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InDesign Basics

Lesson 10 from: Create a Photo Album: Workflow and Design

Khara Plicanic

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Lesson Info

10. InDesign Basics

Next Lesson: InDesign Basics Q&A

Lesson Info

InDesign Basics

This is our document area. Obviously, it's really similar to photo shop in a lot of ways. On the left hand side, we have our toolbar. They have shortcuts for various tools. You are familiar with this already. I am sure, up at the top. Of course, we have our options bar, which, just like photo shop is dynamic. And it will switch displaying options that correspond to whatever tool that we have selected. And over on the right hand side, we've got panels and pallets and all that good stuff, much like photo shop. And the default setting is a little different than this. The panel that I usually have opened that are the most relevant for the type of work that I'm usually doing an in design is pages. Of course, Pages is is kind of like your layers panel and Photoshopped like you. Just that's how you get around. It's the meat and potatoes of your document, so Pages is a biggie, and we'll talk about that in a minute. Underneath that, this is my set up, how I like to have it. I've got links, swat...

ches, stroke and a line. That's what I like to have But, you know, to each their own you guys consent it up whatever works for you. But this is what I'll be working with today, and we're going to start with the pages panel. So up here you'll notice it's basically just thumbnails of all the different spreads in your documents. So if I want to jump in my document, if I'm way down here, let's say you've got a 1,000,000,000 spreads and I'm away at the bottom and I want to jump back up to the top really quick. I don't have to come up here and scroll or drag. I can just come in my pages panel and double click page one and I'm there. Okay, so just keep in mind when you're set up like this with spreads, that Page one is is really spread one. So, Paige, I guess, one into. But that's how it works above that. We have this area up here, and there's two more some nails up here. One says none, and one says a master, and you may look at that and think they look the same and they do because they are at the moment. But what's really great about in design is if we want to set up guides. If we want to set up anything on a page that we want Teoh apply to all of our pages. Let's say, for example, that you like your albums to be black. You want your pages always black. You don't have to build that on every page. You build it on the master page, the a master in this case, and guess what? It will appear on every page in your album that has the A master applied to it, right? So let's look at this for a second. We'll do our guides first up here in the pages panel where it says a master first thing I want to do is get get to the master page that a master. So I'm going to double click that some nail right here and you'll notice in the window area that my all my spreads are gone. I'm not looking at my book. I'm looking at the A master, so anything I put on this spread now will exist on every page in the book that has the A master applied, which by default is every page. If we scroll down in the pages candle. You see the little A here. That means that the A master is applied to that page and we could change that if you wanted a page that had a different master applied to it. It's easy to change, but by default everything will have the A master. So let's build in our guides over here so we can see what we're looking at. We want to put in that gutter in the middle, right, just like Sarah mentioned. So that's going to be at the 10 inch mark. So just like Photoshopped, I'm going to just drag a guide out from the side right here, and I'm going to drop it right here at the 10 inch mark and what's also useful, as I like to then also divide each page in half. So I would also dragged this out from the left and drop this at five and I'll drop one over here at 15 and I'm holding shift down while I drag. And what that's going to Dio is did I get to over here? What shift is going to do is help those guides snap to nice places on the ruler. If you don't hold shift, then you are kind of free styling it and it gets a little messy. All right. Looks like we are mouse pose aid on. Thank you, gentlemen and magic in the back. All right. Okay, so those are the guys. I also, of course, like to put in a horizontal guide dividing my book. Wait a minute. That doesn't look quite right. There we go. I like to put in a horizontal guide. So I've got my book divided in half. So I know where my my pages are, and I've got it divided also in quarters. So each page is split in half, and then I've got it divided in half vertically the flame. So that's great. And because I've done that on the master over here again, it will be applied to every page. So check this out to get back to the book, right? Because we are currently in la la land of the master pages over there to get back to our book. I'm just going to double click the spread one. And if I zoom out now, look at all of that. Everything has guides and is just set up beautifully. and guess what? The same keyboard shortcuts that let you zoom on photo shop. They do the same thing and in design, the same space bar drag lets you drag your document around. So all of those keyboard shortcuts overlap, making your life simpler, right? And that's the whole point. So we love that. Love the in design. OK, do we have some questions? Oh yeah, Bring it on. We had some question a lot of questions in the beginning, and people were really curious about in design working with Photoshopped and how that happened. Yes, so let's see. A couple of the questions are, uh, Chris. Chris Orwell's asked if you can import pages done in a photo shop into in design. Um, M s W photos said, Can you save an in design file into a PSD for use in a photo shop? All these things are, yeah, those are great questions. I would say I'd be hard pressed to really come up with a good reason why you'd want to do that. And not that That's not a good idea. Good. It's a great question, but I think I think that once you get a feel of how this works. You'll see that that there's not really. I don't think a reason to do some of those things, because in in design you can do a lot of the design work. You place things from photo shop, but to go back into Photoshopped for anything other than to edit one of your images that's in your in design document doesn't make it doesn't add value. I'm not sure how it would help you. So if someone has like a really specific purpose for that, maybe that would. You know, I could be more helpful with it, but I would say I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't see a need for that. I think that's a great I think that's a great answer. I think people need toe think outside the Photoshopped box a little bit. I think it will make more sense once they see how this work hasn't how how they interact, because when I say that is it please nice with photo shop, it's BFF. It's not that I'm creating things and in design that I would then open in photo shop and further manipulate their their their separate. But they play nice, meaning that retouching an album and in design is so easy because a simple keyboard shortcut will pop that image open and Photoshopped Aiken retouch it. Save it and it instantly updates and in design so you'll see that. I mean, it's you're not going to go back. You'll never go back. So very cool. All right. That's a good question, though, so we'll see. If we don't address, it will come back to that. But I just asked a really quick one. Sure. What's a like a pick up pica. Pica. It's just a unit of measure that is used sometimes in the design world. Just like a millimeter or an insurer. It's another unit of measure. Great. That's a great question. You There's lots, all kinds of units of measure out there. Um all right, so I'm just going to show you how I generally set this guy up, see if we can get those little tighter, but all right, I like to have bridge open while I'm working in this sort of collapsed mode. And those of you who have CS five or newer, you may be thinking, Well, jeez, Keira, there is Mini bridge. Why don't you just open that, and that is true. There is mini bridge, and you can get to it by going to Window Mini Bridge so we can pop that up and maybe all use it later. You are right, and it is very convenient because it's right here and in design. It's a panel like anything else. And it's great, except for one thing that I find to be a little bit frustrating about it. And you'll see that later when I show you those fabulous keyboard shortcuts for popping over into Photoshopped. There's another one to pop over into bridge or mini bridge. But Mini Bridge responds to that keyboard shortcut a little differently, and I don't know why. Maybe I was hoping with CS six that it would chains, but it didn't so I still prefer to use regular bridge. But that might be, you know, if you prefer Mini bridge, go for it. So it doesn't mean that I kind of juggle some of my my windows around, but I think that the value of that keyboard shortcut playing nice is so advantageous that I'm willing to deal with some of the juggling, so you'll have to see how you feel, but I like it that way. So I've got a bridge opening compact mode, and I like to run it. Here is the sort of film strip like this and in design. Then we're going to just go ahead and place an image, and I'll show you how easy it is. We're going to be using the frame tool here. The rectangle frame tool. The keyboard shortcut for this is F like frame convenient. You'll notice that there's all types of frames. There's a rectangle frame, there's an ellipse frame and a polygon frame, and this they pretty much operate just like the marquee tool and photo shop. So you will be familiar with this. Let me go ahead and use the rectangle frame tool, and then I'm just going to come up here and click and drag out a bucks boom. And now I've got an X through it. It's waiting for a photo, so let's just grab something. I just This folder of images that I have here is really random. It's just a bunch of different images because we're just gonna have some fun with it today. So to get it in there, all I do is come to bridge. I drag and I drop. And now it's in the preference that we changed at the beginning. Remember when we went to objects and we went Teoh fitting, frame fitting options. Although we did this before, we had any open documents. This is what allows us to just drop in an image, and it just fills up the frame nicely. If you don't change that, your picture will land, like, enormous like this in your frame, and you'll have to do a keyboard shortcut to adjust it. It's not a big deal on it's still a handy keyboard shortcut to know, and that keyboard shortcut is shift command options. See, that's crazy, right? So let's think of it this way. It's the whole left side of your keyboard, all the keys, command or control option or Ault and shift. So all three things, and then the sea, of course, stands for convenience. The other really convenient keyboards workout, so see for convenient and the whole everything else. The whole shebang, plus C for convenient that will snap your image into proportionate will fill the frame. And that's really useful. Even if you've got your preference set like we did. But let's say that your scooting stuff around and you squish your image before you panic. Just get your convenient groups. Get your convenient to have auto fit turned on your convenient keyboard shortcut to fix that. All right, so let's talk about how in design handles these frames. All right, so we've got are our frame here that we drew with the frame tool, the rectangle frame tool. Then we went over the bridge, and I drag and drop this in on the way the in design handles. This is unlike photo shop where you did this, you would have pixels here, you would have the whole actual image and in design, it's not like that. Instead, we have the frame itself, which is this blue box here, and I can adjust the frame. If I drag it out, we'll see that now The frame extends beyond the actual image, or if I drag the frame this way, then now it's smaller, right? So we can resize and adjust and shift our frame around. Then the image itself we can access in one of two ways. This little circle that keeps appearing here. This is a new thing and CS five. I think it's called the content grabber. But if I click on the circle, it quickly lets me grab the image itself, not the frame. Okay, so that's one thing. I tend to not use that so much, and maybe it's cause I'm old school. I don't know. I'm more of a fan of. I press A to get this tool instead. This is the direct selection tool that lets me move the image around within the frame. Okay, so the selection tool up here is just like the move tool and photo shop, and the keyboard shortcut is in fact V for move of of of it, right, just like in photo shop, Just like butter job. Same. It's like the move tool only, and in design. It's called the selection tool, and that's what lets you grab loops. Little content thing is kind of a booger. Sometimes that's what lets you grab the frame itself, and you can move it with the image in it. Or you can grab a corner and resize the frame however you want. If you want to get the image itself, that's this guy right here. The direct selection tool. The keyboard shortcut is a and then you just can't grab that around right. So simple stuff. So I was gonna grab this guy and let's make it nice and half of the spread again with that convenient keyboard shortcut. And let's try, Let's try another. We'll just drag another frame here. I'm just making this up. You'll notice as I do this as a drought one box and I make another. Do you see these green lines popping up on the screen? Should really zoom in, probably for the folks at home. Do you see these little green lines popping up those air called smart guides? And they're so smart they're just gonna pop up this marker. They're smart, they're so intelligent, they're just gonna pop up right here and let me know, even without me drawing guides or having to worry about measuring or any of that stuff they're gonna pop up and show me that these boxes are the same size. They're lining up together on the left and right edges, and it's just really hopeful they'll just pop up all around to let you know that stuff is lining up nicely. Let's see we'll just throw in another here. So there is a quick little layout, sort of. Of course, we can move the stuff around. I can click and drag to select everything and then move it if I want a line it up. So it splits the difference here over the center of the spread. This way, if I want to maybe take this whole grouping and in large it or make it smaller or whatever, if I just click here and drag from the corner, I've adjusted the frames right. That's not helpful. Instead, what I would do is command shift, and if I draw from dragged from the corner, it's going to adjust the frame and the images in it so I can do this and the whole thing is smaller. I can do this and make the whole thing bigger. Nice, right. Another little tool That's candy is something called the Gap Tool, and it's over here. And I want to say that this was also new and CS five, Um, but it's really handy. It lets you jump into the gaps between your images. Oh, I don't know if it'll show here, and you can move the gaps. So let's to really actually show you how this works. I need to probably extend these images were going to make these little bigger within the box so that they can see the benefit of the Gap Tool. But let's say that I've got this layout here and let's say that I want Teoh make this one vertical down here. This bottom image I want to make vertical. So if I didn't have the gap tool, I'd have to drag this up. Take this and now move it up like this. But guess what with the Gap Tool, I can come in here and just click and move the gap up. I wish I could hear the Internet out here when it's so fun. I hope that that was like a oh my gosh, jaw dropping. I hope people at home are doing the happy dance because I want to do the happy dance when I see this. I think it's so great on Dove course. Likewise, this way. And of course it works left and right, and any gap that you have between images, you can just push it and it will just resize and move everything so It's very fluid. We have a question. No, just the comments are now way got. Never give up saying, OMG, we have coal Miner then Derek Tampa says I'm never using Finish up again for this photo. You can wait. I want to do it. He also says, I'm suddenly very angry at Photoshopped. Alexis Livingston photo says so upsetting to find out My design teacher never told us when that waas Oh, not here. I'm happy that I could I could take care of that for people. All right, so we're on a roll today. Let me show you. I'm just kind of demo ing random great things about in design and will actually build. I'll show you later A full album start to finish. But right now I'm just kind of throwing in all kinds of great things. Something else, I guess it's handy to know in some cases you might want to select multiple items and group things or something like that. And, of course, to select multiple things I can just with my selection tool with the V keyboard shortcut like the move of Of of a tool, I can just click and drag and select that whole thing if I want to group them, sort of like linking layers and photo shop if I want to group them, so they're just kind of stuck for a while. It's just Commander Control, Jeep for Group, and now they're just nicely put together. And I don't have to worry about accidentally grabbing one box instead of both. So that could be kind of handy. And Teoh Ungh group them is just command shift G and their own grouped. So that's kind of handy, I want to say and I might be remembering this wrongly, but I run. I want to say that in pre CS five in designs, I think. And if you wanted to group or excuse me, scale multiple items at once, you may have to group them. It's been a while. Is that true? Yes, we're getting We're getting confirmation here from new solving you the view if you are pre CS five and you want to scale multiple items together like this. So I'm holding What am I holding command shift? To do this in pre CS five, you would have Teoh command G to group first and then command shift, drink. No big deal. But that's not the nice thing about CS five. They changed that? Yeah, on. And of course, the UN group is just shift community. So that's some good stuff. Let's just drag down here to another spread and make some more cool things. Are you ready for one other thing that I think might be kind of mind blowing? We're ready for this. All right, check this out with the frame tool. So I'm gonna hit F for freeing tool. If I want to make a grid. It's this simple. I'm gonna click and with a drag. And I got a box. Big whoop. Right? Watch what happens while I am holding my mouse down. So I haven't let go yet. Watch what happens if I use the arrow keys. Instant grid. Happy dance. Get out. Shut the front door. Right, Shut the front door. So how amazing that do you want to pee your pants right now, Lewis, like, that's so amazing. I mean, big words, not even here. And you could just hear pants right now. That's so awesome. And obviously, if I hold shift just like photo shop, it's going to be proportional, Right? So, um, kind of amazing. And of course, once you're done with it, once you are done, this is this is even very bonus. Once you're done, you can switch. Of course. Let's get out of pretty mood. You can switch back to your move tool. And even though it's a grid, they are individuals. So if you want to move anything, if you want to merge anything, maybe I want to take maybe are built a grid. But you know what? I want these four to merge and become one. Check this out. This is under object. Object path, make compound path. So I've selected the frames. I want to merge. Object path, make compound path. Bam! This is going to be 10 I'm sorry. I lied. It's gonna be one frame, but it's gonna have maybe like this effect, it's going tohave the still the gaps within it. But it's kind of cool, right? So you can still emerge these frames, but we'll have the gaps. If you wanted Teoh, Let's go back. If you wanted to truly make this one frame, you've got options one might be to simply delete and then dragged this baby out. And the smart guides groups, the smart guides will help you align it that way. So you I mean, look at this instant. Just really lovely. Leo. Piece O cake. Right. Awesome. I love that. Um, let's see, what else is just some good fun things that I want to show you Also, just like in photo shop, duplicating a frame with the graphic in it. So let's let's throw in some more images, shall we? Here's a lovely one. That's great. Thistle's kind of nonsensical since they're all this is just a random assortment here. But maybe you're making a marketing piece. And so you've got all your favorite stuff going on? Um, no. Listen. Nice kiss. Blue shoes. Yes, please. Come on, computer. There we go. Should've known better rape. All right, So you with me tablet. Um okay, so let's talk about how we can duplicate things. So if I've got this layout and maybe I'm like, Oh, this is great. Maybe I want to make another row of three images over here. Just like in photo shop. If you've got a layer active and you want to duplicate it, if you've got the move tool. You hold down alter option and you drag it will duplicate it into a new layer. Here we just select this and if I option drag and then I hold shift, I can keep it aligned and drag it over there like that. So I could I could just flip this whole layout really quick if I wanted to do this flip. I didn't get something aligned, right? Let me show you how we fixed that. Let's say I'm dragged this over and I didn't line it up right. We have smart guys that help with that, but there's some really neat things you can do with something called the Align panel. So if I want to line up the edge of this image with the edge of this image, I'm going to select them both. And then in my align panel. I've got all these controls for lining things. You may have seen these in Photoshopped. They show up if you've got the move tool and you've got multiple layers selected. Maybe you've never seen this, but if there but it's not as powerful as it is here and in design. If I want to align the left edge. I'm going to click this little icon right here, and it's gonna pop this image over to the most left edge, and then it will line up just like that and look at the spread. I mean, that was, like, two seconds to knock out. Um, that is the A line right here in the align panel. It was this button right here. So let's look at it again. I can show you may be in another way. I'm just gonna drag one image, one image in over here. All right, So I'm gonna take this, and just to show you I'm going to drag this out. Let's say I want to make Let's say you want to do a layout with four rectangles going across. And so let's say I was sloppy with it. I could have done this carefully, and the smart guides would have helped me. But sometimes I'm too fast for the smart guide, so I just knocked that out. So the space things obviously not equal between this whole thing. What we can also dio is if I select all of these down here in the align panel down here where it says distribute spacing. We have distribute horizontal space and distribute vertical space. And if I click there we go. This one over here. Distribute horizontal space. Did you see what happened? They snapped into equal distance between them. Now, personally, I I feel like this gap is too big between them. So you have. You have lots of ways you can deal with this If you're a person who is really like a purist and you're like all of my gaps must be an eighth of an inch or whatever. If you're just, you know that specific. What you can also dio is I can take this. For example. I can come down here and say Use spacing and I can type in 0.1 to 5. And when I distribute, it does that. So if I want all of them to have that you spacing, I'll click you spacing. I'll enter in the exact spacing I want between them. And then when I redistribute, they're exactly that. That's one option. If you are not that particular about exactly the facing you want. Another thing you could do is maybe I'll just take this guy and drag it kind of over like this. And if I select all of these and turn off you spacing and just redistribute that way, what it's going to do is it's going to redistribute these items in between the most left and the most, right. So what I've done by dragging this in is I've just closed up the total distribution space. Then when I re select them, it's going to redistribute within that space. And now, obviously, it's too big to fit on the page. So no biggie. I'll just drag that over and command shift and drag it in. Simple. Move it up or down or whatever. Center it if I want it. Sometimes I like to have these a little bit above center, kind of like when you might frame a photo, you might have more space at the bottom than the top. So I do that a lot. But simple stuff? Yeah, it's great, right? Any burning questions out there? Joanna Leboeuf had said, How do you make sure that the full image shows up in the box? Make sure the full image shows up in the box. I'm going to guess that she's talking about, like the re sizing here So that's the if you set up the preferences Azzawi did in the beginning for the object fitting that will make it fit nicely into the box. If it's landing huge like this, that's just that really convenient keyboard shortcut will snap it back into place. I'm thinking that's what they think. So, too. That's good. That's always an important thing. It ISS yeah, okay, so we'll keep rolling waken come back to question. I just want to make sure we get some of this stuff out there. I also mentioned Let's talk a little bit, I guess, about how in design handles color and swatches and objects like that, because some of you might really like your albums to be all black pages, for example. I know there's people out there who like that. So rather than having to fill every page as I mentioned, we could just do this on the master, so the process would be the same. I just use the frame tool and click and drag out a big old frame, and then what I'd want to do is fill the frame with the color. So in in design, it's similar, but different to photo shop. So I'm gonna pop over to the swatches panel over here and in photo shopped at the bottom of our toolbar, as we also have here in design. We have a Phil and a stroke here in in design, which is different in photo shop. We have a foreground in the background and in design. It's Phil and struck. So over in the swatches panel, I've got the fill active case. So the full box up here, that's the fill. So that means if I click abloom pink, my boxes pink. If I click paper, the box is white, not transparent white, so it will cover things. So you would use this. Maybe if you're reversing text. Maybe you're having white text over a black background or something than you would make the text filled with paper. In this case, let's just choose black on in design. You'll notice there's also what looks like another black, and it's called registration. I just don't mess with that. Don't use that for black used black for black. And don't worry about registration. That's a little bit different. Eso just use black and the outline here the stroke. I'll show you that in a minute. Let's will come back to that, but you'll notice we're up here on the master paint. And now I've got this box that's filled with black. And if we jump back to the actual book now, all of the pages are black and any new pages that I add will be black, and I will never again have to mess with that. And if I wanted to change that, if I come up here and I decide you know, I want this to be orange, I don't know if I'd recommend that, but what's come up here and I'll make this you have to select it. Haven Imagine that once you get it orange like my whole books orange. Now I can't say that I recommend this, but for demonstration purposes, now you can see so it's easily edit Herbal. You don't have to change the whole document. Just make sure sometimes it's kind of funny, just like in photo shots. Sometimes you're on. You think you're on one layer and you're really not in in design. Sometimes you think you're on the master page, but you're not, or you're you think you're in the book, but you're really on the master page, so you just have to be aware of your surroundings and know where you are. But not a big deal. That's that. Let's let's get this off of here home because E can't look at my book being orange. Let's talk about strokes. Some people like toe have outlines. Right Stroke is another is like the design word for outlines. So some people like to have strokes around their image frames, and it's really simple that you can just select multiple objects there one at a time. Or however you want to do that. And then in your swatches panel, we would just need to bring the stroke swatch to the front. Right, So that's kind of a funny thing. Let me see if I can. What's the keyboard zooming my screen here so people can see what's going on. If this box is on top, that means that anything you click on will become the Phil. If you're wanting to select the stroke color, you just have to click on the stroke box so that so that this one becomes the active one, and then anything you do will be there. Does that make sense, all right, so we can get back out of that. And if I select all of this and then I click black, it will add a stroke to this. And I may not see it very well right now, because the stroke by default is only one point size. In Photoshopped, the strokes are measured in pixels in in design. Their measured in points like funds are like 10 point font in in design. It's a 10 point stroke, and there's two places we can change that we can come up to the options bar up here and I can just click. And now we see it's a very thick stroke. Suddenly, now it's 12 points, so I can change that here or believe it or not. In in design, there is an entire panel devoted to strokes, and I can come over here and I can change the weight of the stroke, and I can even make it. You know, 1/ of one point. If you really want a fine, fine edge, you can change that here. You can even change. Of course, where it sits, you can align the stroke to the center of the frame, you can have it on the inside the outside. There's so many things you can dio. I don't know that I'd really do this with wedding albums. But if I wanted to make the dough the stroke dotted. Look at that. You can put polka dots around. I mean, I wouldn't I wouldn't do this here in case you are your heads exploding. But that could be fun for different things or for marketing materials or a kid marketing piece or something. You could do that. And it's so much better handled in in design than photo shot because photo shop would not distribute the dots nicely around the corners and in design does that. You always use stroke on every photo I don't use struck, so you don't I personally don't at all don't like aesthetic of it or I just don't Yeah, kind of. I just like to keep it really simple, so I don't personally use strokes in my albums. I'm trying to think if there's anything there might be like a special something not in an album, but maybe in a design piece where I'm I might do that like you will see in some of the keynote where I put a stroke around things because it was a white thing on a white background, and you can't see it otherwise. So some of that stuff, but generally, I don't personally do do much of that, but yeah, Good. Good question. Um, I was also going to tell you. Okay, there is a couple of things I want to point out here with the strokes. If you do use strokes all of the time and you don't wanna have to add them to every object and you don't have to style it for every frame, you can create styles, okay? And I I'll try not to get too deep into this because they don't want toe make anybody bananas. But let's pull up our styles for its called objects styles. And there are two default styles. Will three, I guess if you count none, but we have a basic default text frame style and a graphics frame, and the default graphics frame is toe have a one pixel black stroke around something. So if that's what you like, then you could select any objects. For example, I if I draw a frame down here and I apply a basic graphics cream. Do you see what? Um, excuse me. What happened is it just instantly applied a black one pixel stroke? What you can do If you are a stroke fan, you can edit the basic graphics frame style, and I got here again. This is the object styles panel I got here from window styles, objects, styles. You could edit this. I come in here and I could change all these attributes of the style. So maybe I want my stroke toe always be hot pink, and I wanted to always be four points. I'm sorry. I make a lot of goofy, ugly things when I'm demo ing because it's visually easy to see. So maybe I want a four point hot pink stroke to be my default style. So now that that's been adjusted now, any frame that I draw, not with the frame tool, then you'd want to switch to the rectangle tool any frame. You and I have a fill on their by accident. Any frame that you draw would then have these attributes applied to it. Does that make sense? So if you do that all the time, you can tweak all of these settings and get in there and change all this stuff, and that will be you'll be all set. Then I think I need to clear my overrides. There we go. So now any frame that I drag and draw out would have ah, stroke play to it. So let me just review that. In case you missed it, that was the optic object styles. Basic frame. I edited it by double clicking and changing the attributes. There's all kinds of things you can dio, but probably if you're just looking for strokes, then you're just going to click on stroke and change those settings. But the key is, here's the key. If you're drawing, you're frames with the rectangle frame tool, which is what I've been showing you. The frames that you draw with this by default will not have any style applied to them. So that's what I use because I don't I don't use strokes very much around my friends. If you want everything you dio toe have a stroke just by default. Then instead of using the frame tool, use the rectangle tool immediately below it. That's really the only difference between these two tools is that the rectangle tool automatically simply because you drew a frame with that tool will automatically apply this basic object styles. Does that make sense? Awesome. I think that's really powerful, because if you do like the strokes, you can easily apply them to everything. And what's also great is then after the fact, if you need to edit your style if you decide. Oh, I really wish that all the frames in my album were orange. You could just edit the style, and all the frames that have been drawn and tanned with that style will update. So, yeah, anything else about that? Let's see, um, that's kind of the basics. Let me show you, I guess quickly. Just one other thing. Look at this is the most gorgeous design you've ever seen in your life or what? I mean, we are good over here today. Let me show you one other thing that might be helpful. So I'm just gonna draw another frame, and we'll just drag another image into it. All right, So let's say I've got this frame here and now I've got this frame here, and this remains on top of it. Um and let's say I want to change that. There is sort of a stacking order and in design, even though we don't usually use layers and in design like photo Shop, you may have noticed there is a layers panel. It's different than Photoshopped. I would venture to say You don't need to really go there in design. Okay, so it is there. If you want to play with it, you can. It's more. And in design, it's more very special use because you simply don't need it the way that you would need it in photo shop, so I wouldn't arrange my objects here with the layers panel. I would just select it and the keyboard shortcut to move something back or forward is command left or right bracket. So as you're dragging things, if you need to scoot something back, command left bracket will scoot. The selected item back within the layout and command right bracket will bring it forward. So if you have multiple, you know things kind of on top of each other and you want to move it clear to the back. There's another keyboard shortcut for that, too, But what I usually do is command and I just hit left, left, left, left, left bracket until it's in the right position. So that's a pretty simple thing. A couple other things. I'll point out quickly before the break there, kind of just random. But I know some folks will really like it, and it can be handy. I don't use these particular things and my albums, and we can talk about that this afternoon. But but some people might, or they certainly can be useful in marketing material designs. But also, like in photo shop, you can control the transparency of a frame of an object of a photo. So once I've got this here, if I want to make that transparent up in the in the options bar while I've got the selection tool active, I can just come up here and click this and fade that away so I can get that transparent. I know some people like that that might I use that more for maybe a marketing piece. If I've got a color blocker, I'm gonna overlay something. Don't do it really in my albums, but that's how you can do that. If you want to add a drop shadow There is a drop shadow button, and you can click right there, and it'll add a default drop shadow. If you want to edit that, I believe it's under the window menu effects. There's an effects panel, and you would just open this and you can double click and look at that. It's just like photo shop the same stuff so you can tweak your drop shadow. It's a little different, though. You don't have sliders for signs, you've got distance and we have. We do have size and things, but they're not sliders, and they're measured in inches because that's our setting. So it looks maybe a little different, but it accomplishes the same thing so you can adjust the lighting, the angle lighting of that drop shadow and where it's gonna land and you can turn on preview and and there's there's inner shadows out or glows Blob, blob, bevel in Boston, all of those things, just like photo shop. So then I would have a drop shadow underneath there. So if that's something you need to dio that is there as well, anything I am forgetting, I just want to make sure we can talk really quick to about this before we go to break and we will definitely talk more about this later. But let's say that we want to add some text Teoh our document. Let's get back to this great layout that we've got going on. This is Art Deco reinvented. I don't know. Um, a little This is not what I mean about design. Let's just show you quickly how to use the text tool. It's pretty much just like voter shop. There is a type tool over here, and there is just too type tools. And I'll address this hopefully this afternoon. We don't have the vertical type tool that we have in photo shop. We just have type tool and we have type on a path tool. But I'm just gonna show type tool, just like photo shop. You click and dropbox and you can type something and you can come up here in the options bar and you can style it add pretty much just here we go. There is little typeface for you. You can style it up there In in design. You have even more options for styling text than you do in Photoshopped. Because in design is made for this stuff. The designers. They are using this all the time, whether they're laying out a book or a corporate annual report. They are really concerned with all of the settings for their type. And I'm planning. Hopefully this afternoon we'll get into a little bit about about typography, and I will show you the glitz panel and some really amazing things. And I think you'll have a whole new appreciation for type eso. We'll come back to this. But for a simple text and my albums, I don't you know, I'm not putting paragraphs and text columns and text wraps, and I don't worry about hyphenation and paragraph alignment. I'm just putting, you know, maybe their names or something very simple. So So that's kind of all you really need here to change the size. You can select it, change that, or also, as in photo shop, you can command, shift and drag the box itself and resize that way you can't scrub and in design, and I wish you could. If you're familiar with that and photo shop, you can click here and just drag. And that is that is quite lovely, but not in in design

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Fast Book Actions.zip
Square Starter Templates.zip

bonus material with enrollment

Resource-Guide.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Yep, love your work Khara! I am now using Indesign to make my first wedding album thanks to you. So clearly explained and nicely presented. Such a powerful program that makes a complicated task seem easy, with as many variables in layout and design as I can imagine. I am just so excited! I would recommend this course to anyone who is running any size photography business. It will help simplify your workflow and increase your output.

1106 Imagery
 

This class is so good! I learnt so much about albums, and selling them the right way. Having never really used Indesign before, I was nervous about using it as my main platform to design albums. I'm shocked, but I really enjoy using the program! It's so simple and easy using Khara's methods of designing. I also never used bridge before too (Lightroom faithful here), and it's fantastic for sourcing images for the albums. I'm learning a few upsell methods too, so it's very exciting for my business! Thank you for such a great course :)

Adrian Farr
 

Khara's advice is so simple yet makes absolute perfect sense! She really knows how to get the best out of her albums and packages. If you want to learn things that will help you improve your business/workflow, then seriously buy this course!

Student Work

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