Adobe InDesign Introduction Exercise 1

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Course and Document Description Adobe InDesign Introduction Exercise 1 We will use InDesign to create a flyer. We will learn the following: -Navigating the InDesign interface -Placing images -Inserting and modifying text This workshop is very much a hands-on experience. A poll of user experience is taken before class begins, and materials covered may change based on this information. In trying to accommodate the needs of the class, each class will be slightly different. The core, however, is contained in this document. This handout is a companion to the material covered in the full workshop. We will cover features and nuances of the application in class that are not covered in this document. InDesign is not an intuitive application. Learning to use it can be a frustrating experience. Knowing this, it is very important to play so we can get comfortable. This workshop series emphasizes practice, play, and exploration to strengthen your InDesign skills. We hope you enjoy the workshop and the exercise in this document. Have fun, and don’t forget to play!

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Table of Contents COURSE AND DOCUMENT DESCRIPTION ........................................................................................................ 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................................................................ 2 THE INTERFACE ...................................................................................................................................................... 3 THE SETUP. ................................................................................................................................................................ 5 LET’S BEGIN! ............................................................................................................................................................ 9 USING THE FRAME TOOL ........................................................................................................................................... 9 Here we go! .......................................................................................................................................................... 9 Using the Selection Tool. ................................................................................................................................... 12 A note on Layers ................................................................................................................................................ 12 Rename Layer 1 ................................................................................................................................................. 14 CONTENT ................................................................................................................................................................. 15 STEP 1...................................................................................................................................................................... 15 STEP 2...................................................................................................................................................................... 16 STEP 3...................................................................................................................................................................... 17 STEP 4...................................................................................................................................................................... 18 STEP 5...................................................................................................................................................................... 19 STEP 6...................................................................................................................................................................... 20 STEP 7...................................................................................................................................................................... 20 STEP 8...................................................................................................................................................................... 21 STEP 9...................................................................................................................................................................... 21 STEP 10.................................................................................................................................................................... 22 FINAL DOCUMENT ................................................................................................................................................ 23

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The Interface When you open InDesign for the first time, you should see this:

Those of you using other versions of InDesign will notice some slight visual differences. Don’t worry! Everything is in the same general area. You shouldn’t have any difficulty following this document. Take a moment to scan the screen. Notice the layout. Each section has a specific purpose, and (as we’ll see later) InDesign provides you multiple ways to access information, apply changes, and accomplish tasks.

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InDesign is divided in to 5 main areas; Menu Bar, Contextual Menu Bar, Tools Palette, Icon Palettes, and the document window (not shown).

If you haven’t explored InDesign before, don’t worry! We will only use a fraction of the tools and adjustments available to you. If you’ve experimented with InDesign, focusing on the tools and techniques in this workshop will help you experiment more effectively on your own.

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The Setup. We’re going to create a new document from scratch. The files we need to do this exercise are provided online as a compressed file for download, or installed on the computers in our workshop. First things first! Let’s create our new document by going to Create New> Document in our Start Window. In the New Document Window, make sure your settings match these, then click OK:

Your screen should look something like this:

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Now, to make sure we all have the same tools available for this exercise, we need to click on the pull down menu in the upper right of the Menu Bar: This is where you choose a Workspace. A Workspace is a defined set of Palettes in defined locations on the screen. You can create your own, if you feel adventurous (after class). We’ll use the Essentials Workspace. If you have this selected by default, please click on Reset Essentials. Adobe applications remember where the last user put things, and we want to start with an unmodified default.

Next, we need to adjust InDesign’s Preferences. Go to Menu Bar> Edit> Preferences and click on General:

(Big menu, isn’t it?)

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You can control everything from Autocorrect (not available in all versions) to File Handling from this window. Take a look around, just don’t alter anything yet! What we want to change is under Units & Measurements. Switch your Ruler Units to Inches instead of Picas and click OK:

So, what is a pica? A pica is a typographic unit of measure corresponding to 1/72nd of its respective foot, and therefore to 1/6th of an inch. The pica contains 12 point units of measure. The pica originated around 1785, when Françoise "L'éclat" Ambrose Didot (1730–1804) refined the typographic measures system created by Pierre Simon Fournier le Jeune (1712–1768). (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pica_(typography))

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InDesign tries to save your computer from overworking itself. One of the ways it does this is by defaulting to a less-than-optimal resolution for displaying your projects. You can change this, to get a better view of your final product Go to Menu Bar> View> Display Performance to see your options:

Your settings should match the image above. Leave them. We’ll play with them later.

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Let’s Begin! We’re going to create a simple ad using some graphics and text. The goal is to give you a taste of how InDesign handles content and put you on the track to discover more about this incredibly powerful application. We have 3 important tools to work with today. They’ll be the foundation for everything we do. We’ll spend time with the Frame, Selection, and Type Tools.

Using the Frame Tool. This is the Frame Tool:

F is the keyboard shortcut for the Selection Tool. Frames! How exciting! Seriously! It is! Just about everything we’ll do begins with a Frame. In InDesign we deal with Objects. Frames are definable containers for Objects. These can be text, graphics, images; anything you put on to your document.

Here we go! We’re going to use this tool to create three Frames on our document. These will hold the images and graphics for this project. Make sure the Rectangular Frame Tool is selected, and follow the next two pages of this document for instructions:

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Using the Selection Tool. This is the Selection Tool:

V is the keyboard shortcut for the Selection Tool. There is an important relationship to remember; frames and the content within them can be moved together or independently of each other. What does this mean? It means whatever you place inside a frame (and the frame itself) can be manipulated in an infinite number of ways. Frames are like windows in a wall. The wall is your document. You decide what goes in each window, but, just like in real life, there can be more outside the window than what you can see within its boundary. This will be demonstrated in class. You can move, resize, and alter the content of a frame. You can move, resize, and alter the frame, too. You can do these things separately or together. It sounds confusing, but, once you play with it in the coming pages, it will all make sense. We use the Selection Tool to select objects. Objects are the pieces that make up our document. To move the two smaller frames in to position at the top and bottom of the page, click once on them to select, then click and drag them roughly where they should be. You may then use the arrow keys to finesse the frames in to position. Since InDesign works with objects, the selection tool is very powerful. Those of you used to how Photoshop deals with layers and content will likely find the way we select objects in InDesign liberating. Fireworks and Illustrator work similarly. We’ll expand on this during class.

A note on Layers In InDesign, if frames are windows, and your document is a wall, then layers are additional walls. When you open InDesign, you begin with one layer. It’s the document where you place all your content. It’s where we drew our three frames. It’s the starting point for all the magic. You can add multiple layers to your document, stacking them one on top of the otherlike a layer cake. When you create a new layer, it’s transparent. You can see right through it to the layer underneath. It’s not until you add content to your new wall that it starts to obscure what’s underneath. We’ll demonstrate this in class. Let’s make sure we’ve got the access to our Layers Palette. 12

Go to Menu Bar> Window and make sure Layers has a check next to it. If it doesn’t, click on it:

If you ever lose a palette, or want to show something that’s hidden, the Window Menu is the place to go. It shows you what is visible (check marks) and what you can reveal.

Now that we have the Layers Palette revealed, let’s expand our Palettes! There’s a whole other world of fun hidden from view, and we’re going to open it up. In the upper right, under the little lightning bolt, under the resize window buttons, there are two tiny triangles. This is the minimize and maximize control for our palettes. Click on it!

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Rename Layer 1 Now that we can see our Layers Palette, let’s rename Layer 1 something descriptive. We’ll place images and graphics in the three frames we drew on this layer, so let’s name the layer Images. Double-click on the Layer 1 in the Layers Palette. You’ll see the Layer Options window. Rename the layer Images:

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Adding Content We’re creating a basic ad explaining what the official WVU seal says. There are four files we’ll use: a WVU graphic, a graphic of the Woodburn clock tower, the official seal, and a text explanation taken from the WVU Alumni web site. These steps are straightforward, but will be expanded upon during class.

Step 1

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Step 2

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Step 3 Resizing the content within a frame is easy! Select the frame with the WVU logo in it. Then, right click on it:

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Step 4 Now, hold down the Shift key and drag one of the corners of the WVU logo frame to resize. Try and get it close to the example below:

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Step 5 We have one more graphic to insert:

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Step 6 We need to add a new layer to put our text on. This keeps the different kinds of content in our document on separate levels. It’s a kind of good housekeeping. Click on the Add New Layer button in the bottom right corner of the Layers Palette:

Name the layer Text:

Step 7 We need to create a new frame to hold our text. With the Rectangular Frame Tool, create a frame about the same size as in the example below:

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Step 8 We’re used to placing images and graphics by now, so this will be easy. We need to place the following file in this new frame: TextFromAlumni.txt

The text should show up as black (impossible to see clearly), and there’s too much text to have in our footer graphic. We need to change this.

Step 9 If we double-click in the frame with our imported text, we’ll activate the Text Tool: We can then press Ctrl + A to Select All of the text. Once our text is selected, we need to change the color from black to white. For this, we need to double-click on the Fill button in the Color Palette:

This brings up the Color Picker. We can change the font color here. In the RGB text boxes, replace the numbers with 255. Don’t worry if the color of your RGB Color Space View is different. Click OK.

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Step 10 Now that our font is white, we can trim the fat by deleting unwanted text. Erase enough text, and adjust the size of your frame, so your version matches this:

The body text is 8pt font. The signature is 10pt font. Font choice is your own, but sans serif fonts are easiest to read, especially when text is small.

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Final document

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