Developing Concepts for Editorial Illustration Using InDesign

1. Intro: Hello, my name is James Olstein and I'm an editorial illustrator. I've been running my own illustration studio since 2016. I've worked with such clients as the BBC, Monocle magazine, Scientific American, Little White Lies, The Boston Globe, CreativeMornings, and made art prints for Bob's Burgers and BoJack Horseman. I also have a series of children's books that I write and illustrate called Odd Science. This class is entitled developing concepts for editorial illustration. This course is for anyone interested in presenting their illustration work to their client in a more professional manner. I got my start as in art director at an advertising agency. While working in advertising, I would commission illustrators for projects during the day and work on my own illustrations at night. I've been on both sides of the process and know what an art director or client is looking for when you present your thoughts to them. I'll be teaching you some techniques for coming up with concepts. We will sketch your ideas out in Procreate or your medium of choice. We will design a presentation in InDesign that you can reuse with your clients. You don't need any prior knowledge of InDesign or Procreate, as we will be working together step-by-step. In this class, we go through the full process of getting a commission. We start with receiving a job email from a client, how to respond to their inquiry. You'll want to watch out for it. After that we go over receiving the article you will be illustrating, techniques for coming up with concepts. We'll sketch our ideas in Procreate, and then we design a presentation in InDesign, we will cover adding your work to your presentation and the best way to write about each sketch. I feel like this class is important because we will see a side of being an illustrator that isn't frequently explained. You'll be able to reuse the presentation you create in this class throughout your career. Let's get started. 2. The Project: So what will we be making in this class? Together, we will be building a presentation in InDesign that you can use as a template for presenting your sketches to your client. Like I mentioned before, you don't need any prior knowledge of InDesign to create this. We'll be working on it together step-by-step. I chose this topic because it's something I had to teach myself, when I started doing freelance illustration. This seemingly simple template is something you'll use all the time. For this class, we're going to work through the following steps: receiving an illustration request via email, central presenting an editorial illustration, receiving the article you will be illustrating, sketching which we'll do in Procreate, designing the template in InDesign, adding in your sketches, writing an explanation for each sketch, exporting your presentation as a PDF for your client. So let's get started reading that email. In the Project and Resources section of this page, I've posted the email and the article we're going to be referencing in the class. Go ahead and download this now, and then we'll move on to the next step. 3. The Email: At this point, you should have downloaded that doc labeled Email from the project and resources section. Go ahead and open that up. Let's read through it. You'll notice a few things to look out for. Timing is one, subject, size, and their budget, of course. First timing. Do you have the time to do this? Deadlines for editorial work can range from same day to a week or more. Check your calendar or your workload and see if you can accept this commission. Lucky for us, this is just a class so you can certainly make the deadline of just a week. Normally, editorial illustrators try to have their sketches over as soon as possible. You're going to want to have a loose timeframe to give the art director. Meeting deadlines is a key to keeping your art director happy. It also happens to keep up a good reputation, which is huge in illustration because a big part of your business is referral. A typical editorial project usually goes sketches, client approval, first round of completed illustrations, client feedback. If there are no changes, final illustration file. Next is subject. Sometimes you may get asked to do something with a theme that you're not 100 percent comfortable working on. Sometimes it could be a different political or religious point of view. Sometimes it can be as simple as someone's asking you to do a portrait when maybe that's not the style or the type of work you really do. You're promising someone you can deliver artwork to them so make sure the subject isn't something that's going to hang you up and keep you from meeting those deadlines. For this class, it's just a friendly event so there's nothing controversial here. I mean, unless you hate breakfast. Let's discuss size. Spot illustration is going to be a lower rate and a quicker timeframe than a full page work. Also, you may be the type of illustrator that prefers spots to bigger pages. When I got started, I only got commissioned for spots. Eventually, an art director asked me to do a full page, and it took me a little time to figure out what my style looks like in that context. Of course, this will factor into your timing for your sketches and final art. Lastly, is pricing. This is a part of being an illustrator that a lot of people find really hard. The closest thing the illustration industry has to a guideline for this is the Graphic Artists Guild Handbook. I normally go by that. Some illustrators, what they'll do is, they'll also come up with an hourly rate and then apply that to the time that they estimate the project will take. A lot of times the art directors though will already have a set amount for the project and they will be upfront about how much money they have. If you're not comfortable, you can always ask if they can negotiate on the price if it's too low. There are other factors with the pricing too. Sometimes the client might be a smaller indie magazine that you love and you may really want to work with them. Just make sure you're comfortable with their pricing because there's nothing worse than feeling undervalued. Once you've figured these things out, it's time to craft your response. Remember to be direct and friendly. Address any questions asked in the email and make sure you clearly state that you are accepting the job, that's very important. We're going to move on to the next section now, which is reading the article. 4. The Article: This next section is all about the article. We're going to go over some tips for reading through the article and a few tips for coming up with ideas and doing a little brainstorming on your own. If you haven't yet, you should download the sample article from the Project and Resources section. You received your job, you went over the email and you replied in a professional manner, and the art director has got back to you with the article that you will be illustrating. The art director will probably suggest some directions. Sometimes you're free to try whatever you want, but most of the time they will have some ideas for what they want to see and you can add onto them. The most important thing is to read the full article and take notes. I recommend reading through the article twice. Now that you've read through, there are a few factors to consider with your ideas. What I find really helpful is to write down your ideas as you're reading the article before you even start sketching. Just write out some thoughts you have of like some directions you could go in or just like little ideas that pop up as you're reading. Then you can go through and pick the best ones out of those, and those are going to be the ones you illustrate. As you read, look for keywords. Things like pancakes, bacon, avocado toast, roll called out. You can choose to sketch a specific part of the article or you can do a more like comprehensive summary of the article. Think about what the tone of the article is. Is it humorous? Is it more direct? Is it serious? I tend to do work with more of a sense of humor, but that doesn't mean that I don't pitch more work with serious ideas to the client. You can have a mix too when you present. Sometimes it's good to have a few serious and always a funny one. I find after I'd make my list of initial ideas, it's good to take a little break and come back fresh. Sometimes I go for a walk, sometimes looking at other artists might knock something loose. You just want to be inspired by them, not ripping their ideas off. Remember in a real assignment the AD will have some ideas, so make sure that those ideas are sketched first before you add yours in. Let's say if you feel like you're in a good place, pick three to four of your ideas that you feel could really work. Then let's move on to the next step, which is sketching. 5. Sketch!: So now it's time to draw. We're going to move over to our iPads and start working in Procreate. Then the last step, you should have three or four concepts that you want to sketch out for this. If you don't want to use Procreate, you can sketch on paper, but you are to scan it in to get it into your final presentation. Now we're going to go to our iPads. We're going to open up Procreate. We're going to press the plus sign on the top right. So for this assignment, we know that the illustration is four by four inches. We're going to hit this little plus folder at the top here and add our canvas. So first thing we want to do is select inches. For width, we're going four. For height, we're going four inches. We're going to keep the DPI at 150. We don't need the full 300 DPI that you would normally have with print. This will give us a little wiggle room. Next, we're going to hit color profile. We're just going to make sure that we're on SRGB. This one is SRGB IEC61966-2.1. I have no idea what those numbers mean, but let's hit "Create." All right. Now, here's the part where we're going to break out our Apple pencil and start sketching. So we're going to start by drawing on layer 1. Your layers are up here. These two boxes on top of each other in the top right corner. So layer 1 is all set. So we're already on number 1. We're all good. Now, I like to select a brush for my sketches that looks sketchy itself. I like the dry ink. There's also some pencils and different ones you can pick. Really, it's your own preference. I also want to get this to where it's not like an overpowering size. So you can adjust your brush size over to the left here in this little slider, and you also have an undo down here, undo and redo on the bottom left-hand side. We're going to start sketching our first idea. Since this is like a legal breakfast, I had three concepts that I liked. The first one that I was thinking of was, because there's going to be discussion, but also breakfast, something to do with word balloons and coffee mugs. So I thought it might be fun to do little word balloons in. Maybe show two mugs, and it'll show two people talking, and give this one a directional word balloon too, up here at the top, next to the little pointy hand, there's the eraser. I'm just going to clean my drawing up. I'm going to undo that because that's a little too big. Try that on. There you go. A little smoother. This is just a sketch so it just has to be pretty basic. If I click this arrow here, It'll move my little guy around the screen some. With this step, it may take you a couple of tries, [inaudible] for the class, that's why I'm moving a little quicker. Maybe even inside this word balloon, I'm going to add a little coffee, like that. Yeah, I tend to work a little smaller with my brushes for clarity, but then the nice thing is I can always scale this guy up. Let's see how he's going to work. This is a little smaller than four by four, so I can actually use this little ribbon, which is a lasso tool, and draw around one of my mugs and then hit the arrow, move it up, and do that. Turn around the other mug. Turn it down a little bit. The eraser turns off, click the [inaudible] up. That'll fill the space a little nicer since it's four by four. Again, this is a sketch, so you might have some extra finishing touches for the background. The art director might not want it on light, so it might be in an all square. You can play around. But for our concept number 1, that's all you need. I just clicked the brush to get out of that section. So that's just one idea. I'm going to go ahead and add another idea in here. Again, you might end up with a couple of different things. I just want to do a lot of layers and refine them, and then when you get one you like, click on the thumbnail and hit Rename. I'm just going to call this idea 1. Hit Return, and then this little check here is the visibility. I'm just going to turn that off and move to layer 2, and start sketching my next idea. The other idea, because this is light breakfast and the article had a funny line about pancakes. So I'm just going to draw some basic pancakes. Draw me some syrup. The sketch might be a little sloppy. I don't want it too sloppy, so I'm going to take some lines out, especially erase things that you think might be confusing to somebody that's looking at it. [inaudible] view, because this is like lawyers and legal. I though it'd be funny to do like a gavel. again, this is because the article had a bit of a sense of humor to it in the beginning. This is going to be a fun event. I'm going to do another pancake down here. I'm going to get these pancakes, and because it is a sketch, I'm not going fully detailed. Give myself some room for the final. I just hit the arrow so that way, I can blow this up, and the brushing, and cool. I'm good with that one. So I'm going to go back up to our layers. Click, rename. Idea 02. Turn. Let's do one more. Loving all the breakfast stuff. I like to draw breakfast stuff. I know that this is at the state house, so I looked up what the state house looks like. I'm going to draw a little serious version than that. It has these columns out front. It's got a little statue on top. You can see I'm not getting super detailed just because it's a sketch. It's a nice sized illustration, so you're going to be able to get some nicer details in there. I'm going to fake giving it some windows. It's a sketch, again. We're not going perfect, we're not going crazy, we're getting our ideas across. Now, if you're not crazy maybe about the perspective or how it's looking there, you can hit the arrow and rotate it a little bit. One cool thing you can do with Procreate is you can use the ribbon tool. Oops. It's the ribbon tool, and instead of me drawing on this side of the building twice, I'm going to use the little ribbon. Draw a line around it. Then you'll see here there's Copy Paste. I just hit "Copy Paste." Then if you hit the arrow, you see down here at the bottom, if you're on uniform, you can hit "Flip Horizontally" and it just flipped that for you. Now, you can just drag that to the other side. You're going to hit the brush again. So you get a little drawn, but you'll notice it's on its own layer, so you can actually click the thumbnail and just hit "Merge Down" and hit the arrow. Let's get this down a little bit because what I want to do is have a nice little sun. With Procreate, you can draw a shape and hold it in and it'll become geometric. Then the idea for this one is that it's actually a fried egg. Another goofy idea. Touch the statute a little bit. I just like that compared to the other ones. So I'm going to hit this, I'm going to rename it. We're going to call this guy Idea. There's one d in idea, everybody, Idea 03, "Return." Now, you're going to go ahead and sketch. Just make sure that you're sketching in your ideas. All are on their own distinct layers. Now, what we have to do is we're going to hit "Gallery," so it zooms out and it shows all of your art boards. We are going to click where it says "Untitled Artwork" and we're going to rename this Sketches. You'll want to be more specific when you're dealing with clients. I'm just going to hit "Done." There it is. So we've got that there. Now it's time to move on to the next step, designing your presentation. 6. Let's Design: The first thing we're going to do is open InDesign. Now that InDesign is open, hit "Create New". We're going to call the name of this file Template. Now if you get on here, we're going to make sure that facing pages is unchecked. For orientation, we're going to make sure that it's landscape. Our width is going to be 11 inches, and our height eight and a half inches. You also want to make sure that for pages, we're starting with page one. Now this will be viewed as a PDF on a screen, so we don't have to do anything with the margins and bleeds. If we click this, we just want to make sure they're all set at zero. We're going to hit "Create" and your screen should look like this. First, we're going to go up to the top to go to Window, and then we're going to go over to Workspace. Make sure you're checked on Essentials Classic. Your workspace should look like this. Now the first place we're going to go is over to this icon here, which is pages. On mine it's already opened. If not, just click it. It's the two pages here. You should see this one, page 1A. Then these other ones, A-master and none. We're going to start designing our template. We're going to start with the things that you're going to have on each page of your template. Double-click on A-master to take you over to there. Now we're editing the master slide. But we put here will appear on each of the pages. InDesign at its most basic is a bunch of boxes. You basically draw a box and decide whether to add an image or text to it. For this, we're just going to be adding text. Let's start with your name. We're going to go over here to the X box, the Frame tool. I'm going to click on that and I'm just going to line it up in the corner and draw a little box. The next thing I do is I'm going to go over to the Type tool, which is the T, and click it. You'll notice that your arrow turns into a cursor. You're going to click inside of the frame box that you just made. Here you can type your name. Now that's set to [inaudible] Pro, which is the default in InDesign. What we're going to do is switch it to something a little more designing. I'm going to highlight it. I'm just going to go up here to the top left and click inside this box here that gives you all your fonts. I'm just going to go with Helvetica. You can actually type in the name of the font you want and it'll take you to it and give you these little examples that are on the side. I think I just want Helvetica Bold. I also think that I would like to have it all caps. I miss some punctuation so I can click in there and add it and it'll keep the style. I'm just going to highlight it again. I'm still in Type tool over here T. I think I'm going to blow up the size to 24. If you click the Selection tool, which is the black arrow, it'll deselect the type and you can see what it looks like. Now the other trick with InDesign is if you just hit "W", it gives you a preview of what your page is going to look like. You can hit "W" to check-in and out and see how your design is going. So I'm in the Selection tool, I'm just going to click the box and then double-click on the type, and I'll turn it back to the Type tool. Underneath the font, you can click which weight you like. Keep it as bold. Now if I click the Selection tool again, now you'll see that the type is just black. We can switch the color by going over here to the Swatches on your right-hand side. If you click that, you'll see your Swatches will come up. Make sure you've double-clicked on your type so it's highlighted and then select what color you want to make it. I'm going to go for the red here. If I hit "Selection Tool" again, you'll see that your type is now red. What I really want is orange, so I'm going to double-click on this. I'm going to go over here to the left, to the Swatches. You'll notice the T is highlighted. This is the fill color of the type. If you double-click on it, you'll get this cool color mixer. You can drag around and get what you want. I like having like a reddish-orange. Once you like that, you can add it to your CMYK swatches. If you also have a color in mind, here's a space for your RGB, your CMYK, or your hex code. You can just put that right in to make sure it matches. I'm going to click "Okay". If I click the Selection tool, there's my name, Mr. Illustrator. It's a nice burnt orange. If you notice, the frame in your box is still big. You should be in the Selection tool. Then if you look at your top toolbar, there's this nice little tool here with the two boxes called fit to frame. If you click that, it just makes your frame tighten around the box. That way you don't have any access while you're dragging things around on your workspace. If you're in the Selection tool, now you can drag the frame around that has your type in it. I'm going to just put it up here in the corner an eighth of an inch in both ways. You can see it on the little rollers here. I'm just going to go over an eighth of an inch. The next thing I want to add is the date. I'm just going to come down here to the Frame tool. I'm going to draw another frame. Go to the Type tool, click inside the box and I'm going to type in a random date. Now you'll notice that the date doesn't have any of your formatting that this does. To copy the formatting, what we're going to do is we're going to use the Eyedropper tool. To use that, we first have to highlight the date and then we come down here in the left-hand toolbar, hold and make sure you're selected on the Eyedropper tool. Sometimes the default is selected. The default selection is the color theme tool. You want Eyedropper. So you're on Eyedropper, and then you want to come over and just use the Eyedropper on one of these letters. After you get back to the Selection tool, you'll see that I copied the style. The date isn't as important as your name. At least I don't feel it is. I'm just going to click to highlight that. I'm going to drop it down a little bit maybe get 18. Then you'll notice on the box, I want to text line it to the right-hand side of my screen. If you come up here, all your paragraph alignments are here. You can click this one. I'll move it over. I'm just going to click the Selection tool to see how that looks. Pretty happy with that. You also have the opportunity here if you wanted to make it a different color or maybe say have slashes, I just highlight these and make them black to give it a look. Whatever you want. It's your template, you want to design it to really fit your style or your personal brand. I'm cool with this. While I have the text-box selected, I'm going to come up here and hit our friend, Fit to Frame, again, and make the frame smaller. I'm just going to drag this over so the edges are at an eighth of an inch again. You'll see these green lines pop up on here and they help you. Those are the smart guides. If you got to View, and then go down to Guides and Grids, if Smart Guides is selected, you'll get those and it'll help you snap your frames around the page. Then when you're moving a box, you'll see it lining up to other things. This is aligned at the top. Then I can see on the right-hand side that is over at an eighth of an inch. I'm going to leave it there. That's your date. Another thing you can do to align your date and your type is, make sure you're on the selection tool, highlight your name, and then hold shift and click on the date. Then on the right-hand side, there's this alignment that you can click. Down here where it says Align To, you can click that and make sure it says Align to page. You can align to the top edge and it will move them both up, and then they're both aligned and you can just use the arrows on your keyboard to move it up and down where you want it. I just moved it down five pixels. If you hold shift and hit the arrow, it'll skip and make you jump 10 pixels. You can also grab these with the selection tool and just drag them where you want them. But this align tool is here to help you to get things around the page. I'm just going to collapse that and I'm going to go back and open up the Pages panel so we can see where we're working. Now we're going to add a page number to make referencing the sketches easier for the art director. This just makes it look a little more professional. I'm going to draw a frame. Over here on the left, frame, drag down here in this right-hand corner. Then just like the other boxes, I'm going to click on the type tool and click inside the frame. Now what I want to insert here is a special character. Instead of starting to type, I'm going to go up to the Type section up here, I'm going to go down to Insert Special Character, then go over to Markers, and I want Current Page Number. Then you'll notice in the box you have a little A. Now, same thing as the date and the name, you can highlight this. Take the eyedropper and just use that to copy the style. Now, because this is the page number, I'm just going to shrink it down to 10, that's all I need. I also want to mess with the color, so I'm going to go to the right and go to the swatches. I think I'm going to make this black. Another option for the colors is the tint here. You can click on that and drag it. I turn this down to a 30 percent, it's going to make a nice, gray color. If I go back to the selection tool, then click off of it, you'll see now it's this nice gray. If you hit W you'll see where your page number is going to go. There's a few stylistic things I want to do. First of all, I'm going to click inside the box and make sure it's aligned to the right. Again, go to the selection tool, and I'm going to click "Fit to Frame", just so that way it's as tight as possible down there. I'm going to expand this just a little bit, that way if you ever have a project where you have more than one page, you're going to have ones where you have to go up to two digits. I've never had one where I've had to go to three digits. That's a pretty big project. Good luck with that one. I'm just going to use the arrows to scoot this down a little bit. If I use this selection arrow I can drag it around to where I want it on the page. See that green line came up to align it. Let me drag it down till it's an eighth of an inch away from the bottom. There's our page number. Now I'm going to go back up to the Pages panel and click on that. Once it's open, I'm going to click on page 1. You'll see that now this little note pops up. It says A-Master applied. Double-click on this. Now I'm inside of my pages, and you can see I'm on page 1. If I hit W, it's the very beginning of our template. I hit W again. Now I'm going to go up to File, and I'm going to hit Save. I'm going to make a new folder. I'm just going to call this Template Folder for our class, and hit "Create". It's going to save this inside. I'm just going to collapse InDesign real quick. I'm going to open up our Template Folder that we just made. I'm going to create two new folders. The first one I'm going to call 01-sketches, and the next one I'm going to call 02-PDFs. You just want to have those in there for when we add the sketches and we start exporting things. It's important to keep your InDesign files organized, as InDesign you're really taking the assets and placing them into the program each time you use it. They're not embedded in there like another program, like Photoshop or Illustrator would have them. These aren't linked to the InDesign folder, so keeping it organized will just save you some heartache later on. That's it for designing our template. Now that we've got all the things on the master slide, in the next lesson, we're going to move on to adding content into your template. 7. Adding Content: [MUSIC]. Now, we're moving on to Step 2, of designing our InDesign template. The first thing I'm going to do is go over on the right here to the layers. In this layer 1, it has all of our master file things on it that we don't want to touch. I'm going to lock this. I'm going to hit the little plus button here, create layer 2 and make sure that's selected. Anything we create now is going to be on layer 2, and it's going to show up over top of anything we have on the master file. I'm going to collapse the layers and then move over to the pages panel. The next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate it two more times. I should have three pages. I'm going to double-click to make sure I'm on page one. This is going to be our cover sheet. We're going to get the frame tool, draw a box in the middle here, get the type tool. Now, at the presentation, I like to have the client name and the name of the project. Coming up here to the type, I'm just going to keep this in Helvetica, so I'm going to start typing in Helvetica. Get Helvetica bold. Blows up to a larger point size than our name. I'm going to highlight just the project illustration part. I'm going to shrink that down a little bit because it's not as important as the client name. Maybe I'll even make the weight regular. I'm going to click the black selection tool. It's going to go down here to a line in the middle. You can also double-click inside and align the paragraph to the center, the selection tool. I don't need a box this big, so I can hit "Fit to frame", then just make sure it's there at the center. Now, we've got a cover page. I'm going to go back to pages. Click on number three. This is going to be our thank you page. I'm going to go over to the frame tool, draw a frame towards the middle, go to the type tool like we did before, click inside. I like to put a nice big thank you at the end, so the client knows your presentation is over, give it an exclamation point because I'm exciting, go to the font choice. Again, I'm just going to type in Helvetica, go with the bold, and then make it all caps, this guy. Center it, up the font size up a little bit. The selection tool, fit to frame, go down here to the align panel. Sync it into the middle of the page, and here you go, you got a nice thank you page. If we go back up to the pages panel, let's double-click on number 2. What we're going to do is we're going to design one page to place our sketches, and then we're going to duplicate it two times. We're going to go over to the frame tool, draw a nice box. We know from the email from the Art Director that this is going to be four by four inches. Here at the top, you'll see the width and the height. Double-click inside here. Make this one four. Make sure this is unchecked. If you click this, it constrains the proportions, just make sure this slashes through the middle there so that way you can edit each proportion independently. Four and four, I hit the selection tool. Click down here, you'll see I have a nice square box. If you click off of that and hit W, you'll see that there's nothing there because we haven't styled the box. I'm going to hit W again, click the frame, and then down here on the left where we switch the color for the type. We can use the swatches to edit the styling of the box. I'm just going to click this one here default. It's going to give it a nice black border around it. If I hit W again, click off of that. You'll see there's just a nice black box to put our sketch in. If you wanted to go over to swatches, maybe turn on the tint a little bit, make it more like 60 percent gray. It's a little less striking than the black, a little more subdued. I'm going to click on this and just make sure it's in the middle of the page. The next thing we're going to do is go over in Dropbox for where our descriptions are going to go. We're going to get the frame tool again. Use the frame tool a lot, draw those square. You can either type tool and click inside, and we're going to go up here to type. I'm going to hit "Fill with Placeholder Text" and gives us some Lorem Ipsum. Now, the reason we're filling it with placeholder text first is that we can style the placeholder text, and then later when we come back and write inside of this, the placeholder text will keep the style that we choose to match the rest of our presentation. If I highlight this, it's going to go up to the top, probably guessed and do Helvetica. It doesn't need to be bold, I'm just going to make it light. It's at 12 points. It's got a little space with the line hanging. Click the selection tool. You'll see that I've got this little plus here. It just means that some of your content is going outside of the box. You can hit "Fit to Frame" and actually just resize for your content. I'm going to take the selection tool and draw an arrow, highlight both of these boxes. I'm going to hit a line objects to the horizontal centers just to make sure they're there. There we go. Now, I'm going to add one more frame to this, and it's a box so we can label each sketch, so it makes it easier for the Art Director to go through and see which sketch you're talking about or referencing. I'm going to click the frame tool, just draw a little square right here. Click inside with the Type Tool. I'm just going to call this concept A. Just like we do with the other stuff, we can switch the font and make it nice and bold. If I hit the selection tool, you'll see that there's a little floating A that doesn't look wonderful. I'm going to make a tab. I'm going to click this. You can go over to where we selected the colors, show the box, again, click on the fill, and again to the Swatches. I'm just going to make this black. Now, I'm going to get to the type tool because I've lost my letter now. I'm just going to click inside the box twice to highlight where the letter is. I'm going to make that white. Inside InDesign white is labeled as paper. It's because InDesign is like more of a print tool. I'll just call that paper. I've hit the selection tool again but still doesn't look great. I'm going to click the box. I'm going to go to object Text Frame Options, and I'm just going to give this box. You'll get this little window. I'm going to give it some inset spacing. If I click it up to 0.0625, you'll see that started to make a little border here. Make sure previous checked, let me hit it one more time, and I've got a nice little border there. I'm going to hit okay. I'm going to select "Fit to Frame". If I click off of that now, I've got the A as a nice little tab and just drag that onto there, dock it in the corner, and there we go, we have a nice page for our sketches. Now, we're going to return to our pages panel. Click that open. Number 2, you'll see that it's blue. I'm just going to grab that. You'll see that the hand turns to a little grabber and drag it down to the new layer and it will duplicate the layer. I'm just going to drag this new one. I'm going to make two. Now, I've got two more spaces for sketches, but you'll notice that page 3 is our thank you page. I'm just going to click on that and drag that around to the end, let go, and now, it's page 5. Now, you have page 2. I'm going to click on page 3. You'll notice that page 3 is also called A. I don't want to call that B, so I'm just going to double-click inside of that and type B, you'll notice that that disappeared. With the selection tool, I'm going to click on it and I'm just drag the box out a little bit, so we can see the B again, and then I'm going to hit "Fit to frame". Time to backup. This is option B, double-click on page 4. Double-click inside that box, make this option C. Again, this little square because it doesn't fit, so I'm just going to drag it out a little bit to C and then hit "Fit to Frame" to tighten it up, and there we go. Now, we've got space for three sketches and our thank you slide and our cover page, so when they come into the PDF, option A, option B, option C. Thank you. Now, what we're going to do is just go up to file and we're going to save it. Then for the next step, we're going to be taking our sketches from procreate and adding them into this presentation. [MUSIC] 8. Adding Sketches: Okay, we're going to open up Procreate again, select our sketches, go ahead and hit the wrench here, share, we hit PSD, and the air drop. There's My Computer, so I'm going to hit My Computer, you hear that nice noise on your computer? Just go over and check it out, make sure you got it. All right, now our file should be on the computer. The first thing we're going to do is go to your downloads to see your file named Sketches, you're going to drag that over into our Template folder that we created. Now I'm going to drag that over and put it in Sketches just to keep things organized, and then our InDesign template, double-click that, should be open. We're going to start off on page 2, and we're going to add in concept A. I'm going to click inside of this frame with the selection tool, and then you're going to hit "Command D", "Control D" PC people, and double-click "Sketches". Right-click our Sketches and hit "Okay". All right, there's our sketches. Now we're just going to not mess with those right now, we're going to go to option B. Same deal, "Command D", add in the sketches, there it is again, it's the same sketch. Don't worry, we'll come back. "Command D", sketches, we're on page 4. That's on page 4. We have sketches loaded on each of our three sketch presentation pages. Now what we want to do is switch this to a different sketch, so I'm going to click on the frame, I'm going to hit "Object", "Object Layer Options" up here at the top. Make sure this little preview is checked, so that way you can see in your presentation what's going on. I want to start with Idea 01, so I'm going to click this eyeball, so it goes away, and click next to Idea 01, and a new eyeball pops up, and there's our coffee mug's speech bubbles. Click "Okay", and you go down to option B, and do the same thing. "Object", "Object Layer Options", take away this eyeball on Idea 03, and then put the eye for Idea 02, click "Okay". There's our pancake gavel. Then for our third option, we already have the state house fried egg inside of there. There you go, your art is inside of the template. Now we're going to move on to our next step which is writing a description for each of the sketches. 9. Let's Write: This step is very easily overlooked and even skipped by some professionals. It's important to have it in there because your Art Director won't always be reviewing the sketches with you. They'll probably be doing it on their own time so writing a description is going to help get your idea across to them. For this next step, I'm going to be typing writing in InDesign. But I do recommend if you struggle with writing, just writing things out on a piece of paper and getting them to where you like them and then write in into InDesign. Don't worry about spelling right now because when we get to the next step after this, exporting your file, there is a spell check that we're going to go through as part of this tutorial. We're in InDesign, I'm on page 2 of our template. I'm just going to double-click inside of the type box. It's highlighted. I'm going to select everything and I'm just going to hit "Backspace". Now if you notice when you type, it kept your style and you can put your new copy in that way. A few tips for writing, address which concept this is. There's a couple of different ways you can refer to your sketch. Some people like to call them ideas, concept, direction, whatever you like, you can put in there to differentiate between the sketches that you're showing. With this, make sure you describe your art. I'm going to make sure that when you're typing that you tie in to how this refers to the article. If it's a humorous idea or if you need to mention the tone, be sure to put it in there. I always try to keep this to around two or three sentences. That's all you need to set basic description. I'm going to mention that it's a straight forward view of two coffee cups. You can repeat this for the other two steps. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to highlight all the type. I'm going to go over here to the right in the panels and click "Paragraph". I'm just going to make sure that hyphenate is unchecked. When you're typing, you don't get any hyphens in there. Also there's a widow in this type. I think I want to align the center and then what I'm going to do is knock this line down and I'll hold "Shift" and hit "Return". Now if I hit the selection tool, click off of it. We'll see it's just looks a little cleaner that way. I click on it. Fit the frame. Looking good. Now you have a pretty straightforward looking presentation. We're going to move on to our next step, which is exporting it into a PDF for your Art Director. 10. Export: Now it's time to export our file in InDesign. So you should be in InDesign. I'm just going to make sure we're on page 1. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to check the spelling of everything. So Edit, Spelling, Check spelling. Now, when the spelling window comes up, make sure it's Search ensure you select it on Document. Let's start. I spelled coffee wrong. That was it. Sometimes when you are spell checking, you may get a proper name that Spellcheck doesn't recognize. You can always skip it as you are going through. In this case, we're all done with the spellcheck. I'm going to hit, "Done". Now we have a presentation where we have three pieces of art. And each one has their own little description. Now we're going to export it. That way we have our PDF that we can send to the Art Director. We're going to go up to file. We're going to go down to export. We're going to see our template folder. If you don't see that, you're going to have to find it on your desktop or wherever you have it. Once you're inside the template, I'm going to double-click on PDFs. This is where I want to save it, the Save As we're saving it as template. If we go to Adobe PDF presets and we click this box, you want to have it at press quality again when you go down to pages, make sure All is selected and that you're exporting as Pages. Now you're going to hit, "Export." Let's just save our InDesign file real quick. I'm going to collapse InDesign. You get over here to our template folder and double-click, "PDFs." There Is our template and double-click to open it. Again, there's our client name, our first sketch, our second sketch, and our third sketch and a thank you to the Art director. Now you've explored your PDF. We're just going to move on to the next step, which is some final thoughts. 11. Final Thoughts: I hope this class was helpful to you and that you use the techniques that we discussed from a new concept in sketch. The presentation we designed can always be re-edited and you can reuse it on your future illustration commissions. Feel free to add to it as well and make it more distinctly your own. Please post your final PDFs and leave a review below. Also let me know if you have any questions. If you posted about the class on social media, please tag me @JAMESOLSTEINILLUSTRATION on Instagram, and @JAMESOLSTEIN on Twitter. I hope you enjoyed the class and good luck with your illustrations.