Lesson Info
6. Drawing Lines and Properties Panel
Lessons
Lesson Info
Drawing Lines and Properties Panel
drawing lines. Not a whole bunch of line use, an illustrator and in design here. That's why this is fairly sparse right here. But the reality of it is we do use lines for call outs, things like that. I even actually put a line there for you. So we do have basic drawing tools here. But again, this is not for illustrating things. This may be something that I want to use in order to go in and get kind of the use of just the basic shapes. So lying tool here. It's pretty simple. We have one line tool. That's it when I draw the line tool here, if you want a straight line again, hold down your shift key and get the line in our properties panel. I can go into the stroke, and I can set the color of the stroke. I can set the weight of the stroke as well, and I can choose the style of line that I'd like a swell and in a stroke panel, I can also go be in and do a little bit further editing of the lines if I don't want square ends and I want hot Dog dens. I can go ahead and hot dog the ends right t...
here. And so they don't end in round ones right there. They hot dog the ends right there. Yeah, I call it Hot Dog in the end, because it looks like a hot dog. One thing I can dio with that as well. Other things that I can do in the stroke panel by clicking on the link right there in the stroke is I can put end caps on here and we don't have many of these. I call these ding blurs because they're not just arrow heads and tails. So I can add these little ding blurs to the ends of lines and you can see that they're huge. Now they do adjust with the size of the line here, but I've never found them to be in proportion with line at all. So you can scale these down so that you can make them larger and smaller here. And you don't need to use a little upper down arrows here. You can simply put your cursor right in here and then use your upper down arrows in here just like that. If you're impatient, shift up or down Arrow will make them go down in increments of 10. Right there. Okay. Makes it really nice if you're going the wrong direction. Simply click on the little flip it arrows right there and you can flip the ends right there. Awesome. If you'd like a dash line when we got a dashed line as well, So you can set that you can set the dash. And there you get all these other cool, funky things, no matter what in the end, Zehr right there. So don't feel like you. You know how run out of options here? Actually, they're pretty cool options that you can have. I use these as pointers and stuff. I'm not a big arrow fan, but I like to go ahead and use those circles right there and be able to draw things that you can point things out. So line feature works pretty good. Now, the thing with lines we're talking about an open line here. We can also talk about a stroke as well. So if I go in and I draw shape here and I have a stroke around my object, So let me go ahead and I'm going. Teoh make that red as well. I'm going to fill that with nothing. I can also go into my stroke panel, and I can use the stroke panel for the stroke around my object as well. It's not just an open line. I can also use the stroke type to put this around a container as well. And then I also have kind of like the little corners here are sorry, little corners where I can go in and this is not really rounding the corners. This is rounding the strokes. You see here I can have square edges like a knife around edges. He knows how it only rounds the outside and not the inside. That's kind of like a softened up. So this is one of the things I can do in the stroke there as well. So it's not just a open line, but I can also put these lines around this to very simple, very basic lines right there. Selection tool. Do that. If I do want to draw some basic stuff here, I do have my pen and my pencil tool. My pencil tool. I can go in and draw here. It's gotta fill. Fill it with nothing that I can just do a stroke again. Very rough, very crude stuff. But if you do want to do some type of freeform thing, you certainly can. Right there with a pencil tool, you can double click on the pencil tool, and you can control how nice it's going to look or how accurate it's going to look. So if you do want to draw something with a pencil tool set that to be very smooth, and when you draw something, it's going to come up very smooth. Fill it with nothing here and that stroke. Do it. It kind of smooths the whole thing out. Course we want Hot Dog the end because it always looks better if you do want to do some freeform drawing in there, not what in design is used for. But you can if you needed to. Okay, jumping over to the Properties panel now we've used this quite a lot here, but there's a lot more that goes on in the Properties panel. Then we've actually talked about. Now the properties panel is always gonna change based on what tools we have selected, and that was always a frustration with control bars. People would say, Oh my gosh, I can't see what I'm looking for. Well, if I've got nothing selected, my properties panel now shows me everything with the document here. And here's where I can go in and change the orientation and the page sizes and my margins and my columns and whatever it is that I want. I can also go under the file menu, and I could go under my documents, set up window and change all of the same things. But they just made it that much easier in the properties panel. Now I can also go through, and I can also navigate through my pages a little bit easier. I can turn on my grand guides. I can turn on my rulers and that kind of stuff is well, and it's like, Okay, this is, you know, this is getting pretty good here. So instead of trying to hunt this all down, they try to put this together in the properties panel. If I were to click on a container, whether it hasn't image or text in here, then I can go in here and I can see my transform panel, which allows me to go in and allows me to set the size and the width, and I can also rotate. And I can flip these things as well, using the transform Panel two, which is really nice and handy that's there. If I have my text container selected, then I have all of my text attributes here. You can see I can go through and just changed it by running over the fonts right there. If I have an image container, then I can go in here and I have other options here, Phil and Stroke of the container. If I've got multiple things selected, here's where I can begin to a line things and space things right here, which is really nice. I can also control my auto fitting, and the auto fitting is what I showed you. If I have a text container that's too large or too small here, I can go in and I can just double click. That's the quick way of doing it. But I could also go through, and I could set my fitting options here so that I could go through and automatically fit them to whatever shape I want. So don't overlook the Properties panel. If you're not seeing what you want to see in the properties panel, it probably is based on whatever tool and objects you have selected, whether you have your type selected, whether you have a container selected or if you have nothing selected properties panels Really good. That's taking the place of the control bar. Definitely check it out.
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Ratings and Reviews
- Emma -
Love this class! Very well explained, easy and clear instructions. The instructor is cool, knowledgable and fun. Very engaging. Highly recommend to those new to InDesign!
a Creativelive Student
Such a great class to get up and running with InDesign quickly. Straightforward, to the point, easy to follow and understand. Class materials also great reference.
Mark Choman
Just like Barbara (previous reviewer) said. Great class targeting the fundamentals to get up and running quickly.