Adobe InDesign: Introduction to Shape, Image & Text Objects in-depth

1. Introduction to the Class: there has been household it. And here we gonna introduce the three main elements that you can place and work within a baby in design. So we're gonna create a new document on then look at how we place graphic elements images on, then text in a baby in design. So, basically covering the three main elements that you'll be working with, we'll have a look at how you select and work with those elements that different editing tools and then some cool tips for editing the basic shape of image frames. Andi graphic frames. 2. Document Setup: so we'll go ahead straight way to file. And you were gonna create brand new document. We're going to stick with a standard letter size document here, so and 1/2 inches by 11 we're gonna work in a landscape format. Now, if your new toe setting up a document here, there's a few things you should know. So So first we can customize measurements. So whatever size we want until we can type in any size in inches or centimetres there, you can handily type in centimeters on. In design will do a little translation two inches. So if you type in five centimeters and then we hit top and you can see that it's translated at 1.9 inches. Now, in in design, you get these nice little bits of math that can be done in some of the size boxes and other boxes within in design. So if we have 11 by 8.5 inch document here, we want to add an extra in John to it. We can click plus on one, and then it will add an extra in charge. So if we want to get specific with our document sizes, that We can easily do that in Adobe in design, So we've also got our margins down here now. These are invisible parts of the page when you print out, but they're just there when you're working as guides and we'll have a look at where there's a place when we get started in in design. We also have the bleed and slug down here at the bottom so that the blade is essentially what you would use when you want to print to the edge of a page. If you wanted to run an image to the edge of your page and have the whole page filled with an image on, then that's when you would use a bleed. If you're printing onto a page. But you still have a white border around the edge that you don't need to use a bleed with a document that does use bleed, then you would need to print a size that you'll be able tow crop off at the edge on that something toe cover in a later tutorial, so we'll click. OK, it's essentially here. We're just saying up 11 by 8.5 inch document size 3. Overview of the Tools: So once we're in in design here we get untitled document on. We can see the zoom level that we're at on. Then we have our white page in the middle here that we're going to use to edit with. So the purple or pink line that we can see here is our margin. So that's basically not the edge of the page, but it's giving us a guide as to where we might want to keep important information within. So if we're working with text on a page that we want to make sure that text doesn't run outside the margin that we keep it within that space on what you'll find a lot of office Prentice's they don't print the edge. We always leave a small white margin at the edge, so the margin helps to keep your content away from the edge of the page. So the first thing we'll go ahead and do is just go to file, say that we'll file safe and we're gonna drop this straight off the desktop here, so we'll call this in design introduction. Once we've done that, we're just going to click save, so we've got a couple of options here for templates and idea male files and stuff like that . But pretty much 99% of the time, you're gonna be saving things as an in design CC 2017 document or a CSX document, depending on which version of in design you're working with. So we'll click save here, and you can see now far name pops up top left here. Now, if you're brand new to in design, it's worth just having a quick whistle stop tour of the interface before we start add any objects in here. So on the left hand side here, our toolbar that we see here is split into several distinct sections. So we have our selection tools up at the top on the tools will be using here will be the selection on the direct selection tool on. Then the next section down, we have our type tools which will be using on then we have other vector graphics tools such as the mental. But we're gonna be working with the rectangle tool on the Ellipse tool in this particular tutorial and then below that, we have some other editing tools that will cover in later tutorials. Now, one section that we will use in this tutorial is the color options here. That's the fill on the stroke options on getting used to working with these very tiny colored boxes in the toolbar. That can be a bit tricky at first, but we'll cover easing a little bit of death as we go through toe, creating a fill in a stroke for the old checks that we add. We can also change some of those options up here at the top now, in the options to a bar that we see above our page here. This is interchangeable with the tools on the left. So when we have the rectangle tool selected here, you can see we have our fill and our strike selected a width for our stroke. That's where zero points here at the moment, but we can increase that, and then also we have some other options for the width and height that will become active. When we create a rectangle above that, If we jump to the type tool, for instance, we'll see we have options for the fun options. So whether it's regular or attack and that type of thing, we have the size of the fund letting or the line spacing on some other options to the right that will run through a little bit in this tutorial. Well, they were mostly focused on creating the basic objects here. 4. Adding Objects & Shapes: So we're gonna go ahead and grab the rectangle tool, and we're just gonna draw out basic rectangle. Now, before we do that, I want to jump up to my corruptions here. Now, at the moment, I have no Phil on no stroke. That's what this white square with a red line through it means so if I create a rectangle now, we're not going to see it. So I'm gonna change my fill to slam, and then we're just gonna draw out a rectangle. Now you can see here we can draw out a tool rectangle or long rectangle, depending on what we want on were basically clicking and holding with the mouse on dragging out and you'll see in some spots you get these smart guides. My jump back to the selection talk. We can resize this. We'll see some smart guys popping up in different parts. The documents. So here, that purple line that's popping up is the center of the documents. And if we dragged down to the middle here, we'll see the the vertical center as well. We can use those those guides tow line things up in our document. So let's push this back up to the top. We've got other options for creating shapes in in design. On one is using one of the modified keys. So if we select the rectangle tour again, I'm gonna hold down. Shift This time is like draw out of shape and you'll see that it keeps a perfect square. So if you want to drop perfect square or if we jump to the it's still so I'm clicking and holding on my tool in the toolbar. Here you can see we can draw a perfect circle. So we've got these options for holding down shift, either with a shape that's pre drawn when we transform it to constrain the proportions. So this object you can see now when I'm holding down shift it's keeping the proportions of the height and the width as we transform it. Whereas if we don't hold that down weaken kind of freeform, transforming, disproportionate so we can squash the circle or change the square to a rectangle on as you go through and working in design. One keyboard shortcut that you're gonna definitely need is gonna be command or control and says, I'm working on a Mac. It's on my short cuts are often activated with the command key, which will be the control key on the PC. So if I select this circle here, I could do, Commander said. And it will undo the transformation of media to this circle. 5. Modifying Objects & Shapes: so essentially we have these three objects now, and we can make some changes to them. So if I select my circle here, I can count my colors, my swatches and change the fill these shapes. I can also add a stroke to us. If I select my circle here on come to my stroke options, I can add a stroke to the outside of my shape, so it's not very visible here because it's just a one point line. But if we increase that to seven points, will see that yellow outline of that circle appear. So those are the basics of adding shapes to a document. Andi, As you can see, we can select them. We can move around. We can resize them on also, what you'll notice is worth. As I come close to the corner here, just outside the corner, I'm able to rotate those objects, and that brings me to another point here, which is that when we've made changes to the scale or to the rotation of our objects in in design, we get to information up in the options toolbar about that, so you can see in the angle here I've rotated that by 4.5 degrees, and I can set that back to zero, which will straighten that out again. We can also see the width and the height of this object. So if I want to make this exactly four inches wide by one inch high, I can type in these options up here, too. We can also see the X on. Why position off the objects? If I make this zero on zero, it's going to align the center to the top left because the orientation it's set to the centre in this little grid of squares at the top left their drive this back down. So there's a few options here for manually controlling the shapes that we are in in design . 6. Adding Images into Your Document: So let's go ahead and add an image. So I'm just gonna make sure when I add my image here, I've de selected everything. So I'm gonna click away from everything on my page here and now I'm gonna go to file on place, and this is how we place an image So we can do this in one of two ways. We can go to file a place with a shape selected and that will place that image into that shape. Or we could go to file place with out anything selected and that will allow us to draw out that shape. So I'm just gonna change to my thumbnail view here so I can get a little preview of what we have here. I'm gonna grab this image off Whitby Abbey out of the bottom. So once I selected that, I'm gonna press open. And now, with that selected, I can click once and it will place that image and it will place image at its original size . So essentially it's placing the image and then using the original size in the file. If that's no, I wanted if I wanted to drag out my image to a certain size, then I could do that, too. If I go to edit undo place, it will give me back that some now. So again, command and said or control is that to undo a placement. And now, if we click and hold, you can see we can drag out image. When we get that image at a nice size on this page, we can also see the slides. The image. So for went 39 inches up in the top, left here by 2.469 inches up the top left, so we can modify that here, too. So if I type in three inches, it's gonna change the size of the image frame. So this is one important point about images. I'm just gonna undo that resize item if we jump back to the selection tool and now grab any one of these white corners or white boxes on the edge weakens. Change the size of this image frame. Now what it's doing is it's reframing. The original image we're not losing the original image were not cropping in the same way that we might be cropping in adobe. Photoshopped were basically changing the framing of that image. So if we click on this circle that pops up in the middle here, you can see that we get the original outline in brown off the image that we placed originally on. Now, with that highlighted, we can drag around and reframe the image so we can move that image around within that friend. We've also got some options once we've resized our box. So I'm going to go back to my selection tool and just click away from everything Toe de Select. Why had selected? And then I'm gonna click once on the blue box so that I have my blue outline here rather than the brown outline. And I'm gonna use thes fit options up here. So I'm going to use first of all the fill frame proportionally So this is gonna resize my image and it's gonna fill the new friend I've made as best it can with the image. And you can see if I click on the circle again. It's essentially leaving out little bits of the left and right of the image when a click away there now. So if I click back on the image on resize my friend again can use Phil frame proportionate and you can see it's gonna fill that frame nicely. There are some other options here as well, so I can fit my content proportionally. Which means it's gonna fit our image into the frame was gonna fit the whole image into frame on. Then I've gone back to fill frame proportionally there. They need to be careful with a couple of these. So here we have the option to fit the content to the friend. If we use that option is actually going to squash the image a little bit. So I'm gonna do headed, undo or command and said controlling that and just change the size that to give an extreme example of this. So fight Use this third by here you can see that it's squashing that whole image and really distorting the proportions off that which we don't want. So one thing to do as you're working with in designer to really kind of look and see and it's you're making and try and undo them as you see mistakes because this image in this particular instance is completely unusable. So we need to quickly do edit undo on, then I'm going to stretch the frame out again and use the fill frame proportionally option . So I have some other options up there. But that should give you an idea where you can start with your images and also how you could use this circle in the middle to move the selection you have up and down. We can also nudge it as well, using the cursor keys on the keyboard so I can tap my cursor keys to move my image up and down. So let's click away from everything. Now it's again with the selection tool. 7. Adding Type to Your Document: So now look 1/3 element. We're gonna look at here, So really, we're running through the different types of objects that we have available in in design on . We're gonna grab the title here and stretch out a tight box. Now, when we're creating type in other applications like Focus shop in Illustrator, we can click once, and it will create somewhere we can type in in design. We always need to click and hold on, drag out a type frame. But I'm just gonna type something in here so I will be happy is the happy that we see in the image at the top right there. So we'll just type in that that would give us a text to work with. So you can see now that we have our type placed within that sex frame. Andi, if we select that type, we can increase the point size of it in a couple different ways. So one is to drop down this menu and select a a larger point size. We can also change the front so we can drop down here and we can see a list of fonts that I use regularly or we can scroll down on select another fund so we can flip through and have a look at the different funds way have available there installed on our system. So with the fonts, you have to drop down menus here. One is for the main fun face, and then the other is for the different cuts of those funds. And you can see if a mirror pro, for instance, I have a lot of different options available to me on this will be different for every single fund. So, for instance, if we go Teoh formed like impact, then we only really have one option for that fun, just the regular. So some funds will have lots of options, and some funds will only have one or one or two options. Depending on the front that you're using, we're gonna stick with myriad pro. We're going to choose semi bold, and then we're gonna increase the font size. So we looked at how we can drop down menu here and increase the font size. We can also use these up and down errors to increase the font size to so I could just keep clicking and it will increase my point size and I could do the same by placing my cursor where I see the number 41 here. And if I used the up para, then you can say it's increasing my points less. If I hold down shift while I'm doing that, it will increase it by increments of 10 so you can see I can quickly get a larger point size. That's were my favorite ways of modifying the front slides to hold down shift and use the up and down curses until I get close to what I want. And then I'll use the curses to modify a little bit more. So now we have our front selected. We have a couple of options for our fund. We have an outline option, which we're not gonna cover here. And then we have a fill option for our Funchal, and we can select the same swatches that we have available to us here. Or if we double click on the T here, we can bring up the color picker so we can essentially type in a C. M Y cave early that we might have all we can drive the color picker around and the slider to change the RGB value here and then to move the red and blue values here. So as we flick between these, the color you selected here will be prioritized this up and down slider on the other two colors will be variations around this blue 96. In this particular instance, by changing the red and green values So we have this nice way of change the colors, if so, will select a nice green From across here on, we can add a C M Y case watch, but we're not gonna get into that now, so we'll click. OK here. And I'm gonna grab my selection tool on. You can see now that I have my my font placed in there. If you want to edit my phone and I can with the selection tool, just double click into that. If I want to move out off editing the fun, I can either jump back Teoh, click my selection tool when that will jump me out or I compress escape and that will pull me out of that window to so we can move this around in the same way we can resize it. And as you resize this text frame your seal so that if we make this smaller, we get this little red plus on the bottom right hand side. And that's essentially saying that your text is now over set so that we have text within this frame that can't fit in the frame. So if I come to the right hand side here, this little square on the right hand side and double click that, then you'll see it will it the frame to the content within it so we can do that as well with images. So if I double click on the bottom here, it's gonna increase the size of the frame to fit my image, which is kind of handy. So if you reduce the size your frame and then just double click on the bottom right, it's then gonna expand the image out to now. If we want to resize the frame on the image at the same time, we need to hold down control and shift on the PC or command and shift on the Mac to resize that frame so you can see now on holding down control and shift or command shift on the map . It's resized, my friend and resize images. Well, it will work for the text as well. So if I hold down shift and control or command, you can see it's not gonna resize the text and the text frame at the same time. 8. Modifying Shapes & Type Boxes: just a couple more things I want to cover here about these three basic elements. So on the frames that we have here, we can resize them. We can resize things in proportion by holding down, shift in control or shift command, depending on which platform you're on and in this little yellow circle allows us to turn these diamonds that enable us to ground off the edges of our shapes. So you can see now I can round off the edges of my rectangle here, my square by clicking that little yellow square. I can also do the same for images. Serve my highlight my image. I can click the little yellow square at the top right on drag in those corners, and it will modify those corners if we hold down shift. After you've done that on drag out one of these corners, you can see we can modify corners individually so I could pull out one corner so that it's completely square, like so on. I could do the same for the bottom right here. So we get two corners are square and then two corners that around, which gives the image a nice look or film we could do the same with these shapes as well. That's one of this brief intro to working with objects in Adobe in Desire. How to select them, how to be select them by clicking Away and then also have to make some modifications to either scale, the rotation or the content of those different frames. I have been useful, if you any questions about in design, then send me a tweet in house will or leave a comment below, and I look forward to seeing on the extra tutorial.