Adobe InDesign for Beginners
Posted on: Jan 20, 2024Lessons
- Getting Started With InDesign
- Creating a New InDesign Document
- Creating and Using Color
- Basic Navigation of the InDesign Software
- Adding and Manipulating Text
- How to Use Adobe Fonts
- Finding and Using Free and Paid Images
- What Is Image Resolution?
- Single Pages vs. Spreads
- Columns and Linking Text Boxes
- How to Create Paragraph Styles
- InDesign Tips & Tricks
- Exporting Your Documents
Looking to learn how to use Adobe InDesign? This beginner-friendly course will teach you all of the basics you need. This course is aimed at users completely new to InDesign, so no experience is necessary.
What You’ll Learn
- What to use InDesign for
- How to create InDesign documents
- How to work with InDesign pages and spreads
- How to import and work with images in InDesign
- How to work with text in InDesign
Introduction
1. Welcome to the Course
Welcome to the Adobe InDesign course! Ready to get started? Want to learn what to use InDesign for? We’ll start right at the beginning and move together through the software, step by step.
Together, we’ll create a full-page brochure. This includes covering all of the tools to get there and everything you need to know to get it ready for print.
“In this course, I’m going to show you everything you need to know about getting started with Adobe InDesign.”
2. Getting Started With InDesign
Before we get started, let’s get everything set up. This includes downloading resource files and ensuring your computer is set up properly. This way, your copy of InDesign will look like mine, and we’ll all be on the same page. Ready?
How to Use Adobe InDesign Pages
3. Creating a New InDesign Document
In this Adobe InDesign course lesson, we’ll start by creating our full-page brochure’s cover. We’ll start by creating a New Document in Adobe InDesign. This introduction will give you all the basics you need for creating new documents in the future, too. This includes:
- Creating a new document
- New document presets (we’ll be working at US Letter)
- New document settings
- Margins, bleed, and slug
- Units of measurement
- Viewing your document
- Saving your initial document
If some of these design terms are new to you, don’t worry! We’ll go through why things like margins and bleeds are important, with some real-world examples too.
4. Creating and Using Color
Let’s dig into colors in Adobe InDesign. We’ll begin by creating a simple, colored rectangle using the Rectangular Frame Tool. Then, we’ll explore Swatches in Adobe InDesign. This is a simple yet powerful way to apply, customize, and save colors that you can use in your work.
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The Fill Color is the color that “fills” the inside of a shape or frame.
The Stroke Color is the color “around” the shape or frame, like an outline.
Curious about things like working with specific corporate colors, or the difference between RBG and CMYK? This video lesson covers those questions too.
5. Basic Navigation of the InDesign Software
In this Adobe InDesign course video, we’ll talk about how to navigate around in InDesign. We’ll start with our work area itself. This includes things like:
- Zooming in and out
- Viewing your work
- Panning around your work
- Using shortcuts
This video lesson also takes a look at basic navigation and interaction with objects in your composition. We’ll look at rotating objects, altering the height and width of content in your composition, and arranging elements.
Ready to take a more finalized, print-like view of your work? Let’s walk through how to easily preview your work without guides and margins visible. Tune into this video lesson, and let’s get started.
How to Use Text and Fonts in Adobe InDesign
6. Adding and Manipulating Text
It’s time to start adding text to our work! In this video, we’ll begin by drawing a simple text box using the Type Tool, and then we’ll dig into customizing our text.
These text basics will have you ready to use type in all of your InDesign projects:
- Changing and adjusting the font
- Changing the font color
- Adjusting text boxes
- Duplicating text
7. How to Use Adobe Fonts
Next, let’s talk about how to add fonts to InDesign.
Adobe Fonts (formerly Adobe Typekit) offers us a huge collection of fonts we can use in our design work—even for commercial use! We can easily access them right from Adobe InDesign. If you want to know how to add fonts to InDesign, this is the lesson for you.
Walk through accessing and using Adobe Fonts in this video lesson. We’ll also take a look at a few extra polishing tips to help take your text to the next level.
We’ll also take a look at some free image resources in this video! Make sure to tune in to add these resources to your design toolkit.
But how do we use these images? Let’s look at importing and placing images into our InDesign document together, in this part of our video lesson.
9. What Is Image Resolution?
Understanding resolution is an essential part of working with images, especially in professional design work. In this video lesson, we’ll dig into all things image resolution in Adobe InDesign, including:
- Understanding what image resolution is
- Why image resolution matters in your design work
- How to figure out an image’s resolution in InDesign
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But what about vector imagery? Vector images are resolution-independent, unlike raster images.
How to Work With Long Text in Adobe InDesign
10. Single Pages vs. Spreads
Up to this point, we’ve been working on a single page. However, we can also create two-page spreads—two pages displayed next to each other.
A single page in Adobe InDesign
A two-page spread in Adobe InDesign
Adobe InDesign makes it easy to create both single pages and two-page spreads. We don’t necessarily need to make a new document to do so, either. Ready to create some two-page spreads of your own? Jump into this lesson to get started.
11. Columns and Linking Text Boxes
You may often work with large amounts of text in your InDesign document. Thankfully, InDesign makes this easy.
Make sure you’re on page two, in our new two-page spread, before you begin this lesson.
- Linking two text boxes
- Creating new text boxes for overflow text
- How to easily create text columns
12. How to Create Paragraph Styles
Paragraph Styles are a simple yet powerful way to create a look and feel for part of your text—and use them again in your document. This is way more convenient than styling your text independently, over and over again. In this video, let’s create, apply, and customize our own Paragraph Styles.
13. InDesign Tips & Tricks
Adobe InDesign is a very robust program, with lots to see and utilize. Let’s wrap things up with a look at some useful tips and tricks when working in InDesign, such as:
- Importing images into an existing frame via drag and drop
- Frame fitting for image resizing
- The Line Tool
- Copying, pasting, and using content from Adobe Illustrator in Adobe InDesign
- Importing text
It can also be really helpful to take a look at someone’s workflow—get a feel for what it’s like to polish and finish a design. You can follow along as we finish up our full-page brochure design together.
How to Export in Adobe InDesign
14. Exporting Your Documents
In this lesson, we’ll begin exporting your work in Adobe InDesign. We’ll export as two file types: JPG and PDF.
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You can export your work via File > Export, even if you’re looking for file types other than JPG and PDF.
We’ll also take a look at export settings for your consideration. Different projects will likely have different needs, so it’s good to know where those settings are and what they do. Let’s walk through this process together.
How to Share Files in Adobe InDesign
15. Sharing Your Files With Others
What if you need to share your InDesign file with someone else? This is a little more complicated than sending something like a JPG or a PDF. This is the lesson for you if you’ve ever wondered how to package an InDesign file.
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Assignment 1: Upload the above file/files to dropbox. Pdf and indd formats. Sections 3-15.
Your InDesign INDD file is a working file—meaning that you can use this file to edit your design. This is different from something like a JPG of your work, which you could no longer edit the same way.
Thankfully, it’s easy to package your work in a sharable way. Go to File > Save to save your work, and then File > Package to get started. This will easily package all of your content for you. It makes figuring out how to package an InDesign file a snap.
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Your InDesign document may have a number of dependent Links. This means, for example, that if you share your InDesign document but not the images used in it, it won’t display properly. This is why properly packaging your work is important.
Adobe InDesign for Beginners: Envato Tuts+. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://design.tutsplus.com/adobe-indesign-for-beginners–ytc-8c