InDesign basic course 1/2

Intro to the course and us as a group

  • Who am I? Olov Källgarn, from Malmö, Sweden. I have used InDesign in my work as a freelance graphic designer for many years, and have given courses since 2013. Worked with IKEA, John Deere, Swedish Society for Nature Conservation and many others.
  • Approach to learning via co-learning
  • Who are you, have you used InDesign before, what do you want from this course?
  • Short intro to the course: A basic course over apx 6-7 hours. A very brief introductory course where you get to know the layout program, basic work flows, how to work efficently and how to work in conjuction with Photoshop.
  • What is InDesign, and what is it not? InDesign is the industry leading application for layout and print material. InDesign has very powerful tools for working with text and laying out images. You can create PDFs for print and digital destinations, e-books, posters and much more. InDesign is not a program for logo creation, illustration or photo editing. For that we have Illustrator and Photoshop/Lightroom.
  • Film:Order is beauty” – order and organization can create a sense of beauty. By arranging things in such a way that it minimizes the amount of work for the recipient, we can help them understand, appreciate the content we produce. With consistent and meaningful typography, spacing, color coding etc, your message can shine.

Preparation

  • Preparation: Create a folder on your computer called “Indesign basics course”
  • Download this set of images extract the images in that folder.

Getting to know InDesign:

  • Let’s open InDesign.
    • What version do you have? (Help – About InDesign)
    • Interface overview – let’s get the terminology right.
    • Draw the interface on a piece of paper. Tools, menus, control field, workspace and panels.
    • The page: margins, bleed and page edges.
  • Change workspace to Typography.
  • If you mess up the workspace, you can always restore it in the workspace menu.

The most common InDesign tools

  • The tools I use the most:
    • Black arrow (V/Esc) (50-75% of all the work in InDesign!)
    • Text tool (T)
    • Rectangle frame tool
    • Rectangle tool
    • Zoom – use (alt)+scroll or mousepad
    • Panning (hand) – hold spacebar and leftclick to move around in the document
  • Create a new document and write some text, add boxes, change colors, move and rotate objects.

Shortcuts:

Shift to make things proportional (perfect circle for example). Ctrl-Shift to change the font size when scaling a text box. Ctrl-Z to undo..

Short exercise on typography

Short exercise to create a highlighted text box with heading style text.

Intro to the layers panel

  • The layers panel is used for organizing your layers and objects.
  • You can lock, hide and select objects and layers via the layers panel.

Create a background image

  • Drag out a rectangle frame over the entire page.
  • With the frame selected, add an image (menu: File – Place)
  • The image will now cover your entire page.
  • In the control field, set transparency to 10%.
  • In the layers panel, move it to the bottom, and lock it.

Exercise: Newspaper layout with columns

Summary & next session (10-15 minutes)

  • Individually, write down 5 things you found useful.
  • Be as concrete as possible. I e “I can use spacebar and mouse to move around” rather than “I know how to move around in the document”