InDesign Workshop

InDesign Workshop


Lesson One

Indesign is largely used in the printing industry. It has a very advanced settings in the printing settings. Also, if you was to create multiple pages in one document InDesign would be the best software to use as you can work on multiple pages at one time.

There are many simularities between illustrator & photoshop with InDesign.

Only ever need to use new document this point in time as the book option is when you are making 100 of pages.

Page Size: There is a drop down menu with a number of presets. Below drop down menu there is also the option to type in width & height of the page. If you are working in commercial print them you can't choose A4 and then create a business card within that area.

More Options: Click this to see extra options. These are to do with things that appear on your page & will assist you. 

Column: If it will divide your page into the number of columns you want and then will do that to every page in your document.

Gutter: Space between the columns, allows you to specific distance between your columns.

Margins: Put guides on Left. Right, Top & Bottom of the page. Useful if setting text.

Bleed & Slug: These options where hidden but when comes to print is probably the most important. The bleed option this is to do with cropping & trimming of the page. It should bleed of the page by 3mm so that when trimming you can allow for mistakes and wont get a white trimming around your print. You need to then print them with the trim marks so you know the size of the A5.

The slug is also the area outside of your page, its shows registration marks, and then are lost when trimmed. You would use this if you was going to fold the page and therefore can line it up on the screen before printing.

Facing Pages: Whether the finished format is going to be a book type format.

Number of Pages: This is how many pages you want in your document and this also takes into consideration double sided print.

Black Outline: That is your page, where it would be trimmed when printing.

Blue Outline: That is what you need to be working inside when documenting our work.

Red Outline: Is this the bleed of the page so anything hat needs to go of the page should go up to this line.

You can change your margin & columns when set the document up.

Pages palette allows you to overview of your whole document. This is a palette so when ever your using one of these palettes you can chose more options by clicking on the button above and you can add extra pages and many more options.

This is what it will look like with more pages you can jump to any page by just double clicking on them. You can remove any pages by selecting them and click delete.

We had to set up a document with 3mm bleed with 4 pages and facing pages also. This is the outcome. As you can see the first and last pages are single pages and then the second & third is double spread. This would be a booklet layout. 

You can create a guide on the page by having the ruler visible and then drag & drop where you want them which can help you position up your page.

OR

You can use the create guides which will give you more of a accurate measurement. You make these either fit within the margins or fit within the page. Which will look like this below, it is 5 rows with 3 columns with a 5mm Gutter and they are within the margin.

This is the type tool you drag & drop on the sheet. You then will see the text frame and the flashing cursor.

You can also place with placeholder text so it will allow us to see what it will look like without filling it with text.

You can change many of the characteristics of the text. The font used, size, leading, kerning, cap height etc...

When working with frames you can either work with the context of the frame or the frame itself. If you choose the selection tool then the frame is selected but the text is not selected and you have handles so you can work with the container itself. I have moved the shape of the column of text.

You can have any number of text frames on one page. They can contain also a single character or a single word.

When i move the text box around the page then a guide will appear to tell me that this is in the middle of the page.

You can also line boxes up with each other as a green guide come up to show you they are now in line.

You can also place text so you wouldn't have to type it all up if a client had given you a file with the information they wanted you to put in.

This red cursor on the bottom right hand corner means there is an overflow of writing within that text box. You will make it larger till the red cursor vanishes.

You click the red cursor to flow over the text in the next box. Here it shows you above the cursor once you have clicked the red cursor you have to click in place you want the text to flow.

When inserting images from photoshop you have to:

Make sure it is the actual size, CMYK or greyscale, 300 DPI, save a tif. or psd. NOT jpeg.

When inserting images from illustrator you have to:

Make sure the colours your working with that are in the CMYK mode, but when saving you can save it as a standard illustrator file ai.

Same as the text placement we now have the image attached to the cursor so you ahve to click where you want it to be placed.

The brown outline is the picture only and the blue outline is the frame only.

You should not alter the image when you have placed it from photoshop images due to then you will be interrupting with the 300 dpi.

ALSO

You can place an image into a frame by selecting the tool with a square and a cross through it.

This is the vector from illustrator placed and as you can see its smaller than the frame but i can resize this as its an ai size and made up from vectors.

This is called the content grabber, which is the tool that allows you to move the contents of the frame.

Lesson Two

The pictures are very pixelated but that is what we expect to see when we are working in inDesign as its only to place images around on the page and therefore don't need a high resolution picture. 

This is the links palette it tells us what images we have in the file and the red symbols means that InDesign can not find a file to join this and cant find the location of the image. The PB tells us what page the image is on. So when we print this we will get the full quality image as it will be from the original file and that's why they need to be located and known to the file.

The image will still be there and you can see it but the same red symbol will be placed on the top corner so you know that the file is missing. This means that the low resolution image is in the file but if printing then you need to have the original files in the same folder.

You can relink them by double clicking on the icon and showing them the place of the file again.


If you just save the file with just the one file then you will lose all the quality and then when printing the images will still be low resolution so when you have placed images in InDesign then you will have to save the file within the folder where the images came from.

InDesign works like this due to the main purpose of InDesign is to arrange things on a page and therefore keeping the file size very low and making it more manageable.

 You can change this if your file size is not going to be big and only a few pages and you want your images to be full quality.

If you choose fast display your picture just doesn't come up and it becomes a grey box like above this is for very slow computers and large documents.

You can resize the image by double clicking on the cursor in the middle and then your brown edge will appear which means that you can resize the actual image then you need to select the blue edge separately at the original size of the image then you can smallen that down to the same size.

This is all the information of the image. So you can that you have scaled the image and this is not the way to resize in this software we should really resize them with photoshop so....

You right click and go to edit with to see if photoshop is the default and then click edit original. Or you can shortcut it and hold the alt key and double click on the image.

So then you go to image size and change the width and height to percent and then change to the exact same size to the size you have created on the InDesign file. which is told to us through the information bar on link.

It has automatically updated it and therefore you can see my squiggle for me to make this obvious to us. And also the scale should now be 100% on the links palette info

Use the polygon lasso tool and make a selection of the area you want to keep then inverse the selection and press delete.

Frames

If you press W with nothing selected and you can see how it will print some everything will be removed outside of the page and also the guides etc...

If when you are on preview (W) you can then go to the tool bar on the left and select different options to show and the one that may be handy is the bleed as then it will show you what the bleed would print.

This is the text wrap column and you can see here you can wrap text around a picture and you can change the edge size by enlarging the mm around the picture so you can have a gap before the writing starts.

 This is using alpha channel you have to have a psd. file with transparency and then you have to have the option like above and this wraps within the actual image. This doesn't have to be an image box frame it can be a text box or even an empty box.

You can create this using the pen tool and then can input graphic which is picture and text which is text and unassigned which means it is just a shape.

I have chosen type on the content for my pen tool shape and placed with placeholder text to show you how it works.

You can also change shape after you have created it using the direct selection tool and then you just have to refill the placeholder text.
InDesign has all the vector tools that the other adobe software has.

You can copy & paste illustrator artwork form illustrator and paste it into InDesign and therefore have all the selection points you have in illustrator which you would get if you placed the image into InDesign.

This is the swatches palette this is so you can save a colour and have all your work in the same tone etc...

You have to have which ever stroke or fill you need at the top like photoshop and the click the colour i want with the object i want changing selected and then the object will change colour and then you can also change the fill on the same shape.

You can change the text colour and also the text box colour as the default is transparent.

 This is how you make a new colour swatch, click on the menu icon on the top of the swatches palette, and you can then save that and then you just click on one of the swatches like you do with the preset ones. Make sure it is in CMYK mode nd then mix using the bars.

Print

This is very similar to Illustrator option. 

Saving file as a PDF

To make a PDF you have to choose one of these options on File > Adobe PDF Presets

High Quality- This is the highest for commercial printing.

Smallest file size 2001- is for email and look good on screen not printing.

Middle size file 2002- will be OK in middle its not good enough for commercial print.

The PDF contains all the images and it displays in the very best quality no matter what size on screen. It lists the pages on the file. The pixelated files will look crisp on the PDF without printing.