correctly for this task. And now we can just say edit, paste, and this is how it should look like. Now for the next step, we have to make sure we still have a cursor flashing somewhere inside the table. It doesn't really matter where. Just make sure that you are still in text editing mode and you have the table selected. And then you can go to the table menu and choose table options, and we need alternating fills. We select this option, we will get the dialogue box, and just make sure you have the preview on so you can see a live feedback to the changes that you add here. So we want to make sure this is set to every other rule, and we want to use the Sian swatch. And I think that's all we needed to do in this dialogue box. Yes, we can just click Okay. So that's how it's going to look like. And then we want to save this as a table style. For this, we would need the Window styles table styles panel. And then within this, we can hold down the alter option key and click on the plus sign, and that allows us to call this dishes. That's the style that we want to save, and it includes the alternating fill setup that we used. So we can just click Okay, and now select this just to make sure that it is applied to this table as well. And that is all you need to do for the second project. 62. Project 03 Cranes: For Project three, we have another image that we need to work with. First of all, we have to set the reference point in the center point. Now, this is something we can do up here. It's already in the center point. It's also in the center point here. So we can now flip the image horizontally. Again, I can do that from this icon here. So without moving the frame, it just flips it horizontally, and the cranes should be flying towards the right side. That's when you already done the flipping. But we can also see up here, this little indicator tells us that the image was already flipped. Now comes the interesting part. So we have to crop this image from the bottom by 25 millimeters. Now, how would you normally do this? If you don't have to be too specific, I would say just simply drag the bottom edge of the frame up, and that's already cropping it. However, here we need to make sure that it's done exactly by 25 millimeters. So the best way to do this would be to change the reference point to the top center point or any of the top points, and then you will change the height of the frame but without changing the width. So we will take off the link. We don't want to constrain the proportions. And to be exact, we could type in -25 in the height value. So if I press Enter, that is going to crop it 25 millimeters from the bottom up. So once again, the reference point is there to make sure the top edge doesn't move. So that's the fixed point, and then changing the height will result in cropping from the bottom edge in this case. Now, if we need to crop from the top, we would want to change the reference point to the bottom edge. Then we want to type in -15 for the height because that's the next step, crop 50 millimeters from the top end of the frame, and that is going to work like this. So once again, the reference point change was important to assure that we are cropping from the right direction. Now we can move on to step or task four, which is to add fancy corner effects with eight millimeter size on all corners. So I can use the corner effects from here. We want fancy and set to 8 millimeters. That is also something that we can find from the appearance section in the properties panel, if you want to use that. Then we need to add an inner glow effect. Again, you can either choose the effects from here or from up here in the control bar as well, whichever you prefer. And inner glow is what we are off. Now, in this dialogue box, you want to make sure the preview is turned on just so you can see the changes that you do. And then I'm going to type in first the size. This needs to be 30 millimeter. The opacity should be 100 then we want the blend mode to be set to overlay, and the color should be the following values. It's the hundred 9010 color. So that's this one, the dark blue. It's a default swatch in design. Let's click Okay, and we can see the before and after versions of this. So it adds that nice purple tone around the edges, almost like a vignette. And we can click Okay. And now we just have to save this as an object style, which we can either do from this drop down here on the top or actually this drop down where we can specify the new object style, or we can also do it from the object styles panel by creating a new style here. I recommend holding down the Alter option key, and that way you will be able to also name this style. So I'll just turn on preview, and I type in fancy. And we can also apply the style to the selection. So not just creating a style based on this, but we also link the two together. And then let's click Okay. So now our style is saved, and just to test it out, we can switch back to basic graphics frame, for instance, which looks like this, and then we can switch back to fancy, which will look like this. And that's the solution for the third project. 63. Project 04 Formatting text: Project four is about formatting text and saving a paragraph style. So first of all, we have to change the width of this text frame to 90 millimeters, and we will have to align it to the top and we margin. So first of all, we can change the width here without having the height changed. I'm just going to type in 90 millimeters, and then we can align it up here to the top right corner. And then we need to set the leading to 12 points. Now, the best thing to do is to use the type tool and select all the text, or if you have the entire text frame selected, you can also use the properties panel and already make these changes. So the leading would be this here. I'm just going to type in 12 points, and as you can see, it updated on the entire copy. Then we want to set the tracking to minus ten. That's going to be this value here, so minus ten for tracking. It just moves the characters a little bit closer to each other. Then we want to remove the empty paragraphs. So there is an empty paragraph here and there. But in case you want to visualize this, you can use the type show hidden characters option, and there are the empty paragraphs. So I remove one and another, and maybe this one here at the end is what we can remove. And now, again, I just press this scape to have the entire frame selected, and then we want to add four millimeter space between the paragraphs. So this is something that we can do from the paragraph options, which is further down here, and we want to use the space between paragraphs and set that to 4 millimeters. So that is looking good. Now we want to use justified text with last line align left. This one, and we want to also remove the hyphenation. So let's take that off. And finally, we want to save this as a paragraph style called editorial Design. So we can do this from the Paragraph Styles panel, alter option key and click on Create New Style, and then make sure apply style to selection is on because that's actually part of the task. And we want to name this editorial design. And let's click Okay. So just to test this out, if I switch to basic paragraph, this is how it looks. And with the editorial design, you will remember all the settings that we applied. And that's project number four solved. 64. Project 05 Kerning: Project Number five is probably the easiest one out of all of them. This is just a simple urning exercise. So we have to make sure this black version of the text matches the cerning of the text underneath it. So the blue version is the ideal state of the text, and that's what we need to achieve here on the top. So first of all, you need the type tool, click inside the text, and then you would want to use Alter option key left and right arrows to adjust the kerning, and it doesn't have to look exactly the same as below. Just try to get it as close as possible. And by the way, I have the hidden characters visible. That's why I see that little dot there. That is the space character, and I like to have these on when I do kerning because it helps me just to see where these characters are and where the center point is. So you can go to type and then show hidden characters here at the bottom in case you don't see them already. Now, let me move the W a bit more to the left. Maybe this one can come back a bit, something like that. Again, I'm just using left and right arrows on the keyboard. Until I feel like everything is in the right place. And this guide here on the right is helping us to align the last character to the same text below. So once again, maybe I need to move this slightly in, yes, I feel like we are very close now. And then the next step would be to change the color of the text to Scion. If I press J on the keyboard, I can very quickly switch between having the frame selected or the text inside it selected. And once the text is selected, I can just choose the Sian switch. And with that, Project five is also complete. 65. Project 06 Text wrap: In Project six, we have to use a couple of features in combination, and we have three elements here we will have to work with this circle, empty frame, we have the image behind it, and we have also this text frame. Now, it's important not to move these around, so everything is already placed in the right position. And in general, you shouldn't be moving things around in the exam unless they specifically ask you to. So it's a good habit to get into not to move and mess with things unless they ask you to. So the first step is to place the image into the circular white frame. So let's select the image and then press Commando Control X to cut it out, and then select the frame right click and choose paste into or use edit paste into. And that should have the image placed inside the frame exactly in the same location as it was before. So now we can assign the text wrap to this. So have this text frame selected, and then you can go to the text wrap options here in the properties panel, and you want to choose wrap around object shape, and then you want to use five millimeter offset. That's how it should look like. Next, we want to select the text frame and double click inside the first paragraph to add the drop cap. For this, we can scroll down to the paragraph panel, and we want to increase this value here to three. So that's going to have the first character covering three lines. And stylistically, it would make sense to add a little bit of courting here between this character and the paragraph. That's something you can do with Alter option right arrow a couple of times, and it's not actually defined here in the instructions. It's just something I always like to do. But now that we've done that, we want the whole text frame to be selected. You can always press escape if you are in text editing mode to switch to having the frame selected, and then we want to change the leading to 14 points. So we just scroll down here in the properties panel, and we change the auto leading to 14 points. Then we want to change the alignment to justify with last line align left. And finally, we want to extend the frame down to avoid any overset text. So we can just drag this down like that, or we can just double click on this bottom center edge of the frame, and that should extend it down for us. And that's the final result. So this is how it should look like when you are ready with Project six. 66. Project 07 Parent page: For Project seven, you don't actually have anything on the page to work with. It's just the instructions that you need here. So we need to create a new parent page called B parent, based on a parent. The easiest way to do this would be to right click on a parent in the pages panel and choose new parent. And then we want this to be called B, which should be the automatic option. But we want to make sure it's based on a parent. Page size and orientation don't have to change, so we can just click Okay. And this will take us straight to B parent page, so we can make changes here if we wanted to. But I'm just going to jump back to the instructions on page seven to see what's the next step. So we have to add the text frame on the bottom right corner just below the bottom page margin. So let's jump back to our B parent page, and I'm going to use the text frame, and I create a text frame here. So just below the margin as described, I'm just going to zoom a little bit closer, make sure the alignment is correct. There it is. Okay. So there's a frame. Now let's see the next step. We need to add a page number marker using the bold red character style and aerial font with 12 point size. So let's jump back once again here. First, I just click inside the frame to make sure the cursor is there. And then I go to the type menu and choose Insert special character markers current page number. You can also use the shortcut if you want. Once that's placed in, we want to make sure that there is no paragraph style used, so we will revert this back to basic paragraph. And the character style was automatically set to bold red, but in case it's not for you, you just want to make sure that you highlight the text and you choose bold red. Once you have that, you just want to change the font to aerial. So I'm changing this in the character area. We want aerial regular, and 12 points is what's already selected. I'm actually going to set this to be aligned to the right edge of the frame. So that's how it's going to look like, and we can check what's the rest of the tasks in this project. So we have to make sure that this text frame is placed inside the parent page layer, and then we also have to apply this to page seven. So let's go back to the parent page, select this text frame, and we will have to move it into parent page layer, but that's currently locked, so I'm just going to unlock it and then drag the selected object onto that layer. And if you've done things correctly, you should see a green highlight on your text frame. And now we can just this back just to make sure that we don't accidentally move any parent page elements around. And then finally to apply this new parent page to page seven, we just have to drag it over it. And as soon as the B appears here on the thumbnail, that means it's applied, and we can see the page number there at the bottom right corner where we defined our text frame. So that's all that you need to do for Project seven. 67. Project 08 Preflight: Project eight is about the preflight panel and to see whether you know how to use it. So first of all, we need to define a new pre flight profile that is going to check image resolution. So I already have the panel here, but in case you don't see the preflight panel, you will find it under the Window menu, and it will be under output pre flight. And to define a new profile, you would want to go to the panel menu and choose define profiles, and there we will be able to click on the plus sign, and we will need to call this AC E. So that's the profile name that we need. And then we need to make sure that the image resolution is selected. So once you open up the images and objects section, you need this to be selected. And also, you want to change the minimum required resolution for full color images to 300 PPI. So that's this one here. Instead of 250, this needs to be 300. And then let's click Okay. So now that we have this new profile, we just have to select it from this drop down. So let's choose ACP. And immediately, we get a couple of error messages. But the only thing we have to worry about is what's on this page. So we have to resize the image without moving its top right corner until the error goes away. So let's check the errors. We just open this up, and we can see yes on page eight. So this one right here is an issue. There's an issue with this image. So we need to resize without moving the top right corner. So what we can do is to select it and hold down commando control shift keys and start dragging this up. And when you let go, you will see the effective resolution here in the info area. In case you don't see that, just make it a little bit bigger or open this up. So currently the effective resolution is 228, so it's still too big. Let's go further down. So now it's 263. So this is still too big and the resolution is still too low. So as soon as I make it this small, now that error message is gone. And you don't have to worry about the other image on page one. So we just have to fix this image on this page. We can close the preflight panel, and we are done with Project eight. 68. Project 09 Pathfinder: For Project nine, you will have to use the Pathfinder feature, which you can find in the property Spanel. You just have to make sure you select both the circle and the characters. And then from Pathfinder, you would want to use the option here on the right called exclude overlap. Once you click on this, you should get the same result as below. And this will result in a single object. So when I click on this once again, it's now an individual object, so it merges those two shapes together. Now we can apply the swatch that's defined here. So we can go to the fill options and go into color, and we can change to CNK. So we can just type this while using. So 105 30 and zero. It should be this nice teal color. You can even save this as a swatch if you want. But then, finally, we need to rotate the logo 15 degrees anticlockwise. So that would be simply typing in 15 degrees for rotation, but we have to make sure it's rotated around its center point, so the reference point needs to be here in the center. If you press Enter, that's the result that you should get to complete Project nine. 69. Project 10 Button: Project ten is about interactivity in in design. So we have to turn this image into a button and assign a hyperlink to it. But first, we have to make sure it's set up in the right place and uses the right frame fitting options. So we want to use the auto fit option, and we want to use the fit content proportionally, which will allow it to always be fully visible without being cropped. So that's the first thing that we were asked to do. Then we have to position the logo top right corner to the top right corner inside the page margins. And then scale it to fill the area defined by the guides. We can now just drag the bottom left corner because we already have the autofit and also the fit content proportionally turned on. So we can do that quickly. Now, we want to turn this into a button. That's something we can do with the interactive area, buttons and Forms panel. So window interactive buttons and forms. And I'm just going to turn off hyperlinks and bring buttons and forms here. So we want to choose the type from the drop down button, and then we want to name this. And then we want to choose the action, which will be to go to URL, and we can type in this text. Unfortunately, you won't be able to copy the text unless you unlock the instructions layer, but it's a fairly simple one to type in. So I'm just going to do that. Yes, I'm a designer.com, and that's all you need to do to complete Project ten. 70. Project 11 Text threading: Project 11 is about threading text or connecting text frames, and the first step is to set the space between the paragraphs to four millimeter for the body copy. Now, this is the title here on the top, of course, and this would be the body copy below. But notice that not all the text is visible currently. So one thing we can do to make sure that we have all the text selected would be to use the story editor. That's Command or Control Y. And here we will be able to see the entire copy. I can just make this wider. We can actually see there's only one paragraph that is currently not visible. So we can just select these, not the top part, and then press Command or Control Y to switch back to the layout editor. Now we want to set the space between the paragraphs to 4 millimeters. Let's do that from here. So space between paragraphs is this. 4 millimeters. Now we can thread the text to the small frame on the right under the image. So I can press escape and then click on the little overset icon here and then click inside the other frame on the right. And don't worry if you see an overset sign still, that's something that we are going to change once we format the text. So next step would be to go to the first frame and change it to two columns. For that, we need the text frame options, which would be from object menu, text frame options or Commando Control B on the keyboard. And then here, all we have to do is to set this to two columns. So that's how it's going to look like, and already, there is no overset text anymore on this page. And now we can move on to task four, which is to use the span all columns feature on the title paragraph. So I just double click inside there, make sure my cursory splay is there. And then to find the spanning option, we would want to use the control area here on the switch to paragraph formatting. By the way, if you don't see this, just go up to the Window menu and choose Control, and then you will be able to find this here on the right side where it says span all. So if it's set to none, it looks like this, and span all will look like this. Next, we want to save this as a paragraph style. So while the title is still selected, we want to create a new style, Alter option, click on create new style from Paragraph Styles panel, have the applied style to selection turn on, and let's call it Finley, the goldfish. Then let's click Okay. So now this style is saved. We can test it if we switch to basic paragraph and then back to Finley, the goldfish. By the way, I generated this story with Che GPT. It's surprisingly touching, so feel free to give it a read if you have time. But now we can just move on to the last task, which is about adding a drop cap on the first paragraph of the body copy, and it should cover three lines of text. So we just increase this to three, something like that, and maybe I just add a bit of kerning here just for good measure. And that's how the final result should look. But just as a side note, I would still want to fix these orphans at the bottom of these two columns. So we can see the individual lines of text both in the first column and the second one. So to fix these, we would want to select the entire copy. So we can select all of this. And normally this would be set up as a body copy, and then we would be able to make changes easier. But even without that, we can go to these additional options up here and then choose keep options. And if you choose keep lines together and turn on the preview, it's going to fix that problem for you. So now we don't have the orphans. So that was before, and this is after looking already much better. Once again, this step wasn't included in this project. It's just something I thought I point out to you just to help you to know how to fix orphans and videos if you encounter them in your text. 71. Project 12 Document setup: For the last project Project 12, once again, we don't have any assess to work with. Simply just a few instructions that we will have to change on this document. So first of all, we need to add bleed to all the edges. Now, the best place to do this would be from the file menu, the document setup feature. And if you keep the preview turned on, you will be able to see these changes. So I am going to open up the bleed and slug, make sure the chain is on for the bleed setting, and then I type in three. So that should be added to all the edges straightaway, and I can see these red outlines here on the layout as well. Then we can just click Okay, and now we have to add five pages to the end of this document using a parent. So if you hold down the alter option key and click on the plus sign, the create new page icon at the bottom of the pages panel, you will be able to type in five pages, and you can also say you want this to be at the end of the document. And you also want to use the A parent option. Let's click Okay. And here we have these pages created, so one, two, three, four, five. Let's jump back to page 12, just to see the rest of the instructions. So now we have to save this document in a format that is compatible with in design CS four and above. So that would be the IDML format, the in design markup language format. So if we go to File and choose Save As, we will be able to find this here. IDML, and then we can just save it somewhere on the computer. I'm just going to save it as it is for now. And then last, we have to export a PDF, including crop marks using the documents bleed settings. So for this, I go to File Export, and then I'm going to choose the Adobe PDF print option. And then from here, I need to go to Mark and bleed. Choose crop marks and use document bleed settings. And if I export this, it's going to look like this once the file is opened. So we have the crop marks visible for all the pages. And that's all we needed to do for this last project. And overall, I hope none of these were too challenging for you to complete. And like I said, in the beginning, each of these projects are combinations of multiple tasks while in the exam, you would have individual task not connected or not related to each other. So for each task, you would have to just perform a single task. Tried to make this project slightly more challenging. So if you could complete most of these, you shouldn't have any issues doing the tasks during the real exam. 72. Conclusion: Congratulations on completing this course. You've put in the time, the effort, and the practice, and you are now one big step closer to earning your official Adobe certification. Remember, during the exam, you will have 50 minutes to answer 11 questions and complete 19 tasks. So keep practicing with the exercise files and test exams included in this course. When you feel ready, book your exam, stay calm, trust your skills and show what you can do. If you are looking to build even more creative superpowers, don't forget. We also have exam preparation courses for Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. These certifications can make your resume even stronger and open even more doors in the design industry. If you manage to pass the Photoshop and either the Illustrator or in design exam, you will automatically get an additional Adobe certified professional in visual design specialty credential and badge, even more reasons to do more than one Adobe exam. Once you pass your exam, and I'm sure you will, we would love to celebrate your success with you. So tag us on your social media posts. We are always excited to see our students achieve amazing things. Thank you for joining me on this journey. Stay creative, stay curious, and I will see you in the next course.