Practical Graphic Design: Learn Adobe InDesign Through Fundamental Design Principles | Kyle Aaron Parson | Skillshare
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Practical Graphic Design: Learn Adobe InDesign Through Fundamental Design Principles

teacher avatar Kyle Aaron Parson, Graphic Designer and Illustrator

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Class Intro

      2:35

    • 2.

      Class Project And What to Expect

      1:44

    • 3.

      Document Features

      3:40

    • 4.

      Document Setup: Getting Started in InDesign

      7:54

    • 5.

      Knolling: Creating Order

      2:07

    • 6.

      Alignment: Building Structure

      2:22

    • 7.

      Alignment Practice

      9:05

    • 8.

      Hierarchy: Capture Attention

      1:56

    • 9.

      Hierarchy Practice

      11:50

    • 10.

      Typography: A Basic Guide

      3:50

    • 11.

      Typography Practice

      9:28

    • 12.

      Class Project Example: Part 1

      14:42

    • 13.

      Class Project Example: Part 2

      7:06

    • 14.

      Class Project Example: Part 3

      13:34

    • 15.

      Thank You! You Are AWESOME!

      2:46

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About This Class

Graphic Design is all about communicating an idea effectively and this is something that is needed in every industry. Learn how to take your message to the next level with InDesign by learning practical graphic design principles that will help catch your viewers attention and guide them through your design. Take what you learn and apply it quickly with interactive practice files that will help you develop your abilities and knowledge throughout the class. By the end you will have polished layouts to add to your portfolio.

Join Graphic Designer Kyle Aaron Parson as he walks you through the basics of InDesign and shows you practical ways to communicate effectively through layout design.

What you will learn:

  • InDesign Basics
  • Production Terms: Trim Bleed and Margins
  • Create visual relationships with Alignment
  • Use Hierarchy to Establish Structure to your Layouts
  • Understand Typography Basics
  • Apply what you learn to Clients Files

When I first started learning graphic design I was highly focused on learning Photoshop and Illustrator, and never took the time to really dive into InDesign. However, One thing I would do differently if I started my graphic design journey over is to learn InDesign early. It is a powerhouse tool in creating beautiful documents for print and for web. It has been often the case that InDesign is my final step before sending my work of to the printers or to the web. For this reason, whether you’re a designer or not, Learning InDesign is an invaluable asset that will set you apart in almost any industry.

This class is for everyone who wants to create polished work that will stand out in the world. InDesign is the final step before you work goes out into the world, and in the world of design the finishing touches make all the difference!

Meet Your Teacher

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Kyle Aaron Parson

Graphic Designer and Illustrator

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Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Class Intro: Graphic design is all about communicating ideas effectively, and this is important in every industry. This class will give you a firm foundation on how you can take your message to the next level by implementing practical graphic design principles that will catch your viewers indention and guide them through your design. Hey guys, my name is Tyler and parson. I am a graphic designer and illustrator based in Edmonton, Canada. I've been a freelance graphic designer for nearly a decade. And over that time I've worked on many projects like award-winning logo designs and poster designs. Clients come to me and give me information for a brochure, poster design, a book cover, and many other things. And it's my job to take that information and organize it in a pleasing, effective way so that it catches the viewer's attention and guides them through the information. Now this is something anyone can do once they learn some practical graphic design principles and apply them to their designs. When I first started learning graphic design, I really focused on learning Photoshop and Illustrator, and I never really considered in design. However, one thing I would do differently if I were to start my graphic design journey all over again is learning design early. This is because InDesign is a powerhouse tool in creating beautiful documents for print and for Web. Although you can do many things in Photoshop and Illustrator, such as design, a logo, and editorial illustration, or photo manipulation. It's often the case that this is just the starting point. And the final step is bringing all those components into InDesign to format it in order to send it out to the printer or to the web. And since InDesign is my final step in my workflow, it is essential that I know how to use the tools effectively, because in the world of design, the finishing touches make all the difference. This class will introduce you to InDesign and how you can make polished work based on a set of design principles. You'll learn practical graphic design principles such as alignment, hierarchy, and typography. And this will elevate your design to the next level so you can communicate effectively. This class is for anyone who wants to make more polished work so that you can communicate your message effectively and level up your designs. Although we will be using InDesign throughout the class to learn the graphic design principles. These graphic design principles can be applied to any application and really any design. So if you're ready to learn practical graphic design, I will see you in class. 2. Class Project And What to Expect: Your project for this class is to format a document, whether that'd be a poster, an editorial advertisement, even a restaurant menu, really anything that uses texts and images. And then apply the graphic design principles taught in the class. The first section, we'll go over a basic InDesign document and what makes it up. We'll understand terms like trim and bleed and understand the color mode is RGB and CMYK and when to use them. In the second section, we'll dive into a little bit of design theory and understand things like alignment, hierarchy, and basic topography that when applied to your design, will catch your viewers attention and guide them through it. In the third section, we'll dive right into InDesign and learn the basic functionality of the program. And also, we'll create our class project utilizing the things we've learned in class. All you'll need for this class is a computer with InDesign installed. Although a lot of this class, we'll be learning the graphic design principles that can be applied to any application of your choice. We will be using InDesign practice files to take what we've learned and put them into practice. If you don't have InDesign, you can always sign up for a seven-day free trial through Adobe and utilize that time to go through the practice files. After you download the project files, you'll be able to follow along. By the end of the class, you'll have a full understanding on how you can easily customize your documents and utilize the practical graphic design principles. In the next class, we will learn the basics of an InDesign document and the setup. 3. Document Features: In this class, let us learn a few key features that will apply to our document when we're working in InDesign. When we work in InDesign, many of the things that we produce will be for print. There's a few terms that we need to understand such as trim, margins and bleed. Trim is essentially the final size of your document. Many printers will print on oversized paper and then trim them down to the final size afterwards. The margins are essentially the frame on our paper where will contain all our important information. If we go outside the margins, essential details may be cut off and our design might be too close to the edge and look in proper. So you want to keep any important information within the margins. You can adjust your margins so that you have more or less whitespace around your document. And this might help your design breathe. Bleed is an extension of our document that allows images or graphics to go right to the edge. Printers print on oversized paper, then trim the paper down to the documents size. Since the documents are cut after the fact, if we push our image is only to the trim line and it's slightly misaligned. You might have a small white streak on the edge of your page. However, to prevent this, we push our images to the bleed past the trim line. This allows our image to be right to the edge every time. Now that we understand that both the page in InDesign, let us understand about the common color modes that we will be using. There are two main color modes that we'll be working with. Rgb or CMYK. Rgb is the color mode usually used for screens, and CMYK is the color mode usually use when things go out to print. If you are working in RGB, just be aware that when you go out to print your document, it may not come out as vibrant as you saw in the screen. So this is why if you know that you're going to go for print, It's better to work in CMYK. Now let's learn a little bit about RGB and CMYK. Rgb is an additive color mode, since when you add all the colors together, you get white. In an RGB display or screen, there are thousands of tiny knowns that have three colors, red, green, and blue. When you turn on each one altogether, you get what? This is. What I mean by additive. We add all colors to get white. Cmyk, however, is a subtractive color mode, since as colors are removed, it will leave only white. In the CMYK printing process, it runs for different color inks. Cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. As a printer runs through each color, only the areas without any ink will be one. This is what I mean by subtractive. Since we have to remove each color to get white, although you may not need to know all the details of the printing process or RGB. It is good to understand the end results so that you can plan your project accordingly. Remember, if you know in advance that you're going to produce something only for screens work in RGB. But if you know that you're going to plan for something for print, it might be better to start in CMYK. In the next class, we'll walk through how to set up a basic document in InDesign. 4. Document Setup: Getting Started in InDesign: Hey guys, in this class, we'll learn to quickly set up our document, understand a few key features of InDesign, and go through a couple tools that we'll be using throughout the class. So when you open up InDesign, you'll come to this menu here. This is the welcome screen. In the welcome screen, you can see a few different things. You can see on the left-hand side you have a new file option. You can open an existing InDesign file, or you have a menu options of a recent documents that you've had open. You can see that I've had a few open recently. However, if you're opening InDesign for the first time, your layout might look a little different than mine, but that's okay because what we're going to focus on is the new file option. We're going to click on that and it'll open our options here. When we're creating a new document in InDesign. Indesign gives us a few presets depending on what we want to create. So it has a few options here we have something for print. It gives you a bunch of print documents such as letter size paper, legal tabloid, letter half, and many others that you can use. You can decide to choose something for web or even for a mobile device. It has these presets already made. So if you're making a design specifically for an iPhone tin, it already has that size preset into InDesign. It makes it really easy to create designs specifically for a specific element, like an iPhone ten or a Word document. We're going to create something for print today. And we're going to go over to the right-hand side. The right-hand side, you can see that there are a few different options. You can title your document and that's a document set up. And you have the ability to change the height, height, and the width of your document. You can go up in increments using the arrow keys like that. You can also decide on which units you want to use, whether that'd be in inches or millimeters or pixels. After that, you can see that there are pages. So if you have a multi-page document, you can decide how many pages you want. And there is a checkbox here that is facing pages. Missing pages is used generally when you are making some sort of book of booklet. It means that your pages that you have in your document will end up facing each other. You can click this on. So if you have a multiple pages, you want them to fold into each other. So you want facing pages on. However, in our case we're going to do a single-page and we don't need that on. And then you can start at page number one. And a primary text frame essentially makes a frame within the boundaries that you've noted here. If you've created a specific margin, it'll create a default text box in proportion to that margin, which is really cool. It speeds up your workflow and we will go over it in this class. However, it's something to look forward to in future classes that I will teach on InDesign. All right, if we go down further, we'll go through the margins. Margins are essentially your frame that you want to contain your important information in. So you can either increase or decrease the size of your margins. And if you only want to change one side of your margins, you can see over here there's a link option. You can unlink it. And let's say I want the bottom part to have more whitespace than the top part and everybody else to be the same, I can increase that to one inch. Now the bottom we'll have one inch of whitespace and everywhere else will have 0.5 inches. Now we're down to the bleed. Now remember the bleed is the extension of our documents so that when we want graphics to go right to the edge of our page, we push them to the bleed so that when it is trimming down during the printing process and the cutting process, actually we won't lose any graphics. They will go right to the edge every time. And then we have an option called slug, Slug. Really, we're not going to talk about it too much. They it's just another extension to your document to write notes in or something specifically for the printers. It's not often that the designers will use it. It's mainly for the printers. They may want to add a slugging to say, you should cut here, you should fold here, something like that. But for us today that's not too important. I think everything that we have here is good. We're going to add a bleed of 0.125 is a pretty standard bleed. Anywhere you go. However, if you are getting a printer to print your documents, ask them what they require that maybe they need a 0.25 inch bleed, not as 0.125, but that is different depending on where you go. But for most cases is 0.125 will be great. Alright, now we can hit Create. Now that we're in our document, I want to give you a quick tour so you can understand what's happening in InDesign. Jumping right in here, you can see that you have your menu at the top, your file edit layout type has some type options. Object has some things for graphics and objects that you are creating, tables, view, window, and help. Up here you can see a drop-down menu currently it's at Essentials. This is the Workspace menu. So depending on how you want to work in InDesign and what Windows you want open. You might want to change this to something else, like Essentials Classic. It might bring up a few different options here. However, I'm going to set that back to Essentials just to keep it nice and clean. Over on the left-hand side, you can see our toolbar. We can go up here and toggle our toolbar in and out just like that. Then it has a few different tools. We'll go over it right now. The first two at the top are your selection tools, your general selection tool, and your direct selection tool. The next thing that I want to show you is these two boxes here. These are our shape tools. We have two different types of shape tools. We have a frame tool and irregular shape tool. If we click and hold, you can open up the shape tool and it'll bring up a few different options. You can create a rectangle, or a circle, or a polygon, and this is the same with the frame tool. However, they work slightly different. The rectangle, you can actually create a shape and then you can give that shape some color. So if I double-click in this box here, this is the fill color. I can give it some sort of color like that. However, the frame, when I click on that and click and drag, you can see that it just has an x through it. What does that mean? A frame is used when we want to use graphics in our document, but we don't know what we want to place there yet. So we can design our document and put this in as a placeholder. Say, I want a picture here, I'm going to put a frame there. Later on. I'll put that actual picture there, but it's just a placeholder. Until that happens, you're saying, I know I want something here and this is a frame that's going to hold it so you can design your document beforehand and bringing all your elements later on. And everything will be nicely executed. And then the next thing that I want to go over as quickly is our type tool. Type tool is T on your keyboard, and it works similar ways to our rectangle and our frame tool. You can click and hold and drag out a box. However, this box is a little different. You can see that there is a blinking cursor right there. That means it's a live text box and now I can start typing in my text. Whatever I want, just like that. Now that we know a little bit about InDesign, let's go over a few practical graphic design principles in the next class. 5. Knolling: Creating Order: Before we move on to the principles of design, I want to show you a simple way to make any combination objects more appealing and organized. This practice is called Nolan. Nulling is simply the process of arranging objects at right angles so that they are parallel to one another or at 90 degrees. It keeps everything organized and creates clean, appealing images to apply. Nulling is very simple. Let's go through a quick practice that you can try out yourself. All you need to do is grab some stuff lying around your desk, the keyboard and mouse, hourglass. Maybe you have some toys, pencils, pens, or note book, anything. Now to begin, you should get yourself a key object as a beginning reference point. After that is placed will align all other elements in relation to the key object. Keeping parallel or perpendicular lines. Essentially, you are creating a custom grid made from the elements that make up your composition. This can just as easily be done onscreen as it is off-screen. Now I want you to have some fun and try it out yourself. Take some objects that are lying around with you. It doesn't have to be many and arrange them in this way. Use the principles of nulling to create a pleasing composition. Then take a picture of your composition and post it in the project panel. Knowing has been used so much in social media as well as advertisements. Why? Because it is pleasing to the eye. When we arrange elements in an organized fashion, actually, our brain just recognizes that this is satisfying. Creating alignment in your designs will instantly make your designs more appealing because it creates a relationship between the components and it's easier to navigate. In our next class, we'll learn about the principle of alignment and how we can apply it to our designs. 6. Alignment: Building Structure: Now that we understand how simply lining of objects at right angles can add to the appeal of a design and create a sense of relationship. We'll move on to learning some practical graphic design principles that when applied, will instantly improve any design. Alignment is simply organizing our text and images to create a relationship that is easy to fall though, there are many ways to align things to create order. We can align everything to the center or to the left or to the right. If you have graphics that are arranged side-by-side, you could align top, bottom, or center the items. Language has a natural flow. In English, we read from left to right. Now, imagine trying to read this group of texts. It's all over the place. Our eyes don't know where to go next. However, if we align all the text to the left, this immediately allows the reader to follow the words since the starting position of the next line remains constant. However, you could align the text to the center to create symmetry and balance. However, after three lines of text, the reader's eyes are forced to jump around quite a bit. This may cause the experience to be confusing and end up losing the viewer's attention. Visually, your designs will look more polished if your designs are aligned in some way, even if few items are present. So as you're developing your designs, look for things that could be aligned so that you can create a more cohesive design along with alignment spacing will help your overall design be easier for the viewer to follow. Having proper spacing will help your view or have a consistent visual footstep from one element to another. You may have a set spacing for the lines in a paragraph or between a paragraph in a header, creating a group of elements and creating consistent spacing between the groups. As long as you think about applying consistency to the spacing within your design, you will create a pleasing design. Now, let's put this into practice in the project resources you will find a file called alignment practice. In the next class, we'll walk through how you can use the alignment tools in Adobe InDesign to create alignment and create relationships between all your elements in your document. 7. Alignment Practice: Hey guys, in this class we'll go over some tools to help us create alignment and our documents so that you can have a more cohesive design and build relationships between all your elements. Let's jump right into it. All right, jumping into the document here. This is our alignment and spacing practice sheet that you can find in the project panel. If you don't have it open and go download it and you can follow along. So the first thing that you can see is we have a brief history of pizza. Now it's very cool and interesting article teaching you a little bit about the history of pizza. So if you want to read through it, definitely go ahead. However, it looks like somebody just haphazardly through some images and some text on there. Well, that's exactly what happened. That's exactly what I did. So don't blame me. We're going to fix it together. The first thing that we wanna do is we want to fix up the text down here. Remember, in English, we read left to right. So when we align text to the center and sometimes people get confused or their eyes get tired from jumping all around. So it's beneficial to align your text to the left if you have large amounts of texts. And in this case we definitely do have large amounts of text. So let's jump in and fix that. One thing that we need to do is we need to open up some windows. If we go to Windows, we go to Type and Tables and we can go down to paragraph. The paragraph menu will open and we can see that there are a few different options. You can align left, align, center, align, right. We can apply this to our document. So we can click into the paragraphs that have misaligned text. And we can hold Shift to click them all and all at once. We can align all the texts to the left. Now, if we want to preview what this looks like without all these guide boxes and the margins and the bleed. We can go over here to this option here we have the normal view or we have the preview view that gets rid of all our guides and our margins and we can see what the end result will be already. This looks a lot better because all the bulk text is aligned to left. It creates a consistent visual footsteps for the readers to follow. Let's jump back in and see how we can adjust this a little further. Let's hit W on our keyboard and we can turn on our grids and guides. And we can see that we do have a margin. Remember, the margin is sort of like a frame that contains our information and we can utilize this margin to line things up. We can see that this text down here is already aligned right to the margin, as well as this picture of the pizza, we want to make some relationships between all of these objects and make it consistent. So we can take this brief history of pizza and we can move it over. Now, one thing you can see is there are these green lines appearing. What that is is a smart guide. If you don't see those, you can go to View Grids and Guides. Smart Guides that allows you to click the points and highlights areas where it sees alignment in your documents. So it makes it really easy to align things. So this pizza box, this pizza textbox, it is already aligned to the margin, but it's the texts over here in the middle. So how do we fix that? We go to our paragraph and we go Align Left. And now you can see that they're all line up. If we hit W, you can see that it looks very clean. The next thing that we wanna do is we can bring this image down a little bit and allow that pizza title debris than standout in the background there. So we have some space between this picture and that picture. So I want to align this picture exactly centered horizontally with the other picture. How do I do that? Now one thing I could do is I can click it and I can drag it down. And you can see my smart guides snap when it's aligned to that image. And that's a really good one thing I wanna do is I want to align it perfectly to the center. I can do that with my smart guides. You can see that a purple line appears when it's centered. But what if I just wanna do it in one click? If it's over here and it's aligned perfectly there, but I want to align it to my page. I can open up the Align panel. If I go to windows object and Layout, and I go to a mine, it'll open up my Align panel. The aligned option gives me the options to align objects to the left, center, right, top, bottom, and center horizontal. And you can distribute objects evenly. Now, one thing you have to see here is there are options to align to. Currently, it says align to selection. However, if you click and hold, you can see that there are other options you can align to the margins. You can align to the page, you can align to the sprint. Let's see what these options do. So if I wanted to align it to the margins, I can click on that and I can click a line and it pops it up and aligns it right to the margin. If I want to align it to the page and I click left align, it'll line up right to the edge of the page. So that's really cool. But I want it into the center of the page so I can do center horizontal, and it'll go directly to the center of the page. The next thing that I wanna do is I want to align this block of text directly centered to this object. Now, if we click both objects, we can go Align to Selection and centered. Now what happened? It took my top picture and my bottom of texts and align them to the center between their original position. So it found the middle ground. However, I wanted my bottom text tool online only to the picture and I didn't want the picture to move. So let's undo that hitting Control Z. Now, there's another option. If you click and hold aligned to key object. How do we activate this? It's very simple. If we click both objects holding Shift and then release Shift and click an object again. You can see that it highlights it with a big thick blue bar. This creates a key object. Now in our Align panel, you can see that there's a key in this side, the aligned box. Now, when I click Align Center, the key object will not move and the textbox will move perfectly to the center of the key object. Now let's go through and try to online a few more objects. Now, this is the textbox. I want to bring it up slightly. I want all these three textbox to align perfectly to the top of this textbox. So how do I do that? Hold Shift, select them all. Click once again on the main text box and create a key object there and align to the top. And now you can see that they all align evenly. Now, I can bring this down a bit and hit W to see how that looks. It's looking pretty good. But I think these ones need to go up a little bit just like that. Well w, and that's looking a lot better. It has some space in-between these two groups of text. Now, to create a little more repetition, I want to create the same spacing between these two boxes as in these two boxes. So how do I do that? I can try and eyeball it and tried to drag this one up and make it close. But we can do it even better if we create a rectangle, clicking M on your keyboard. And we can click on the bottom of this box and the bottom to the top of the bottom box. Weaker, create a rectangle, give it some color. Now we can drag this one right to the bottom of our top text-box here. If we zoom in, we can then pull this one up and match that perfectly. And now we can see that those two spacings are exactly the same. And this will create consistency in your document that'll be pleasing to the viewer. Now we see that we went from a very disorganized document to a very clean and organized document. Applying the principles of alignment. This creates relationships between certain elements and sort of guides the viewer along your design. So what I want you to do for this class is go through this practice sheet, as well as there is a secondary practice sheet underneath that you can try to apply what you've learned to. And I definitely want to see what you guys do with it. So definitely posted in the project panel after you're done in the next class, we'll go over a principle of design that will instantly capture the viewer's attention and guide them through your design. 8. Hierarchy: Capture Attention: In this class we're going to talk about the king of visual design. If you master this, you'll be able to get any message across effectively. So what is this king? It's hierarchy. Visual hierarchy is the principle of arranging elements to show their order of importance. Hierarchy is simply guiding your viewer to where they should look. First, look here, then look here. And finally, here, if you do your job well, you will get your message across clearly. Although there are many ways that we can establish hierarchy, we're only going to go through a few today. The forms of hierarchy we'll go through today, our scale, color contrast. And finally, we'll go through style or shape. The most obvious form of hierarchy that will be used in most designs is scale. Since viewers noticed larger elements easily, you can use scale to express or what the viewer should look at first. To create a sense of balance in a design using scale, you need to have elements of various sizes. This is why in almost any design, you'll want to know them. And that is big, one that is medium, and one that is small. The next way to establish hierarchy is color and contrast. Bright colors typically attracted more attention than muted ones. Although higher contrast will ultimately overpower the bright colors if the contrast between it and the background is low. The final way to apply hierarchy is style or shape. People are drawn to things that are out of the ordinary, the different, an element that is different in style or shape from the rest will usually catch the viewer's attention first. In the next lesson, we'll go through the hierarchy practice sheets you can find in the project resources. So go download it and I'll see you in class. 9. Hierarchy Practice: Hey guys, in this class we'll go over putting into practice the principles of hierarchy in a layout design. Alright, let's jump right into it. So the document that I have open here is hierarchy. You can find it in the project panel with the practice documents. For this class, we're going to go through how we can actually use the principles of hierarchy to increase the effectiveness of this document. So let's see what we can do with it. The first thing that we need to understand is that right now we have a lot of information here and nothing really stands out. We hit W, we can see that everything was sort of blends into each other. We have a title here, but is that a title? I don't really know. Based on what I see here is just a group of texts. It's all the same text. So we need to think, what do we want the viewer to see first? What do we want the viewer to see next? And then what do we want the viewer to see? And we can try and implement the principle of hierarchy to establish these things. So let's go through that. The first thing that I wanna do is I want to bring out this title here. So I've got two parts of the title. We got the history of and we got to video games. Video games is the front and center of the title. That's are the main purpose of this. So this will probably be the biggest thing or the biggest texts that we have available in this document. So let's do that here. Let's increase that size. Pretty big. One thing that we can do to give it a little more hierarchy, we can actually distinguish it from all the rest of the document. How, by differentiating the style. Remember people look for the different, the unusual. So if we have a text that is different than all the other texts, our eyes are going to automatically go there. So let's find a text that sort of fits the theme of video games. So we can go into our Character panel here. If you don't have that open, you can go to Windows, type in table, and go to Character. In this table, we can actually select what text or what font we want to use. Actually, I've had a few different fonts here and some of them look pretty cool. Future looks pretty cool. It's a very geometric version, but I'm going to select this one here. Ethnocentric. It's a pretty cool type. So you can see here that now I only have video in here and I have this box here. What that means is there's overset text. It means the texts that I have in there cannot fit within my text frame, which is okay, but I want to see that text. So how we can get rid of that is we can just pull a textbox out. And you can see that the video games appears. Whenever you see that red box with the plus sign, it means there's overset texts that needs to be addressed. So now that we have addressed that, we can go on and play with the history of the history of it doesn't need to be as big or different as the video games. So we can increase the size a bit. And we can also change that font. We can change the font weight. So we have Roboto, that's gonna be our main font. Throw the document. That's pretty easy to read font, so it's good for the bulk of the text. But we can also use it in our title so we can keep it as rubato and we can change the weight of it. So you can see that we can go really thin with it, or we can bring it up, give it a little bold, just like that. Now, just with that, we can see that there is already a nice sense of hierarchy. We are really drawn to this over here, but there's one more thing that we can apply to the title that'll actually create even more hierarchy that will draw our eyes instantly to this title. What is that? So we went through size or scale, and we went through style or shaped by changing the font. Now, what can we do? We can apply a color to it. So how do we apply color to our type? If we go to window and we go to color, and we go to color again in the menu. It'll open this up. Now, you can see in the color options, there are two things. If we select our text, you can see that if we select a color here, that's really not what we wanted to do. Because there are two options. We have the box itself or the text. In order to change the color of the text, we need to select the textbox here. So right now I don't want them to have any color. So I'm going to remove that by clicking this red slash here. And now I'm going to click on my type. Now what happened is because it was black and white, it gives me this option here, and it only gives me a value between white and black, but I don't want that. So I can go to the drop-down menu off to the side, and I can change it to one of these four options. Hsb, lab, CMYK or RGB. For simplicity, I'm going to go HSB and this is hue, saturation and brightness. I can change the text color to that, to anywhere on the rainbow. And it's pretty dark. So I need to lighten it up. And it's not saturated at all. So I need to bring up the saturation. Now you can see what's happening. Now in this image of the man here, you can see that there's a few little purples and stuff like that. So I really like that theme, so I'm going to apply that to my text, make it a little brighter. Just like that. Now if we preview this, you can see right away, this made a huge difference in our document. The history of video games that stands out among all the rest. But this history of, it's pretty harsh because this is not a really dark font and this sort of overpowers it because it's so dark. So we can change the history of the text and we can reduce it and make it a little lighter gray just like that. So it doesn't overpower our main title text, and that's looking a lot better. The next thing that we want to play around with is the subtitles here of each of the documents. So they sort of blend in. We don't know where to start. Let's address these two at the same time. If we go to our Character panel, we can increase the size. Let's go to maybe double. So it was ten points, Let's go to 20 points. And instead of having it at a regular, let's use some consistency, just like the title up here, we use bold, we'll use it down here as well. And that's looking great. After that, we can play around with the images as well. So we have our text, we have already created a sense of hierarchy with the title, and we want to play around with the images. Now one thing that we can do is we can adjust the images, play around with them. And we can also adjust the size. Maybe I don't want both of these images in there. I want one main image to really catch the attention of the viewer. Now the text is really good at capturing the attention. But if I want to capture attention, I want a really big and bold image. So I can take one of these out. I don't really like this one, so I'm gonna move it off to the side, but I like this guy here. What I'm gonna do with them, Let's align them to the bottom corner. And I'm going to blow them up. So how do I do that? Now, the funny thing with InDesign is this right here is actually a frame. So if I try to adjust it and pull it out, actually, it adjust the frame which the image contains. So if I try to stretch it out, nothing really happened to the image, but the frame got bigger. So what's happening here? Let's just undo a few of those. Perfect. So we have our image inside our frame. We can either adjust our frame like this or you can see that there is a content picker in the middle. So now you can see this orange box and this is my actual image. So my frame can remain still and I can move around my image within the frame as well. Which is really helpful. Sometimes you can place your frame anywhere you want and you can adjust your image inside it. However, if you want to scale them both at the exact same time as you can hold Control on your keyboard or Command on a Mac, then you can click and drag holding Shift to constrain the proportions. You can bring it up just like This is underneath our text at the moment, so that's really good. But now my text sort of faded away here. It's not there anymore. So we can click both of my text. I can click into my text color over on the side panel. I can double-click and I can bring it up to a white. And now you can see what happened. So this is looking really cool. I can see the final document. Now this document is looking really clean and really awesome using the principles of hierarchy that we learned in the class. And you can see it has a sense of rhythm to it. First look here, then look here. And finally, we're going over here. We usually look at the lightest parts, and then we move to the darker parts, which this is the image. But it's really, what's really cool about this is when we move over here, we can see this guy, he's playing on the computer and he's looking towards the title. Actually subconsciously, people look to where other people are looking. So this gives us circular cycle. Look here, look here, look here, look here, and then where is he looking? He's looking at the title and it sort of bringing us around. And that's a really good design. You can create repetition and cycle your viewer around the image in an orderly fashion. That's an amazing design because they're going to retain that information over and over again and it's going to sink into them. Alright guys, so this was a really fun project. I really hope that you guys take this practice sheet and try it out for yourself. You don't have to do exactly what I did. You can play around with it and try different ways to apply hierarchy to this and make it your own. And then after you're done, posted in the project panel, I would love to see what you guys create. Okay guys, I'll see you in the next class. 10. Typography: A Basic Guide: In this class we will talk about fonts. There are two main types of fonts. These are the Cera fonts and the sans serif fonts or without serifs, these two types of texts are usually best for large blocks of text. However, they could be used as a header. Then there are fonts that are used to catch people's attention. These are display fonts, such as script fonts, decorative fonts, or black letter funds. Display fonts are amazing to capture the attention of the viewer, but they are terrible to use enlarge blocks of text. This can overwhelm the viewer and turn them off of your design. It is best to pair your display font with an easy to read font like a sensor for Sarah, however, you can always mix and match Serif and Sans Serif and use one for a title and one for the page when deciding which fonts to use less is more. Limit yourself to two types of fonts. If you need more contrast in your design, try repeating one of your fonts and in different size, weight, or style. This trick is practically foolproof for creating interesting combinations that work when it comes to typography, there's two main groups. There's the header and the body. The header is the component that is usually the largest, like the title or the tagline. Then the body is the readable texts that has the bulk of your information. So remember these tips when choosing your fonts, limit yourself to two fonts per your design. Make your display fonts something fun that characterizes your design overall. Whether that'd be simple, bold, flowy, childish, or elegant, make it fit the theme of your design. Remember display fonts are perfect for display and capturing attention, but terrible to use in the bulk of your information. So for that, make sure you choose something simple like a San Serif or a serif font. Some popular fonts for body text are Arial, Georgia, lethal, Minion Pro, monster at Verdana and Times New Roman. There's a reason why these fonts are used so often is because they were specifically designed to be easy to read. Now that we've talked about how to decide on a typeface, let's learn how to refine our typefaces to make them the best they can be by using three different types of adjustments. Kerning, letting, and tracking. Letting is the space between the lines of texts, also known as line spacing. If you're not sure how much line spacing you should apply to your text. The default is usually fine. However, you can always adjust the line spacing to give it a little more room so it'll allow your texts to breathe. Tracking is the overall spacing between your characters, sometimes called a character spacing. You can condense or expand the overall spacing to fit your needs. One example is when your paragraph has orphans, orphans, or a single word that sits at the bottom of your paragraph. To correct this, you can condense your tracking by a couple of points to bring this orphan text up and unite your texts. Once again, kerning is the space between specific characters. Unlike tracking, it varies over the course of the word because each letter fits together differently. Kerning is especially useful in adjusting your display fonts or titles in general, you can manually adjust the space between each letter to create the feeling you want. If the font you use for your body texts has bad kerning to begin with, it is better to cut your losses and choose a proven fund. In our next class, we will go through the typography practice worksheet in the project panel. So go ahead and download that and I'll see you in the next class. 11. Typography Practice: Hey guys. In this class, we'll put the principles of topography into practice through our typography practice sheet. Let's jump right into it. So jumping into our document here, you can see that I've opened up the typography practice sheet. You can find it in the project panel so you can follow along. One thing you'll notice is there are two practice sheets. There is the space theme practice sheet and there's the flowers theme practice sheet. For this class. I'm going to use the space theme practice sheet to show you the practical principles. And then if you want to go forward and try it out and apply it to the flowers practice sheet. Go right ahead. So jumping right over here to the space practice sheet, Let's try and use typography to create a pleasing layout that also fits the theme of the design. So right off the bat, we can see the topography is pretty boring, although there is a sense of hierarchy with the scale of the type and a really cool image. It doesn't really fit the theme. Too much. Space is usually something that's futuristic. However, we're actually using a font. What's this font is? Times New Roman, It's very traditional. So one thing that you have to consider when you're choosing your font is what's the theme? Do I need a traditional font or do I need a more bold font, or do I need a futuristic font? Actually, for this one, I think I need a more futuristic font. So choosing fonts according to your theme is very important because it will also bring out the characteristics of your design and it'll be more cohesive. So let's try and pick a font that futuristic. There are many fonts that are futuristic, but a serif font usually isn't because that's a traditional font. However, san-serif fonts are usually more futuristic and geometric, which I really want to go for. So there's one font in particular that I'm going to use, and that is future. Future is a very geometric font and it's very bold with its shapes and its forms, and it feels very futuristic. I'm going to choose that one specifically for this design because it sort of fits the theme of space. So I'm going to change my fonts to Futura. And then I'm going to play with the typography a little bit more. So number one thing I can do is I can add it to the hierarchy by changing the weights of the font. I can go heavy for the title and maybe bring out this one to a medium. And I'll leave that one as the book font because that's pretty easy for reading. Now, the next thing that I wanna do is I want to sort of play around with the theme of space within my typography. Now, how do we do that? Actually, one thing you can do is the theme of space is right in its name space. I can bring a little more space into my typography to sort of add to the theme and design. This one, I want to space out the letters. What can I use to space out the letters? If I go into my character panel, if you don't see this, you can go to Windows, Type and Tables and character. You can bring this panel up now to space out the distance between the letters. Remember, we can use tracking. Tracking over here, increases the space between our letters. And I want to really overdo this to fit our theme a little bit. So right there I'm adding a little bit of space to our typography, and I'm going to do that with the subtitle as well. Just a little bit. The next thing that I wanna do is I want to create some visual hierarchy that will tie the picture with the text in the document. This picture is a really great example of hierarchy. What we can do is we can take this picture and we can blow it up and use it throughout our document. I'm going to hit W on my keyboard to see all my guides. And I'm going to bring it to the top-left corner of the bleed. Next I'm going to hold control. Now I can resize this picture by just clicking and dragging, but that'll only re-size the frame of the picture. But I don't want that. I'm going to hit Undo. I want to resize both the picture and the frame. In order to do that, I hit Control or Command on the Mac. And then I can click and drag out. And I can scale up the image and the frame. However, that didn't really work because I didn't hold Shift. If I hit Control and Shift, it'll scale proportionally and I could bring it to the bottom left corner of the bleed. And you can see that it fills my entire document. But you can see that the space text and all the typography blended into the background. So we want to change that to white. How do we do that? We can take this text. We can go over to our side panel here and we can click onto the text option, not the fill option, not the formatting of the container, but the formatting of the text. Now we can double-click into our fill of the text, bring up to white and hit Okay. Now I can see that really stands out. And already if we hit W, This looks really good compared to where we started. It feels like it fits the theme of space. Let's jump back out to our main view. And let's play around with this a little bit. I want to have a lot more space above my title. I want to bring my title down quite a bit. But we can see that there's a problem. I my body text here and I want a space that out as well. I can bring that out like this and pull it down. One thing you can see is the text spans the entire width of the document. And really that's going to be so hard for a reader to follow. There's only a certain distance that's comfortable for a reader to follow, and it's not that far. So what we wanna do is we want to keep the size of our textbooks about half or a little less than half. Maybe I'll just put it to about there. The next thing that you can see is not all my text is showing. That's because I've changed the text frame size. However, there's more texts than couldn't fit in there. So what do I wanna do is I need to make a second text frame over here. Now, you can see that there's a little red box with a plus sign. That means there's overset text. It means that there's some texts that is in this text frame, but it's not visible because it can't fit within the parameters of that text frame. So I want to move it somewhere else. So how can I do that? Is I can click this box and I can click into my document. I can click and drag a new text frame. Now what's happening is the text that is overset is flowing in to the next text frame. Now to visually see this, if we go to View Extras and show text threads, you can see what's happening here. You can see that there is this text box and then it is moving up and starting over to this text box. So if I were to click into this and add some spaces, you can see that it moves it over to the next side. So that's a really cool. Now, if I click out and hit W, you can see what that looks like. It's looking really cool, really good. Now one more thing that I want to do is I wanted to make this title sort of fit in and interact with the design. How can I do that? Is I want to align this final frontier right up to the sun. So now I'm just using my arrow keys to move the final frontier right, connected with the sun. And you can see that it interacts with the overall design. And now I'm going to center my space over top of the final frontier. One more thing that I can do to make this more cohesive is I can add some color to my final frontier. So I'll click on that text frame. I'll click on this. And then I'm going to click on the eyedropper tool. When I click on the eyedropper tool with my text fill selected, I can click anywhere in my document and it'll take the fill of that area. Just like that. You can see it has some color and I took it directly from the image so that color matches the theme, an overall feel of the image. So this is looking really could all ready for this class guys, I want you to try to put the principles of topography into practice by creating a space theme and also try it with the flower theme. And then posted in the project panel, I look forward to seeing what everybody creates and I'll see you in the next class. 12. Class Project Example: Part 1: Hey guys, in this class we're going to run through a sample class project. I want to show you how you can take some information that is just generic and apply the practical graphic design principles to it so you can make it really interesting for the viewer to look at and really easy to navigate. So let's jump right in and see some of the assets that you can utilize for your class project in the project resources, do you have a few different things? We have the practice files, alignment, hierarchy and typography. We went through the class and we also have the class project files with three different files with both the same content. So let's see what sort of content you can use in the pizza assets. You can see we have photos related to that subject. And we also have an advertisement which has a little bit of texts. You can make up your own pizza company name. And you can apply the practical graphic design principles to that topography or that texts and organize it in an interesting way. And I really want to see what you guys create. You also have a sample essay that's related to the subject, koala, pizza or ice cream. You can take that information and organize it in InDesign and make it really interesting to look at and guide the viewer through that information in a creative way. The last thing that we have here is we have the logos in the logo file. You'll actually see a few different logos that you can apply to your design. So you're not limited to just one standard logo. There's a few different options for you to play around with, to give it a different feel, what we're gonna do is we're going to jump into InDesign and we're going to take some of that information and we're going to create our own custom document, applying the practical graphic design principles in InDesign, Let's create a new file. And I'm just going to create a symbol 8.5 by 11. And I'm going to create it with one column with margins of 0.5 inches and a bleed of 0.125 inches. And I'm going to hit create. Now a blank document opens up and I want to add in my information. So if you have a Word document, it's really easy. All you need to do is go File Place and you can click on your pizza document or whatever document you have. It doesn't need to be one from the project resources. If you have your own information you want to format, definitely use that. I'm going to use the pizza document and I'm going to hit Open. Now you can see my cursor appears and it has some text actually floating in the cursor. That means I have some content to place. All I need to do is I need to click with my cursor and drag out a text box. That textbox will be filled with all the information in the Word document. So it's really cool, really easy. Now the first thing that we wanna do is when we get our information into InDesign, we want to separate it into its own textbox. The reason why is because just like our example of kerning, you can take multiple elements of different sizes and different shapes. When you align them, they can actually create a sense of relationship and organization. If everything is just in one standard text box, It's just gonna be very linear and you won't be able to customize it as easily. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to take all my information and I'm going to use my type tool and select my text. I'm going to use Control or Command X to cut it out. And I'm going to create a new text box over to the side. And I'm going to paste it in place. Alright, I'm gonna do that with all my information. Now, when I'm navigating my screen before we move forward, I just want you to know is to navigate your screen. If you hold the Space-bar, it'll bring up the Pen tool or the hand tool. And you can click with your mouse and you can drag it around. If you hold Control or Command and Spacebar, it'll bring up the Zoom tool. You can click once to zoom in. And then if you hold Command and Control and Alt or Option and Space bar, you can click to zoom out, just like that. Alright, so I'm going to separate all my information into its own custom text box. One thing you want to remember is when you're resizing a text box, you can use the selection tool, which is V on your keyboard. And you can drag out the text box, or if you hit Control and drag it out, click and drag it out and hold Shift, you can scale both the textbox and the topography and the font at the same time. So that'll quickly create a larger text frame and larger font. Alright, so I'm making a little bit of hierarchy here with my titles. And I also want to do the same with my subtitles over here, or my subheadings, I guess. In my subheadings, I want to increase the size a little bit so I can open up my character panel and I can increase the size, maybe to 14, just like that already. If I just hit W, you can see that there's a sense of hierarchy. This is just very quick and very easy. And it's laid out nothing special, but it gives me an idea of what I need to work on. The first thing that I want to work on is the title, because it should be the first thing that the viewer sees. And it's sort of creates the feel of the entire document. We're going to first focus on the title and arrange it and arrange the elements within the title. Sort of set the feel or the mood for the entire document. And afterwards, we'll organize the rest of the document to fit the feeling of the title. So jumping right in here, Let's go to the title. And the first thing that I wanna do is I want to select some font. So if we go to our Character panel, we can select some fonts. Let's just drag that character panel up just like that. I really like future because of the sharp edges and the geometric shape. And I think I might use that. However, there's a few different options. There's this cool display font that looks pretty cool and I like the feel of it. Minion Pro sort of gives it a more classic phi of a traditional pizza place feel. Roboto again, it's geometric. It's a little more blocky. And then new hero, I liked that one as well. Times New Roman. And this ethnocentric, maybe a futuristic pizza place might have this. Georgia looks pretty good. And hummingbird, yeah, it's really very fancy. Pizza place might have this sort of typography. I'm gonna go with future for this one because I really liked the bold shapes and I really like how the XY pads have that sharp edge to it. I will give it a weight of some sort, maybe heavy for the time being. Now, we've already created a little bit of hierarchy. You can see that I have some overset text here. I'm just going to stretch out my text box like that. And I'm not really feeling this colon here. I'm gonna get rid of that. Now, within these three elements that makes up my title, I can also implement some hierarchy. The first thing that I want people to see and the things that's going to catch their attention is the word pizza. So I want to increase the size of the word pizza. Let's do that again, holding Control, I can increase the size of the word pizza. I can get rid of my preview mode. And there we go. Now pizza is really big and bold. Now one thing you'll notice is that when I have text over top of each other, I want to click the how to order, but I can only click the pizza. It's because the pizza textboxes over top of it in the layers panel. I want to show you that quickly if you have this issue, if we go to Window and Layers, you can go to the layers here and you'll see that my word pizza is right at the top. However, when you see down here how to order is right at the bottom. What I wanna do is I want to bring this how to order, and I want to bring it right up to the top, just like that. So now when I click, I can actually catch that how to order. And if I wanted to rearrange them, I can click on my pizza. And I could do Control and left square bracket and it'll bring it down in the layers, panel Layers order so I can move it wherever I want. I'm gonna put it underneath there. One thing that I wanna do is I want to shrink down this how to order. And I liked that really big bold pizza, but I want to condense it a little bit, bring it in. One way I can do that is if I go to my character panel, I can use the tracking and I can bring in the text a little bit like that. Or you can see that some things went in properly and some things didn't. I want to undo that. And I want to use kerning. So remember, kerning is the space between individual letters. And how I can change the kerning is I can click my cursor in-between two. And I can use the arrows over here to bring it in or stretch it out. A faster way is if I hit control or Alt or Option on the Mac, you can use the arrow keys left and right and bring it in and out just like that. So I want to tighten it up pretty close together. Maybe like that. The next thing that I wanna do is I want to move this, how to order pizza. I'm going to line it up, right, with this dot here, the dot of the I. I'm going to shrink it down slightly, holding control. And I want it to line up with the zed and the a, how I can do that. And then you can have a little more precision is I can use rulers and guides. When I go to View, I can see hide rulers here. But if this was unclicked. Or not shown, you can see, Show Rulers. I'll show my rulers. I can bring down some guides right on top of my eyes, just like that. And right by the zed or the Z. And right by the a. Now I can try and line up my How to Write with the top section of the dot. And you can see that the a doesn't line up perfectly with this a over here. So one way I can do that is I can just condense the tracking just lightly. Sorry. The tracking up here, maybe not, that maybe negative two points will do the trick. Yeah, that looks good. Now if I turn off, turn on preview mode, you can see how that looks. That's looking pretty cool. How to order pizza. Maybe I want this a little bit lower there. Alright, the next thing that I wanna do is I want to use this essential skill for the hungry individual. And I want to line it up with the pizza right over there. Maybe make it a little bit bigger. And I want to change the font to create a little more contrast. I'm going to change it from heavy to book. And now it's pretty small, but I wanted to space it out quite a bit. And I'm going to bring up my text box. And I want to bring out the tracking until it lines up with the a. So maybe a 114, that might work. Now you can see that there is some contrast. There are some large element, medium element and the smallest element, even in my title, I have that sense of scale and hierarchy, which is really good. And this whole thing can work as one group in our entire document. And within that group, there's also a sense of hierarchy that creates dimension to our title. Now you can see there's a great amount of hierarchy in our information already that title really stands out. It's really bold. Bold. Alright, Now one thing I could do with this is I can actually group this into one group. Now when I select it, it's one group and I can move it wherever I want. When I scale it and hit Control and scale, I can scale it together. Good. Now that I have my title done, now I can start working on creating some hierarchy within all the other elements. We can see that we have some text here that's part of the intro to the document, that's sort of part of the title. We have the title and we have the information about the document. What does the viewer expect? So we want to connect this one with this one and give it a relationship. We don't want it connected with the other parts because these three parts down here, they should be connected to one another. And then this element is sort of separate in order to create relationships and make certain elements connected, we can use spacing. Remember when we have a group of elements, we can keep them a little closer together. And that'll make it feel like your group. When we add spacing between those groups, we can say that this is together and this is separate from that. The next thing that I want to work on is this subtitle. So I've already decided on the font is Futura, and I want to make sure it's left aligned. Now, I want to line it up to have some connection with this pizza. And I can line it up maybe to the zed here. So I can pull out a guide. See that it's lined up. Now one thing you can see that there is a well that sort of, I don't really like it there. I can do a shift base and it'll bring it up. Another thing that I wanna do is I want to line up this pizza right to my margin. So the P is in line with the margin, just like that. And then the other elements are part of that. Okay? Now you can see that there's a relationship between this pizza and this paragraph here. It's looking pretty good. I can bring it up maybe slightly, or bring it down for it to read. 13. Class Project Example: Part 2: Now that we organize the elements that make up our title group, we want to move on to the second group, which is our step 123. In our step 123, we have the subheadings and we have the paragraphs. We have already created a little bit of hierarchy within it, but now we want to refine it and make it really interesting and pleasing to the eye. So the first thing that we can do is we have to make sure all our texts is our proper font. So our font that we're using in this document is Futura. And I'm going to place it as book at first. I'm going to change the subheadings to future. And I'm going to increase that to maybe medium, maybe a heavy. Now I have a little more contrast between my subheading and my paragraphs. Now that we have hierarchy within our second group, Let's organize it and see what we can do with it. The first thing that you want to see is step one. Then we want to see step two and step three. So obviously, we wanted to have this 1 first. The first thing that you see is your title, and then you want to move into step one. We want to place that in a position where it would be guided to next. So there's a few different ways you can place them, maybe side-by-side like that, bringing the textbox in a bit. Or you can place them vertically, one on top of another. That might work for this design, might look pretty good. So we're gonna do that for this design. We're going to take these textbox, maybe align it with step one, choosing the pizza, and then we're going to pull it out to the edge. Now there's already an Ikea elements here. So I can organize this to line up with what I have here. I have this guide here That's right from the z. I can pull over this text box and line it up right there. Good. I always referenced using W to see my preview without the guides, see how it's looking, seeing how the hierarchy is going. This is looking really good. How to order pizza. Step one, choose your pizza. Let's make this a little more bold. Choosing your pizza. What do one-on-one to make some emphasis on, just like our title, we have multiple elements. We have a large element, medium element, and a small element. For these, there's really two parts. There's choosing your pizza and step one, I think I want to highlight step one, so I'm going to cut that out. And I'm going to create a second text box just for step one. So this doesn't look too great right now. So let's see how we can play around with them. Now, one thing you can do with your elements, as you can actually use shapes. You can use shapes within your designs. And to create some sort of repetition, some sort of order, and create more relationship. Just like when we're rolling objects, we can take many different objects and when they're placed in a specific way, we can create relationships to other elements as well. So we can do that when we're creating our designs. In order to do that, we can use our shape tools. So I'm going to hit M on my keyboard and I'm going to make a little rectangle right underneath here. There it is. It doesn't have any color, so I'm going to add in some color. Now I can use this text box or this shape, and I can arrange it and line it up with this letter p. Now I have something to reference from underneath. And now choosing the pizza. I can control and drag this out. And I can bring up my guides. And you can see how it's lining up with both the top and the bottom. Cool. Now, what I wanna do is I don't want to repeat this over a few times. Now, we can see that we have a nice sense of hierarchy. We have something big, we have something medium in our design, and we have some smaller elements as well. Now we can align our text up to grade our relationship with our objects. Now, we can take these step one, twos, and threes, and we can group each of them with Control G. We got to collect the shapes as well. And now we can select all of them, open up our Align panel, object and Layout a line and we can distribute, distribute vertical spacing. What that does, it creates equal spacing between all three elements. So that's really great. And now I can align this first one up to the top of that one. This one up to the top of that one, and this went up to the top of that one. Now if we hit W, we can see that we have consistent spacing between step 123 and we have our elements lined up. So how can we push this a little bit further? Now one thing I see here is that this one lines up to the bottom of this line, which is really good. This one almost does, and this one really doesn't add all. So I can pull this one back just a little bit until this line goes in line with placing your order. Now I can do this one a little bit back more until that lines up. However, what I wanna do is I wanted to repeat this element here. I use rectangles in my design to sort of just create more relationships, blocking things out. So I can use M on my keyboard. I can make a rectangle about the size of this text. Give it Fill, and I can move it right to the edge. Perfect. Now we can line it up with that one. We can line it up with this textbox, pull it out to that textbox. And finally we can do it with our last textbox just like that. Now finally we have our conclusion and using what we've already had, let's establish some relationships using alignment and place it somewhere in our document. Now there's a few different things that we want to add in. Number one, it's all black and white right now, and honestly it looks pretty good black and white. However, we may want to add some color into our document. 14. Class Project Example: Part 3: Now we're going to add a little bit of color into our design. To add color, maybe your client has a specific colors that they use in their branding. Want to make sure that our colors match their branding as close as possible. So if they provide you with hex codes, you can actually use hex codes to create a custom color and a custom swatch and apply that color directly into your document. Let's see how we can use that. So we have to open up our color panel. If you don't see that you can go window color, color. And now you can see that it's black and white, but we want to change it to RGB. Now, I have my color information here, and I want to create a box. Now that box has no color right now let's just give it a black fill for the time being. And now our color mode is set to RGB. Now, in our hex code, we can copy our hex code. Click on our box, and we can paste our hex code into the RGB panel and hit Enter. Now it will give us our yellow exactly as it's described. We're going to Alt click the box and create a duplicate. And we're going to repeat it for all the other colors. Alright, so that's awesome. So now we have four different colors here. We have our yellow or yellow, brown, or red or black. Now one thing you can see is when I click on my red in the RGB panel, it gives you a little warning here. This warning here it says out of gamut warning. What that means is in an RGB display, it actually uses light and it has a wider spectrum than what could be provided in print. So if we tried to print this color through the CMYK, it's out of gamut. You will not be able to print it out. It won't come out like you see on the screen. If we jump into our CMYK color mode, you can see that the magenta and yellow are already at a 100%, but yet it wants to push a little further to get this red. So how can we correct that to make it print worthy? If we go back to RGB, oh, we need to do is click this red box and it says in color gamut, correct? Now what that did, it altered the color slightly to fit it within the CMYK spectrum. So now if we go into our CMYK, we can see that it's within the boundaries of the CMYK color gamut. And that will be print what you see on the screen. We'll be able to print in real life. Now, what if we want to make some custom swatches? We can go into our swatches panel. We can click on our boxes and we can add them here. All I'm gonna do now is I'm going to just delete these other ones because I don't need to see them. Now let's apply some color to our document to make some things really stand out and add to that hierarchy. We're going to implement some color into our title itself. Actually, I think I might want to keep this as black, but I might want to bring out the other elements a little bit. So if I jump into the group clicking my how to order, I might want to add the red color. However, if I just click read, it adds it to the textbox and not the text itself. So let's undo that. And what we have to do is we have to go over to our side panel. And you can see that we can either adjust the container or the frame or the text itself. Now I have the text fill selected and I can click my color and it applies it just like that. And you can see already how punchy that title is. Let's do the same thing with our essential skill for the hungry individually. Now you can see that our title actually has a lot more contrast and it really, really pops. Let's apply some of the color to our other elements. In step one, we can apply the color in a few different ways. However, I want to apply it to our boxes. Now you can see the hierarchy developing within your document, and you can see the relationships between all of these things. One thing I might do is I might pull these back just a little bit to give the text a little more space to breathe and still have that visual relationship using alignment. Alright, now this is looking really great. The final thing that we wanna do. And you can do this at any point in your process and use it as a visual reference, is add some images. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to decide where I might want some of my images. I think I want a nice bold image at the top here with my pizza. I'm going to hit F on my keyboard, which is the frame tool. And I'm going to create some sort of frame up here, maybe like this. So I create a frame in the top right corner, just like that. And I think I want one down at the bottom here. So hitting F, I will create a frame down here. Now I want to add images to those frames. So how do I do that? I click on my frame, I go to File, Place in my class project asset folder. I have my photos. Now we can decide which photo do I want to put on the top right corner? What's a pretty good photo for here? I just want a big bold image of pizza. Let's do this one over there. And it goes into it just like that. However, it's really big. If I click on the content picker in the middle, you can see the orange bounding box appears and it's really, really big. So I'm going to click on the orange bounding box holding Shift and Alt to drag it from the center, I'm going to reduce the size and bring it into the middle. Just like that. Now if I hit W, you can see how that looks. I think I'm going to play around with this and adjust this a little bit. Next thing, I have a frame down here. Let's add some images to that. Alright, so that's looking really good and it's looking really cool. I have my title, it's very obvious. It catches the attention. It sort of pulls my eyes to the first paragraph. And then after the first paragraph, again, there's hierarchy placed here and guiding the viewer in the direction I want. And finally, it has this text over here as the conclusion. The last thing we want to do before we export our document is we want to add that final little touch and that is the logo. So let's add it in here. Let's go to File Place. And we're going to find in our asset folder at the logo. Now one thing I want you to do now is in the file you should have a Show Import Options is because within logo document there are multiple different logos that you can choose from. However, if you just import it directly, it's only going to import the very first one in your document and you won't have the ability to select any of them. If you do Show import options, you'll be able to select from a variety of logos. I'm going to open it up here and you can see this is the preview of what I have. Now it says total pages five. And I can select from 1234 or five. Now, I think I'm liking this, this logo here. It looks pretty cool. And I'm going to hit, Okay. Now you can see that it's filled here and I can drag it out and added my logo. All right guys, Now the final thing that we can do is export our document. Let's go up to File Export. And now we can name our document how to order pizza or whatever you want and hit. Okay. It exists. Now you have a few different options here. In the main page, you can decide whether you want it pages. You can pick the range if you have multiple pages, or you can pick anything you want. It's going to be a PDF preset. So that's gonna be pretty good. That's fine. And we're going to go into marks and bleeds and marks and bleeds. You can use use document bleed settings. You want to add the bleed to your document if you're going to send it out to the printer because you want that bleed included because when they trim it down, you want those colors, those images to go right to the edge. If you don't add it in, it will only go to the trim line and you may have that white streak off to the side. So just make sure you add that in if it's going out for print. I'm going to turn that off for now because I'm just going to export it for screens and I'm gonna go back to general. Everything else should be good. We're going to hit, Okay? And you'll see up at the top there's a little wheel and that'll show that it's exporting. Then you can open up in PDF. Now if you want to export it as something else, maybe just a PNG file or a JPEG. You also couldn't do that. Go to export and just change down here, save as a JPEG. This will be perfect when you upload it as your project in the project panel. So I really look forward to seeing all of your designs in the project panel. There's one more thing that I want to leave you guys with before we end the class. It is the fact that sometimes we need to warm up our design skills in order to get the best results possible. So one thing you could do is once you create your first design and it might look really good, try out different versions of it. How we can do that is we can go to our pages panel and our pages panel. We can actually select our page, right-click on it and we can duplicate spread. That'll create a second page right underneath. Now what we can do is we can go in and we can change some of the elements, change the title, change the images. We can play around with the fonts. We can do a lot of different things and see how else can we organize this document to create the visual hierarchy and the visual display that we want to create. Now, I went ahead and did this and I really played around with it. This was one of my first ones that I did. And, you know, it's pretty it's good and it gets the point across. However, it's doesn't have that bold feature that I was looking for. So I continued to work on the topography, creating more variation in sizes and changing up the picture's a little bit. And then I thought, oh, maybe I wanted a more classical feel. So I created this one with a really bold image and just white text against that bold image. And I made it feel a little more classic with the Cera fonts. And then I made another one here using the same color theme. Starting off with a really bold image of a pizza having the font within the image itself, and having the title in the center between all the information as well as the steps that are used to create it. Now the last one that I had, I played around with it and I used a display font that I thought was really interesting and really cool and playful. And I played around with it using different shapes in this one, using a sense of hierarchy and relationship. So there's multiple ways that you can lay out your documents. And I really encourage you to not just leave your first one as your only one. Play around with it. Try out different things. Experimenting is the best way to learn because when you experiment, you'll actually see visually what's good, what works, what doesn't work. You'll tune your creative eye to see these sort of details and see, oh, if I push this a little bit more, it creates this feeling, oh, I pushed it a little too far and it feels awkward. Maybe I can compress it down a bit. Those sort of things will come with time and come with practice. So I really encourage you to not be content with just your first one, but duplicate it and rearrange it in a different way, trying different things. And you'll definitely have better results if you do these things. Now that you've seen a practical way to apply the principles of design, I want to see what you guys can do. Definitely check out the project resources and download those assets and utilize them for your class project. I really want to see what you guys can come up with because you're going to definitely come up with something different than what I've come up with. After you're finished, make sure your export your images as a JPEG or a PNG or PDF and posted in the project panel. I really look forward to it. I'll see you in the next class. 15. Thank You! You Are AWESOME!: Hey guys, I just wanted to say thank you so much for taking the class. I really hope that what you've learned in the class, you can take with you and apply it to your own work going forward. Creating pleasing designs is really quite easy if you learn to apply the techniques and principles taught in this class. And Adobe InDesign makes it super easy for you to take your current graphics and text and organize them to create a beautiful display. Practical graphic design principles taught in the class can really be applied to any design for the class project. I really encourage you to make whatever you want. You can make a poster on editorial, maybe even a book cover or an advertisement. Just to apply the principles to that design and posted in the project panel. I've provided many assets in this class, so you can use those assets however you want. So it gives you some creative freedom to take what I've given you and organize it in whatever way you want. And I really look forward to seeing all the creative ways that you can make beautiful displays. So after you're done organizing your project, make sure you export it and post it in the project panel. I really look forward to seeing everything you create. I really hope that you've learned something through this class. However, I know that I'm lacking and I may not have explained some things as well as a cutout. So if you have any questions, feel free to reach out in the discussions panel here on Skillshare. Whenever I get a chance, I look forward to reading your discussions and answering your questions, whatever I can. If you've learned something through this class or just enjoyed the class in general, I'd really love to hear what you think. So after the class, please consider leaving a short review. Let other students know what you've liked most about this class so that when they read that, they can have encouragement to continue their learning and we can all grow together. I'm always looking forward to creating new classes for you guys here on Skillshare. So if you want to be notified when a new class launches, please consider following me here on Skillshare if you want to continue your creative journey and learn more about graphic design and illustration. Taken my other classes here on Skillshare. Classes for the beginners for vector illustration, I have classes are geometric design and even one on the gradient mesh tool in Adobe Illustrator. So definitely check those out. I just want to say, thanks again for taking this class and I really look forward to walking with you along your creative journey. See you later.