Working with Graphics

This lesson introduces you to the workspace in InDesign. You'll get a tour of the key functions, including collapsing and expanding panels, nested panels, and the menus you'll use every day. You'll also learn how to switch between different workspaces depending on the type of project you're working on.

The InDesign toolbar is rich with tools, but many of them are hidden or "nested" underneath the tools you see initially. In this video you'll learn about the primary tools used to select, rotate, and size objects, as well as the Type tool, which lets you edit text and create frames with or without borders. We will also cover switching tools with the keyboard and navigating with the Hand and Zoom tools.

There are many different ways to navigate a document in Adobe InDesign. In this lesson you will learn the key ways to get around your project, including keyboard shortcuts to speed up your workflow.

This lesson shows you how to configure InDesign to get the best possible document settings. You'll see how to make changes to document settings, including kerning and tracking, leading, fonts, and much more.

Building a new document and saving a reusable preset is a snap in InDesign, as you'll see in this lesson. You'll also pick up some time-saving tips for your workflow.

In this lesson you'll learn all about creating and formatting text for maximum impact as you build a postcard layout project.

In this lesson you'll learn more advanced techniques for text formatting, including changing colors, adding paragraph spacing, and more.

This lesson looks at frames. Everything that is placed into InDesign ends up in a frame - you can create frames from scratch, or you can import text and images into a document and InDesign will automatically create the frame for you.

In this lesson you'll create a new document and place and format text, setting the number of columns and pages in the process.

Paragraph styles help you quickly and consistently format your documents. This lesson shows you how to use them.

In this lesson you'll see how to apply more advanced formatting using the paragraph styles tools.

This lesson shows you how to edit paragraph styles so you can make global updates to even large and complex documents.

Master pages help you maintain consistency in your documents and quickly apply repeated elements throughout the project. This lesson shows you how to set up master pages, including elements like page numbers.

As you'll see in this lesson, a single text frame can be split into two or more columns, either directly or by setting up page guides so that text flows into each column automatically when placed. Once columns are created, you may need to span a heading across them - and InDesign has a Span Columns feature designed to do just that.

Text wrap prevents images from obscuring the text they are placed on top of. InDesign's Text Wrap panel makes selecting a placed photo and applying text wrap a breeze, as you'll see in this lesson.

Letterhead is fundamental for branding, and in this video we will build one from scratch, complete with guides, logo, and contact text. When we're finished, we'll save the letterhead as an InDesign template for reuse.

A newsletter is an easy, low-cost way to reach customers and colleagues or connect with family. In this lesson we will start a newsletter with a template, auto-flow some text, semi auto-flow more text, and place images to create a clean, elegant newsletter.

InDesign has an automatic table of contents (TOC) feature that will build the TOC in less than two minutes while adding bookmarks and hyperlinks. In this lesson you'll learn how to do this, as well as how to make text begin on the cover and continue several pages later, add jump line numbers, and more.

As this lesson demonstrates, the Selection and Direct Selection tools perform different tasks. The Selection tool allows you to resize, crop, and move objects, whereas the Direct Selection tool allows you to reshape the edge of an object or move a placed photo inside a frame.

In this lesson you'll learn about a powerful feature called multi-place, which allows you to import many files at once. You'll also see how to use InDesign's smart guides to align, size and perfectly position your images and be introduced to a little-known feature called "gridify."

In this lesson you will see how to design the cover of a postcard, complete with an image, rounded corners, and text.

In this lesson you will complete your postcard with text on the back, a postage paid box, and bulleted items.

Adding color to a layout creates impact and can convey an emotional message. In this lesson you will see how to create a new color swatch and use the Eyedropper tool to sample an exact color from a placed photo.

The Kuler panel in InDesign is an online collection of colors that you can use to create a "color story" for a given project. Once you find a group of colors you like, you can add that collection to your Swatches panel in one click. This lesson shows you how.

A Pantone® color is a branded color, more generically known as a "spot" color. In this video we will take a black-and-white postcard and add a Pantone® Red, specifically the Adobe Red, PMS (Pantone Matching System) 485. Also, we will modify paragraph and character styles to add our new color.

In this lesson, we will use two ovals and two rectangles to create a bottle. Then, once the bottle is merged into one piece and given a color, we will draw dotted lines with arrowheads to create a simple schematic.

Gradients give depth to a layout, but if overused they can be distracting and make your designs look busy. In this lesson you will see how to add subtle gradients that give your design depth and impact. You'll also get some tips to help your gradients print smoothly and avoid banding.

InDesign lets you make objects transparent, create soft feathered drop shadows, and add "Photoshop-style" effects to elements of your page. In this lesson you'll see how to add these effects to your layouts.

Object styles allow you to save the appearance of objects on your InDesign page. In this lesson you'll learn about the settings that can be saved and reused in an object style, such as fill color, stroke color, character styles, paragraph styles, and effects.

In this lesson you'll learn how to create a silhouette or clipping path around portions of an image to make it look like it is on top of other elements on the page. This effect is accomplished by "sandwiching" two images on top of one another.

Character styles are used to add formatting such as bold or italic to individual words or letters inside a paragraph. Once you create a style and apply it, you can modify the settings and anywhere that style is used, the new settings will be picked up. Watch and learn!

As you'll see in this lesson, nested styles are just character styles that are nested inside of paragraph styles. The nesting allows you to make changes to a specific word, line, or character. Nested styles are particularly useful if you are creating catalogs or directories, or if you make frequent style changes in your paragraph text.

In this lesson you'll see how to format a catalog with over 100 paragraphs, each requiring three style changes. Changes can be applied quickly to all 100+ paragraphs by creating rules in the paragraph style.

If you have a file where Microsoft Word styles have been used, you can quickly relink the Word style formatting to your InDesign styles. In this lesson we'll place the same Word document multiple times, using different import options each time to control the style of the text.

Creating hyphenation rules is something every designer should learn in order to create clean, easy-to-read documents. In this lesson you'll learn about InDesign's hyphenation tools so you can be sure you never have a widow or orphan in your documents.

Once you master tabs in one application, they get much easier to set up in other programs. In this lesson you'll learn about the main styles of tabs in InDesign and when and how to use them.

In this lesson you'll learn to set hanging indents to align text in a numbered list. You'll also see how to use the center-justified and align to decimal tab styles. Finally, we'll change the align-on character to a number, then a colon, to control the exact alignment of tabbed text.

Using keyboard shortcuts to format and align your text can make assembling and modifying pages a much faster process. In this lesson you'll learn some keyboard shortcuts for sizing type, changing the font, and aligning and adjusting the leading. You'll also see how to use the Eyedropper tool to reuse font settings in other places in your document.

As this lesson demonstrates, if you're ever curious about what fonts are used in a document or encounter missing fonts in a file, you can use the Find Font feature to locate and/or replace document fonts.

In this lesson you'll learn how to use an alternate character for your bullets to add some pizzazz to your document. You'll also learn about the Glyphs panel, which allows you to see every character that exists in a font and insert any character into your text.

In this lesson you'll learn how to apply custom page numbers and when you would want to do so. For example, some books start with the actual or "folio" numbers for the first page you read, while others custom-number the frontmatter. No matter which mode you choose, creating custom page numbers is an easy task in InDesign.

In this lesson you'll learn how to use InDesign to add custom section markers so you don't need a different master page for every chapter or section in a document. You'll see how to add the Section Marker placeholder to the master page, then tell InDesign what to print in the Pages panel.

Building a table of contents (TOC) in InDesign is a breeze, as long as your document is set up using paragraph styles. In this lesson you'll learn to generate a TOC, style it, and update it to reflect any changes in the document.

Facing pages arrange your document with a left and right master page and all following pages in double-page spreads. In this lesson you'll learn how to create facing page layouts for use in books, newsletters, and other types of projects.

This lesson shows you how to use InDesign libraries to save frequently used content including colors, guides, drawn shapes, groups, and text frames with character and paragraph styles.

In this lesson you'll learn how to use several master pages in one document, each with different margins, columns, and guides. You'll also see how to create referenced master pages so that if you update or change content on one master, all the referenced master pages update.

In this lesson you'll learn some of the finer points of working with master pages, including how to lock and unlock items so that you can edit on the page. You'll also learn a keyboard shortcut to release an item from the master and restore its position and settings.

Moving objects and text to their own layers makes editing and selective printing of objects easier. In this video we'll create new layers from scratch, placing new objects on each layer.

In InDesign CS6, you can show or hide all objects on any document layer by hitting the collapse or expand triangle next to the layer name. In this lesson you'll see how to select individual objects on a layer, move objects to other layers, and edit the contents of a group in the Layers panel.

In this lesson you'll learn how to adjust the page guides on a document page or master, including how to use the Layout Adjustment checkbox. This way all content that is sitting on a guide will automatically move to fit your new margins and/or columns.

In this lesson you'll learn to use the new Liquid Layout feature in InDesign CS6. Liquid Layout allows content to automatically be moved, scaled, or both when the page size changes.

This lesson looks at alternate layouts, which were added to InDesign CS6 to allow multiple versions of the same document to be stored in one file. These layouts are perfect for building tablet or eReader content, reworking the pages so that they look beautiful in either horizontal or vertical orientation.

As you'll learn in this lesson, the Mini Bridge panel offers large visual previews of content that you might want to place on your InDesign page. Mini Bridge can navigate to any folder on your hard drive, connected disk, or server. Once you have the proper content displayed in Mini Bridge, you can drag and drop text and images into your InDesign page.

In this lesson, you'll see how InDesign can read the metadata that is stored in an image and use that metadata to generate dynamic captions, adding descriptive information that will always travel with the image.

A clipping path is typically created around an image in Photoshop to cut it out of a background in a non-rectangular fashion, creating a silhouette of that shape. As this lesson shows, InDesign can create a clipping path around any shape for you, without having to jump to Photoshop.

In this lesson you'll learn to use the Align panel, which allows you to align images horizontally, vertically, or to edges of objects. The Align panel also lets you distribute or space objects to proportional values or values you set yourself, or align to a "key" object so that you can keep one object in position and have other objects on the page move in relation to the key object.

The Pathfinder panel allows you to easily join and manipulate shapes created in InDesign. In this lesson you'll learn how to use the Pathfinder to build single shapes out of several pieces using the Add command and how to slice objects based on their stacking order. The Pathfinder can also be used to create interesting shapes for text frames.

In this lesson you'll learn about anchored objects, which are also referred to as inline graphics. These are text frames, images, or groups that flow with your text and are "anchored" to a line of type.

In this lesson you'll learn about the Links panel, which allows you to see the status of a linked graphic and provides you with all sorts of extra information about a placed image.

The Content Collector and Content Placer tools were added to InDesign CS6 to give you a quick way to grab any elements on an InDesign page and place them into other layouts or on other pages. This lesson will show you that this handy little tool can be much faster than a copy and paste when you want to reuse content.

In this lesson you'll learn to create document templates that you can reuse with different content. When you open a template, InDesign always opens a copy of the document so that you never overwrite the original and you can place new content with already defined frames, colors, and styles.

This lesson looks at InDesign's Book panel. In this panel, you can add many different documents and they will automatically be numbered sequentially. When all of your pieces have been added, the book can be printed or PDFed as a single file.

Documents in a book can be synchronized so that all the styles and colors are the same for all the chapters. In this lesson you'll learn how to make a change in one book document, set it as the style source, then click Synchronize in the Book panel to have that change applied to all chapters of the book.

It will be very helpful for readers if the PDF of your book includes built-in navigation. In this lesson we'll build a table of contents for an entire book, then create a PDF to make sure that all the items in the table of contents are clickable and that they appear in the Bookmarks panel.

In this lesson you'll learn about creating folding spreads by using the Page tool to build pages of different sizes in the same document. You'll also learn how to create trifold and accordion-style documents by adjusting the Shuffle function.

In this lesson you'll learn how to create hyperlinks and buttons so the viewer can click a link to jump to other locations in the same document, to other documents, or to websites. You'll also see how to add a rollover state to a button so that when the mouse moves over the button its appearance changes.

For dynamic documents, it is a good idea to create document-wide navigation using master pages and the Buttons panel. This way, when viewers jump to a location in the document, they can easily get back to the home page. You'll see how it's done in this lesson.

In this lesson you'll learn how to animate content on your page using the Animation panel and save it as a Flash file or as an app for a tablet device. Once the animations are created, you can use the Timing panel to control the order they play in.

As you'll see in this lesson, objects can be animated to a motion path, allowing you to create the route that an object will travel on when it is animated. This is useful for objects that you'd like to have travel in specific patterns or locations on the page.

In this lesson you'll learn how to use object states to create a self-contained slideshow on one page in a SWF file and to allow the user to go to the next or previous image using buttons.

In this lesson you'll learn how to check all the elements of a document to be sure that they are print- or "press"-ready, including the image resolution, the color space, missing or modified images, overflow text, and much more. You'll also learn to "package" all the assets used to assemble the file.

Sometimes you will encounter a placed image that doesn't have the colors defined properly for press. As you'll see in this lesson, InDesign's Separations Preview panel allows you to check the color definitions for all content in your document. If you spot an issue, you can use the Ink Manager panel to identify the proper colors for the job.

This lesson will explore InDesign's Print dialog box. You'll learn how to choose your output device, select pages or spreads, pick the proper paper size, scale and tile pages, add printer's marks, convert to CMYK, and much more.

Color settings control the display and output of color in your documents. In this lesson you'll learn about the various options and which settings you should use for each type of output.

At some point you'll want to create a PDF of almost every InDesign document, whether as the final product or as a proof. In this lesson we'll explore the PDF options in InDesign.