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Transform Containers

Lesson 7 from: Intro to Adobe InDesign

Jason Hoppe

Transform Containers

Lesson 7 from: Intro to Adobe InDesign

Jason Hoppe

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Lesson Info

7. Transform Containers

In this lesson, Jason models how to rotate, resize, duplicate, change, and group shapes to create your desired layout. He demonstrates how to use the direct selection tool and how to make edits to an isolated object without ungrouping it other containers.

Lesson Info

Transform Containers

getting a little bit further inside here when we want to go in. And we want to have a little bit more fun with our basic shapes, our shapes or really basic. But we can go through and we can transform and edit thes shapes and do a couple more things that are going to make things a little bit better while we're working with in design. So I'm gonna show you some of these cool things with this. Okay, I'm gonna do a text container is one, and I'm going to just fill that some text here, and then I'm also going to do just a shape, and I'm gonna have that with a fill in a stroke around it as well. There it is. So I'm going to show you some basic things that we can do. We know we can move these things around. And with our selection tools, I can also go in. And I can also rotate these shapes. And to do that, I can select, click on the shape and hover outside, but not touching the corner point on any one of these. And I can rotate my shapes around if I hold down my shift key. This allows me to ro...

tate and snap to 0 45 or 90 degree increments when I'm doing those shapes. OK, so that's pretty cool Now. Another thing. Copy paste. I don't copy paste. It's just two strips that I don't need to take If I would like to duplicate anything. If I want a different shape here, I'd like to duplicate this text container. I don't do copy and paste. Select the shape. Select the object. Select the container. Hold down your option or your Ulta Kate, and you'll see that your cursor will double up when it doubles up. You can option or alter, click and drag, and you can then duplicate your object. I love that they do that all the time. Duplicate feature. Absolutely do it instead of copy paste option, click and drag and move it over. Bowman's right there. I've got exactly what I want. I'm not going to redraw it. I'm not gonna copy paste two steps when I can do one. I'm gonna do the one step. Absolutely now, one of the other things that we talked about two is being able to just go ahead and do something slightly different with their shapes. We showed you how we can go with it and do a circle or a square, whatever. But maybe you want to go ahead. And I wanted kind of distort the shape a little bit born. Maybe I have a text container that I would like to kind of create an angle with. You know, it's like, Oh, my gosh, how do we do that? Well, you know, I've got some basic tools here where I can go into the object menu and I can change shape. All right. Doesn't matter if it's a text container or containers, because, as I've said before, containers the containers a container so I could turn this into it. You know, like a triangle if I wanted to. If I didn't know how to draw a triangle. What happens if I'd like to manipulate this triangle to turn it into kind of like and I saw Seles trying all you know are kind of like the skewed triangle. I'm gonna use my direct selection tool, not something that I use very often at all. And the reason why is because the direct selection tool, when I click on my objects, you'll notice I don't get those pull handles and everything else to scale a rotate. That's not what the direct selection tool does. The direct selection tool allows me to directly select a point or a line segment and move it. So if I have my triangle, it's don't have it clicked on. Make sure it's not clicked on when you go ahead and do your selection tool. If it is, click off it and then come back to it. If I click on one of the paths here, you can see I can pull the path separately. If I click on one of the corners here, I can pull that corner separately as well if I have a text container and I'd like to skew that text container so that the type creates this kind of funky shape right there a camp and that's all by using the direct selection tool again. It's not something that we use very often at all. 99.9% of the time we use our selection tool because we want to select rotate scale whatever, but that one time where it's like, you know what, I just want to take this shape when I want to tweak it a little bit. You know, maybe I have a circle right here, and I'd like to go ahead and make an egg out of it. You can select that shape, move it up, and it's like, Great, There's my egg right there. Awesome. I can not really what Ellis in design is used for. I mean, we can create these basic shapes, but I'm not going to create a Faberge egg out of this thing, okay? It's just basic shapes, so transforming the containers can be really quite cool to dio that. Remember, we also have up here in our properties panel the ability to flip and transform and scale on warp and skew as well. But when we need to go in there and we really need to tweak something, we can go in and use our direct selection tool. So that's what we have here with a direct selection tool right there. We can go in and change those shapes. Now, one more thing that we have, because this is gonna happen quite often. We may have some objects here would be be working with these things. I'm gonna put these together create a different Phil here, and I'm gonna create a different shape over here is well duplicated. Fill it with something else. Awesome. I'm gonna select all of these items together. Now. You'll notice when I select them all together, I can move them all together, and it has an overall bounding box. Now, I don't have to group these together, because if I just select them and move them if I want to scale them, Aiken, scale them together too. And I can hold down my shift key to make sure they all scale correctly. Now, if I do want to group them all together, I can I can simply go to my properties panel and shoes group right there. It's one of the quick actions or object group command G I group them together. Dotted line means it's all group together. I want to move one of these items separately. Do I have to un group it while you could? I could go over here and on group and then select him. And I'm not gonna do that in design. There is my group. I'm gonna double click, double click allows me to get in and isolate that one object. Do whatever I want to with that object right there without having to on group I click off it. I clicked back on it. It still grouped. Cool feature. Very handy to have.

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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.

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