Transcripts
1. Introduction: Typically when we think of creating brand guidelines or other multi-page documents, we think of a really tedious workflow, spending hours, creating new pages and layouts from scratch. I love InDesign because of how flexible it is. There are so many tools that can save you so much time. You can set yourself up for success really easy if you know what you're doing. Hi, my name is Sophia Yeshi, I'm a graphic designer and illustrator based in Brooklyn, New York. Today's class is about creating brand guidelines in Adobe InDesign. I've been using Adobe InDesign since I was in high school, but I really discovered its power when I was in college and when I started working professionally full-time as a graphic designer. I use InDesign when I'm creating brand guidelines for clients, when I'm making presentations or PDFs, anything like that, I'm going to use InDesign and you should be using InDesign for those things too. In today's class, I'm going to show you how to set up your document, how to effectively use master pages, how to set up paragraph styles, and also how to use your color settings effectively. This class is really just a stepping stone into the powerful world of InDesign, but I hope that you walk away with just a few more tips and tricks that can save you a lot of time and speed up your workflow when you're creating documents. Not only can you apply this to brand guidelines but you can apply it to so many different types of documents that you probably use every single day. Follow along by creating your own brand guidelines or other type of document. Make sure you post your work in the student gallery and any questions in the discussion board. Now let's get started.
2. Setting Up a New Document: Before we get into designing, let's set ourselves up for success by setting up a new document, making sure we're choosing the right settings like page number, size, and specs. Let's get started. We're going to go to "New File". I typically like to create documents or brand guidelines with pixels and a size of around 1280 by 800. You can change these specs if there's something else that you typically use. We'll go ahead and give it a name. For today's class, I created a fake Popsicle brand, [LAUGHTER] I called it Popsi. We're going to name it Popsi-Brand-Guidelines. I like to start with around 10 pages because I know it's going to be multi pages, but we can always add more later. Make sure facing pages is not selected because that would be like if you are printing it out, if it was a book and pages we're going to be side-by-side. We'll start at page 1 and give ourselves some columns. We have at least something in place we can always add more later. You can use 36 points for margins, what I think is the default. Because it's not going to be printed, we don't need a bleed or slug or anything like that. Once you have everything selected, you can go ahead and create your document. Now make sure you follow along and do the same.
3. Creating Your Paragraph Styles: This lesson is about setting up Paragraph Styles. They are one of the most useful tools in InDesign. By setting up our paragraph styles early, we can apply this formatting to different paragraphs without having to individually go in and tweak each block of copy. I'm just going to show you this example, so I can show you how I set up the paragraph styles. If you're wondering what that means, essentially, let's say you're going to have paragraphs on every page and you want every single page to have paragraphs that look exactly the same. Maybe they are a certain color or, there's a certain amount of leading or tracking, something like that, that's going to be consistent, that's what you're going to use paragraph styles for. As you can see on this page, I have a heading at the top, a heading 2 here. Just a few different headings and then also a paragraph. Now I'll show you how I actually make those into paragraph styles. I'll have Heading 2 selected and go to New paragraph style, title it Heading 2. If you see right here where it says based on, you would use this if for example you have a paragraph and you want to modify or build the next style based on a paragraph style you already had. So if you have a paragraph and you want to use that as your basis, but then maybe you're going to make it all caps, then you would base it on that. But we're not going to do that, we're creating new ones for each one. We have our name. You can customize this a good bit. I already have everything set up, but if I wanted to, if I wanted to change the tracking here, can make it 15 and I can even preview it to see how that would affect it. Let's change it to 75 and that's just like the width between the letters, or even zero. You can see a preview here of how it's being affected. I changed that to 15, select, "Okay". I'm going to do the same thing with Heading 3 as well as the paragraph. I'll select my paragraph and go to New paragraph style. All right. Then the last one, we'll do Heading 3, and we're actually going to make a new one for this one. Let's make this a lot smaller because it's at the top and it doesn't need to do that big, maybe about 14 points. What I'm going to do is create a new paragraph style and this one is going to be based on Heading 3. Because we know it's basically the same, we're just making it a little smaller, and I'm going to call this, the Section Title Heading. Let's go ahead and apply that same formatting to the page number. For this one, it's right-aligned, so I can do the exact same thing, section title heading, but I'm going to go into my properties panel and I will redefine this style. I already had a style called section title heading, and I'm just redefining it based off of the new properties that I have selected. Now as you can see, I just made different styles based on existing ones that I already created. Then for the page number, I'm going to go ahead and left align this one. Let me give you an example of how you can actually use these once they are created. This could be the mission statement. We'll go to our paragraph styles and select Heading 2. You can see super easy to just start creating new paragraphs with the settings that we already applied. I'll fill with placeholder text again and change that to paragraph. As you can see, it was super easy to set up our paragraph styles and you can see how we're going to implement them across different pages. For heading 1, I will import this one from my Creative Cloud Libraries. Now you can see how all of this text works together. It's super cohesive and it's going to be really easy to apply this to our brand guidelines as we're going along. Now I want you to set up your paragraph styles for your document and make sure you have at least three different styles defined. Your paragraph, a main heading, and a secondary heading if you want. Typically, as you know, they should follow some type of text hierarchy. So you're heading 1 should be your largest, you're heading 3 is typically going to be the smallest. This heading 2 is a little bit smaller than heading 1, and your paragraph can really be whatever size that's legible as long as it's not too large. Go ahead and set that up and then we'll get started with the next lesson.
4. Swatch and Color Settings: In this lesson, we're going to talk about swatches and color settings. It's really important to keep your swatches panel clean and organized otherwise, it can get confusing as new colors are added, especially if they're in the wrong color space. When you're designing for web, you want to make sure everything is in RGB format. If you start having CMYK or other color, it can throw off your workflow because you're going to have to go ahead and clean it up later. I've also run into problems where I've had duplicate swatches of the same color multiple times, and this can make your file larger and just in general be confusing. If you add your swatches right away, it's going to be super easy as you're going through just selecting colors. I have a color group already created. You can only have five colors in a color group in your creative cloud library, but you can also add individual swatches as well. I have this color group, and I'm going to go ahead and add the theme to my swatches. As you can see, it actually duplicated this purple color and so I'll delete that one. To show you an example of how confusing it actually can get if you have multiple of the same color, it added purple again, but it named it one. It's literally the same color, it's just another copy of it. Once you try to delete a color, it's going to ask you what you want to replace it with. What I like to do is if I end up with a bunch of unnecessary added swatches, I'll just go ahead and delete them and then rename them or I will replace them with the correct swatch. So instead of having this duplicate, we're going to replace it with the right right from our palette and we'll click, "Okay". It's also important to make sure that all of your colors are in RGB or whatever mode you're going to be using. You can select each individual swatch and just make sure it is in the right color mode. We know that RGB is selected and we're good to go there. It's also important to note that anytime you do add a new color to your document, it's automatically going to add it to your swatches. That's why you do really want to be on top of what's happening and make sure that you are streamlining it as you go. It sounds super simple, but if you've ever gotten to the end of your document and you're done designing and suddenly you have all of these colors added to your swatches that don't need to be there, it actually can mess up your exporting and you're going to get an error in InDesign showing that you have different color modes and different color spaces. Just by being aware of it, even though it sounds super simple, can save you a lot of time later as you're trying to export. Now that we've walked through how to set up your swatches correctly, just go ahead and add your color palette to your swatches' panel and you can save it as a color group to make it easier. If you don't know how to do that, you can select all of your swatches and you can select this folder and it'll just create a color group with those swatches.
5. Mastering Master Pages: This lesson is going to be all about mastering master pages. Master pages are one of my most used and most favorite tools in InDesign. For example, if you have a cover page and you want to apply that cover page across your entire document or every couple of pages, we'll create one template as a base such that we can then customize to our needs. I have an example of what it's going to look like after we're done. We're going to be creating two different master pages. We'll be creating an A and a B. I'm going to show you how I made this. I know that I usually like to have some type of maybe like a rectangle or something to define the header. I'm just going to ahead and draw a rectangle at the very top. Using my color palette, I will select the yellow that I use. Typically, I like to have a page number so you know what page it is. Using the text tool, I'll just go ahead and draw a space for the page number. You're going to type, insert special character markers and then current page number. You'll also see an A. What that means is, on every single page, it'll automatically fill in the page number. You don't have to go individually and change it. It's always going to keep it current. Then right next to it, I'll put another placeholder for what that current page is. I'll just type in Placeholder. [NOISE] We'll have a placeholder because we're going to have to update it for each individual page. We'll just put something that we can format, that we can change later. Then on the right side, I will put the name of the brand and the fact that it is the brand guidelines. That'll be consistent across all the pages. We have the text, and using the paragraph styles that we defined earlier, we'll just go ahead and give these some styles. For the page number, let's use left align header. The fact that I already set this up, it makes it super easy to just go ahead and change those now. I don't have to worry about formatting or anything like that. I know I also had a block here explaining what's going to be on that page. We'll go ahead and put heading 3. Change that to heading 3. We'll put another placeholder for the title of the page, which I believe was heading 2. Then we'll have a section for a paragraph. I'll just go ahead and go to 'Type," "Fill with Placeholder Text" again, and we'll change this to our paragraph. But know how when we first set up our document, we set up four columns depending on what's going to be on that page. There are times when I'll add more columns because I just want more flexibility and it's just easier to see how everything aligns that way. On this page, I'm going to go ahead and add let's say six columns. That looks good. I want to also put in a placeholder. What that means is it's just going to define the width and the length. Later I can put a photo or some type of media in there. But nothing specific right now. It's not a rectangle, anything like that. If I enter into preview mode, you don't even see it, but it'll help when I'm inserting content into that page to just know the specific size that we want to use. I'm going to go back to preview mode. You can see everything is set up and this is going to be a great template that I can use as I'm building other brand guidelines. The second one that we'll make will be a cover page, because every time I'm introducing a new section in my brand guidelines, I'm going to have a cover page introducing what it is. This one is going to be super simple. I'll draw a rectangle and I'll fill it with a color. I want the headline to be really large for this section, so I'm just going to make a large box, and select cover page headline which is one of the paragraph styles I made earlier. I can give an example of what one of the pages will be. Maybe it's about or it could be topography, your logo, or something like that. We're just going to adjust it how we want. Then you can set this up however you want for your page, it doesn't have to look like this exactly, but you're going to want some type of cover page, just depending on what your document looks like. We will also add in the name of the brand guidelines again. Actually to make it easier, because I already have it on this page and I want it in the same place, I'll just go ahead and copy and I'll go back to this B master, then go to "Edit Paste in Place," and it'll put it in exactly the same place. Another thing that you can do is add in a page number. Let me show you how I do that. I'm going to select cover page headline again because I want to enlarge. I'll go back to object current page number and this page is B, since it's the master page. That's why you see B. I'll enter back into preview mode, and you can see what it looks like. Now, that you have master page is great, so what? What does that mean? What that means, is now we can apply them to our pages in our document because it's actually a different mode. When you're in a master page, you're just creating a template. That template can be applied to the individual pages in your documents. As you can see, I have 12 pages right now. You can see a preview and there's already content there that I haven't created. But when I go to that page, I can move it or anything like that because it's just template. I'll show you basically starting from scratch, you wouldn't have anything on that page. I go to page 5 and I drag a blank page, you won't have anything. But in order to add your master page and apply it, all you have to do is drag it onto the page that you want, like this. As you can see on all of our pages, we're going to have same content. In order to edit this and make it specific, we're going to left-click on the page that you want to change, and you're going to select, 'Override All Master Page Items." What that's going to do, it's going to make that page editable, and so that you can actually change all of the content. We'll say that this is going to be our mission statement. We can say a fake tagline that I made up. Any content that you want to put on this page. This could be the about section. We don't have to update this, the brand guidelines that's going to stay the same. I could insert a picture if I want to. Sometimes if it's larger than the placeholder, just going to be the full size of whatever the images. If I go to frame fitting, and I select fill frame proportionately, it'll crop it so that everything fits in the frame. Let's show you how I customize the cover pages. Once again, I can't edit anything. Everything is set in stone. I'll go back to the pages and left-click "Override All Master Page Items." Maybe for this section we'll change the background color. This one could be the typography section. It's a little bit larger. I'll just make this one a little bit smaller, so it can fit. We already have the page number. That's all we need to change on this page. But maybe your cover pages have photos on them or other content that you want to change out. This is where you can really customize each one to fit your needs. Now, that I showed you how to make master pages, go ahead and set up your own master pages and create your cover page, as well as your inner content of your brand guidelines.
6. Designing Your Pages: Now that we have all ingredients, let's make a meal. I'm going to show you how I customize the pages and actually make this into a brand guideline, not just templates. I don't have actual texts because this isn't a real brand, but I'm going to show you how I'm going to insert some imagery, change up the colors, and you can see how it will come together very quickly. Let's make this the Logo Suite. I like to look at my pages panel and see the cover page backgrounds that I already have. I don't even think I need this many pages, so I'm going to get rid of a few interior pages. I'm going to do the same thing that I showed you earlier by overriding the master page items. One thing I like to do is I like to make the heading the same color because it keeps it consistent. As you're scrolling through and you're looking for the section that's about the logos, then you can easily identify that section by the color. I'll change this placeholder text to logo suite, and I'll name it logos, and let's say this section is about the primary logo. This one should be capitalized, so I'll go over to my character settings and select all caps. Now we want to insert our logos. Going back to my Creative Cloud Library, I actually don't need this place holder on this page, so I'm going to delete that, and I'm going to insert the logo that I saved from Illustrator. If I hit W on my keyboard, it'll enter me into preview mode, which I toggle back and forth quite often to see how the page will actually look. Let's do one more page. I'm going to delete the template one and I'm going to duplicate the spread that I just made. Anytime you duplicate a page, it adds it to the end of your document. I want it to go right after the one that I just created. For this one, instead of the primary logo, it could be our secondary. I will get out of preview mode and I'll drag in the secondary logo. We'll just add that in, super easy. You can easily see how, based on this template, I can change out the paragraph if I want to talk about what this logo is about, how I made it, anything like that, it's super simple. I know I have one more page because I have one more logo. I'll drag that after the secondary logo and we'll call this one the brandmark. I'm just centering it in this section with this middle column. Let me see what sections I already have. I did the logo suites, let's go ahead and make this one about the typography. Now, remember our typography was a large word and I had to make it a little bit smaller, which typically I would just redesign so everything can be the same size, but for the purposes of this, it's fine. Maybe we want to make the text white on this one. Let me get out of preview mode because it's a lot easier to see what you're doing when you are not in preview mode. I'll change this heading to white as well, and let's add in our typography. Going back to the same thing, override that page, I'll change this background color to green, and this is our typography section. Let me show you something real quick. When you are adding in any content in the document that you're adding from has multiple pages, you're going to want to make sure that you have Show Import Options selected, because I'll show you what happens if not. If you try to import something and you know you want to use the second page and you just put it in there, it's only going to populate the first page. Make sure that you have your placeholder selected, because if you have it selected, then it's going to fill inside the container, it won't just paste on the entire page. Using Command D, which is placed on a keyboard, I will select Show Import Options on my file, open, and let's go to the typography page and click, OK. This is actually cutting off because the dimensions of the place holder aren't the same as the page. We're going to go to Fit Content Proportionally, and it'll make sure that everything actually fits inside of the container. I think I want to make this one a little bit larger. Then the only other section, let's go ahead and do the color palette. Same thing as before. We will override this page. I think actually for this one, let's make it on two different lines because this word is super long. This is going to decrease the lighting a little bit. I want to make sure that this lines up at the same place. Another thing you can do is use your rulers. If you don't already have your ruler shown, if you use Command R on your keyboard, it will show your rulers. If you need to change the increments, you can left-click on the ruler. You actually can change it for both the left side and the top of the page. You can make this one inches and you could keep this one at pixels. I usually use them just to keep an alignment. It doesn't really matter the specifications. In that way we make sure that these are both aligned. Let's go ahead and make one more page, add in the color palette. Once again, we want to make that fit. I think I already have a green, so I actually want to change this color of the background. We'll keep that as yellow and this will be our color palette page. This is supposed to be heading 2, there we go. We'll name this our primary palette. If you're scrolling through, you can see it was super easy to just customize and update these pages with the information that we needed. In a very short amount of time, I made basically a full brand guideline. Now, go ahead and do the same thing. You're going to be creating new pages, applying master pages to them that you made, and then overriding those and customizing them and adding in your own content.
7. Keeping Your File Size Small : A huge issue I've had with brand guidelines because they're so complex, there are so many pages, there's colors, there's images, there's so many things happening, that they can be really huge files, and that can be difficult sending to clients. I have done a lot of trial and error, and I figured out the best way to get the sizes down. I'm going to share that with you. I have everything in my current InDesign file linked to my Illustrator file. The problem with that is it's the working file. The good thing about it is that while you're working on your brand guidelines, and let's say I want to go back to Illustrator, and I want to update something, it's going to update automatically. Let's say, I change this text to heading one, and I save my file. If I go back to InDesign, you're going to see right here there's a little yellow triangle where it'll show that you have modified the file that it's linked to. All I have to do is double-click, and it's going to update it. Trying to show you the links panel so you can get a better idea. Here we go. These are all the links that you have in your file. I'm going to just double-click on this triangle in the links panel, and it'll update every instance of that one. That's great while we're working on it because you want that flexibility. If you haven't exported to a PNG or JPEG, then you're going to have to go and update that link every single time. But because it's the working file, it's super easy to update. But now that we're done, we don't want to keep updating it. We want to just export the Illustrator files to something that's going to be smaller and easier to manage. If I go back to Illustrator, I'm going to go to File, Export, Export for Screens. I already named all of my artboards depending on what each page is, and I have the brand name as the prefix. Let's use 2x scale, and I think JPEG is fine for this. I'm going to make sure that it's going to the right folder, choose, and then export those artboards. Now, I'm going to update the instances where I linked to the Illustrator file so we can update them to the JPEGs. I'll navigate to that folder, and I know that this one was the cover image, so I'll select that one. Then we'll see that one. We'll update this image as well. Perfect. I think this was the last one. Now that we have everything linked, we are going to go ahead and export. The only other thing that you want to double-check is that, if you have any additional colors in your swatches panel that you don't want, maybe colors that accidentally got added. I can actually show you an example now. You can see there is a Pantone color, and I'm not sure how that snuck in there, but I can go ahead and delete that because it's not being used. Another way you can see if there's any colors that aren't supposed to be in there, is go to the little drop-down menu here and select all unused. What that'll do is highlight if there's any colors that aren't actually being used in your document, and you can just easily delete those so you can clean it up. You're going to go to File, Export, and the format is going to be Adobe PDF interactive. I'm going to navigate to where I want to save it and we're going to name it. Click ''Save''. Let's go ahead and look at our compression settings, JPEG 2,000 lossless. It's fine. You can change your resolution. Because it's for web you don't need as high of a resolution. If it was for print, you would want to make sure it's 300. But for web, you can only get away with 72 or 96. Let's do 96. We can always export it smaller, but if you go too small, then it could be low resolution, it could be pixelated, and that's not what we want. I have my settings so that anytime I export a PDF in InDesign, it automatically opens in Adobe Acrobat. That's a really great way to make sure that all of your images are crisp and clear, your colors look the way that you want them, they are exporting correctly. While we do want a small file size, we don't want it to look messy or anything like that. You should do the same, so export your file, make sure you're checking your color palette, cleaning up any unnecessary colors, deleting any unwanted objects, maybe things you have placed outside of the artboard, and just compressing your file. Now, please do the same. Just go ahead and follow all the steps, and when you're done, export it, and please share it to the project gallery.
8. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] Thanks so much for taking my class. I really hope that you were able to pick up some new skills that will help you with your role on your team. You can apply these concepts to other types of documents other than brand guidelines. I hope that it really speeds up your workflow and Adobe InDesign. Please share your work in the project gallery and post any questions in the discussion board. Feel free to check out my other Skillshare classes for some tips and tricks in Adobe Illustrator.
Sophia Yeshi, Graphic Designer and Illustrator
