Lessons

Lesson Info

Setting InDesign Preferences

If we're talking about having a plan and then executing it, we need to start with our end in mind, right? So let's talk about that here. This is an album that I did Oh, not too terribly long ago. But we'll scroll up here to the beginning so you can see how this kind of works out. But here was the album cover, and we'll be talking about lots of ways to handle the album covers because that could be different depending on what you are building. And here we see the various spreads in the layout and you'll notice that it's it's really great. That is one document, and I can just scroll through the thing and see the story of their day. And it's really great when I'm designing it because I can swap around stuff on the fly, and it's just it makes it really a piece of cake. So that's what that would look like. Let's take a peek at some of the other cool things that you can dio with in design. I'm going to show you the info packet that I have produced for my seniors back in the day when I was sho...

oting 100 and 50 of them over the course of like, three months or whatever, that was bananas. This is what I would send them when they would ask me for pricing information so I would get their emails and rather than sending them J pegs or, I don't know, having it just necessarily on my website. I really like to discuss pricing personally with my clients, and this is what I would send them. And I would export this as a PdF and had a little intro here about you know what, they're who they're dealing with and some quotes and testimonials from people. And this ended up really looking like a magazine, right? So I wanted to keep it very stylish and give them really an example of what they'd be getting into. And it was a lot of fun, and I think it gave them a good taste of what to expect and how how their stuff would look when it was finished and somewhere I think I had an example of their album. I was on the other page, so that's what that looks like, and we will do some of this stuff later today. also will be talking about text and how you can really create some documents like this for your marketing purposes. So we're gonna go well beyond just the album's. Another example. That's kind of fun. I showed you the finished thing yesterday that is a book printed, and that was the alphabet book here, So this was a lot of fun to put together. This was a shoot I did with these cute kiddos, and if you've never done something like an elbow issue, it's a lot of fun. It's pretty intense to come up with all of this stuff, but they were so great, and we put together this book and it's just been a lot of fun. So this was built here, an enzyme as well. So you have a lot of flexibility. Some of the books you'll notice. I've got set up here with different pages and then other books like this. I've got a whole spread, so we'll talk about the difference between all of those things and why you might want to choose one over the other. Sometimes we're going to start today by talking about some of the preferences that you might want to set before you get into in design. One of the trick about making the preferences stick is that you actually wanna edit them without any open documents. So if you have anything open and you change the preference, it will only B for that document, which would be really frustrated. So I want to write that one down, put that one in your hat to remember. So the first thing we want to do is come up to the in design menu and she's preferences. I think, on a PC. I think it's under the edit menu, so edit preferences on the Mac. It's under in design preferences, and I'm just gonna hit general so we can see what we're looking at here. It's very similar to photo shop set up, so we've got general settings and all these different sub categories of settings. You can tweak the one thing that we probably want to touch on, and it depends what part of the world you're in. But over where I live, we generally operate in inches, so by default in design is set to Pikus. I think that's the default eso. You probably want to change that and obviously you can choose millimeters or whatever. We've got tons of options. You can work in pixels as well, so I'm going to go ahead and make sure that this is set two inches. That's a biggie. So I'm gonna go ahead and click. OK, another thing that I want to touch on that, I think is really helpful is something called the object. Where is it sitting? So under the object menu, if you come down to fitting and you'll get this fly out menu at the very bottom of that, there is something called frame fitting options. And this can be life changing. If you've been using in design for a long time and you never discovered this, I can't wait to share it with you. What this does is, as we draw the frames in design for all of our image is changing. The setting will adjust the way that those images default into the frame. So if you don't change this, it's not a big deal. It's just that when you drop in an image, it's going toe land in its full humongous size, and then you need to do a keyboard shortcut to fit it into the frame. But if you want to save yourself, some keyboard shortcuts come into this option and we're going to turn on not auto fit. That's a little different. What we're going to do is go to fitting, and what we want is what I usually do anyway. Is Phil frame proportionally and that will fill the frame proportionally? And then you can choose where Teoh, a line that from an onion have this just in the center. So we're gonna fill the frame proportionally and align it from the center. And once we've got that set, then we click OK on. We should be pretty pretty good. As far as color management settings go, I would recommend going with what you've got. You know, whatever you've got that works for you with photo shop and all of that, that's another nice thing is that you can have your color settings synchronized across the different adobe platforms. And if you actually set your preferences Enbridge, then it will apply those same preferences to anything in your adobe. Sweet. If that makes sense, nifty, right? Yeah, so fantastic. Another great thing about working within design, so I'm going to go ahead and leave that one of the things that I decided to dio recently, and I don't know if anyone else cares, but when I really get into designing stuff, it kind of makes me bonkers to have all these colors just sitting in my swatches over here. This is totally, I mean, personal preference. I really I don't know that I have a recommendation either way, but if it bothers you when I start adding a lot of colors to my swatches, I just don't I don't like having this. If you want to get rid of it, you can just select it with no documents open. You can select all this and just trash it, and then it just won't be there anymore. So that's up to you. Um, I'm just going to hit delete Swatch. And now though they're gone. But you can get them back. Of course, you can reset your swatches at any time. Another thing you could dio, if you've got swatches set up in photo shopped, for example, like maybe if you've added your personal branding swatches to your swatches panel, you can export those and then you can import them here, just choosing loads, watches. And so just to give you an example, I did put that on time thing here blooms, watches. So if I load that we see I've got a blue pink and co bloom orange right here. So that makes designing your marketing materials really simple. And these now, because I've set this without any documents open, this just becomes my preference. So this is what my swatches panel will always look like until I add stuff to it within each individual document. But this will be like the default setting for my swatches now. And I just think that's pretty pretty handy, right? All right, so we've got our preferences set. Let's go ahead and start making a document. We're gonna come up to the file menu, and we're going to choose new. And there's three choices here, and you might be tempted to say book because we are designing albums and their books. But in in design, the book document is something a little different. It's like a book book that has what's called pagination like that you would you would send, like if you work for a publisher and you're laying out a book like that that's going to be paginated thing. That's a little different here. So we don't need this for our album book set up. We'll talk about library later, but most of the time for our normal in design purposes, whether that's blogging or photo, album or marketing materials, we're just going to go ahead and stick with documents, so we'll keep it simple that way. This is what the new document window looks like. And what's great, of course, is you can set up your own presets. So if you are always making, you know, a certain book with a certain vendor, which is what we talked about yesterday, once you get your initial book built, you can save that as a preset, and then any time you wanna start again, you just pull it up and boom, you are ready to start designing. So in this example, I'm just gonna put we'll just start with four pages, usually at home. If I'm starting something, I might just start with one, and I might add them manually so you can put a number here, however you like. Let's talk for a minute about facing pages, because this one can be tricky for people if they've never given it much, much thought before. But facing pages is pretty simple. All that means is that when you build a book instead of building it as a spread, if you turn on facing pages, then the dimensions that you enter for the book would just be the actual pages. So half of a spread does that make sense, and facing means that they face each other and become a spread right? So that's simple, not too confusing. Which one do you choose? Do you choose facing pages, or do you not choose facing pages? It's really up to you. The difference just is, if you've got facing pages on the dimensions you would enter here would be individual pages, right? Not a full spread, just an individual page, because they would then face each other and become a spread. So the advantage to that is like Here's what you really ask yourself the book that you plan to export, depending on who your album vendor is and how they want their files. If they want pages like, if you actually upload the single pages separately, then you would want facing pages on so that when you export it in design will export each page as a J peg or whatever, so that if it will work with your album vendor. If your album vendor once spreads, then you don't have to have facing pages on you still could, because in design, it's so cool that you can actually build with facing pages. But you could export spreads if you want. So I guess the rule of thumb would be. If your album supplier wants the individual pages, then turn on facing pages. If they do not, then I would go with turning this off, yes, central lines so that you make sure that you don't have a face in the crease. Is there a way of displaying that? Exactly. So if you do have facing pages on, you will see a crease because in design knows that they're two pages coming together. If you do not have facing pages on, which is how I generally operate, then in design will just give you one giant spread. But we will add the line down the middle in the guides through the master pages. So great question. We will totally address that anyone else right now we're good on facing pages. Okay, we can come to that, of course, will hit the chat room later for some of that stuff. All right, so I'm gonna leave while also, you know, I'll show you an example. Let's turn it on and we'll make a 10 by book. So in this case, if I'm going to use facing pages and I'm going to make a 10 by 10 album, I would actually enter 10 by 10 for the dimensions, because those are the actual pages. So I'm just going to click OK to show you what this looks like. We'll come back to the screen in a minute. So here's what facing pages looks like it's going to give you individual pages. The 1st 1 in facing pages is always a single, and we can address that. Also, if you still need a double, we can deal with some of that. Eso here would be the one page. Then here's two pages to come together, becoming a spread. Here's the next page as I add pages to my book. I'm just going to zoom out so we can see this build here as I add pages. It's adding half of a spread at a time because a page is half of a spread. Right, so that's facing pages. If I'm gonna leave that open, let's go back here. I'll turn off facing pages will make the same book with the same number of pages, but now they're actually spread. And for the with this time, because we're building the whole spread. That same 10 by 10 book would now be 20 by 10. Right, because that's the spread size, so I'll set that up. Down here. Down here is Faras columns go. We don't really have to worry about this too much s I'm just going to leave that as one giant column margins. If you want Teoh, set your margins, you can do that. I like to have 1/2 inch just for myself. That's the default, and I just leave it. So it just reminds me if I'm putting text at all in the document, I or, of course, important things. I just don't like to put it beyond that half inch because it starts to be uncomfortably close to the edge and it's kind of an alignment thing, and we can touch on it. when we get to some design stuff, but you generally don't want to put, you know, someone's eye or something, maybe right close to the edge. Not necessarily because we're worried about trimming it because we'll talk about trim lines in a minute, but mostly just because it's kind of uncomfortable toe look at someone's face this close to the edge of the document. It's almost like they're gonna fall off, so I like to have my margins for that purpose. Over here in the right side of the document window, there's something called more options, and if we click on that, we actually have the ability and in design to set our bleed dimensions. So in the design world, we call them bleeds. In the photography world, they're often referred to as trim or trim lines. Trim edges right? This is the edge that would extend beyond the actual finished document. So do you need to suitably do not need to set a bleed? It depends on how your structuring things and what your album vendor gives you. Probably most album vendors. They've already built that in right. If you open, for example, the Photoshopped template for whatever album vendor. If you're not sure, you can just take those dimensions and just build them into your document dimensions here. So you can either build in the bleeds, right? So that's the whole document includes the bleeds. Or you can enter the finished trim size of the document and then add the bleed down here. So let me do that just to show you what it looks like. Just so you know, if I click OK, now we're going to get this set up. So here's the black line represents the the edge of the book. Okay, so when it's finished, the black line will be the edge. This pink line magenta represents the margin, and the red line is red like it's the bleed that makes sense. Right? So this red line represents the trimmed edge that would get cut off if you indeed do use bleeds. So you would want to make sure that any images and things that you add would extend all the way to the bleed. So that's how that works? I don't know. Do you have a question? Okay. I think I'm a little confused about why would you use a bleed? I don't I guess I'm not understanding that concert. That's great. Well, it kind of depends what you're building. I would say that probably within the album world, the album industry. Probably. You don't have to worry about bleeds because, um, most of the album dimensions usually have it built in. So, for example, if you know if for nao, for example, there 10 by tens, they just want you to send them a 10 by 10 or 10 by 20 spread, and if they in fact do trim that, they will take care of it. But the file they want from you is 10 by 20 so they'll give you those dimensions. It's probably more applicable if you were designing something to be printed on a press, like maybe a marketing piece that you were going to send Teoh ah printer with, you know, a digital press or a four color press, and they were going to run it through, and then they actually trim it because they like toe, have actual bleeds in their documents, so it really just depends. But it's the same thing. You either make your document the full size, which would include the trim or you can add it on with the bleed. Also mix ins when we're doing the OTA covered with the way the album covers scores usually. But if you look, you know if you will relate it to photo shop, although, of course I do not advocate building albums and Photoshopped. But people are familiar with photo shop so well related to that in photo shop. If you open an album template from a vendor, they usually will have, you know, like this is your printable area and this area will be trimmed and they might put it in a layer. And they'll say, You know, make sure your documents go all the way to the edge and delete the flare before you flatten it. It's that same concept, but you you can do it here in in design with a bleed, or you can just build it in. So personally, I don't use the bleeds in my albums. I used Teoh a long time ago with a different vendor who wanted bleeds, and actually they had specifications for in design. They would literally say, If you're building your books and in design, set it up this way and that was great and they wanted bleeds. So I put bleeds, and I did it that way. But I'm work with video now, and they're documents are just, you know, 10 by 20 for that spread. So I don't add a bleep because it's built in. We're good with that. Okay, so in this example here, I'm gonna go ahead and change this back Teoh to not have a bleed. So we'll set this back to zero and there we go. So now if I click, OK, we see the bleed is gone. And now I just have a spread Like what you might be more used to seeing. So I wouldn't worry too much about the bleeds. I only mention it because you know it will probably come up where you'll hear it somewhere. And I don't want people to panic. So I mentioned it. But more than likely for the album stuff, for most things that you might do in in design, you probably won't have to worry about it. And if you do, whoever's producing your stuff will probably let you know. So not to worry. And you can always add it later. If you ever sent something Teoh a printer or lab or whatever, and they ever said, Oh, this isn't right. We need a bleed, You could add it or you could take it away later. I mean, you've got the flexibility. You don't have to redesign it. It's not like photo shop where if you suddenly extended your canvas now you have to stretch pixel information and so you don't have to rebuild. It is not like that, so that's kind of liberating. It's another great thing about in design.