Indesign introduction

Overview
This course is designed to familiarise users with the page layout and design features of InDesign. At the end of the course delegates will feel confident to produce single and multi-page documents.

Prerequisites
Good Mac or PC skills

Course Content The Interface

• Using tools, panels and contextual menus
• Changing view sizes and navigating through a document

Creating documents

• Creating a new document
• Bleeds and Slugs
• Opening and saving documents and templates
• Using guides, rules and grids
• Opening and creating master pages
• Understanding Document Presets and Preferences

Creating objects

• Drawing shapes and lines
• Selecting moving and duplicating objects
• The Selection and Direct selection tools
• Info panel
• Shape to Shape conversion
• Changing the size, proportions or orientation of an object
• Anchored Objects

Working with text

• How text frames work
• Importing text
• Text frame options
• Threading text frames
• Character and Paragraph formatting
• Basic hyphenation and justification
• Using the eyedropper tool
• Creating and applying paragraph and character styles

Tables

• Working with indents and tabs
• Creating, editing and formatting tables
• Adding images to tables

Graphics

• Understanding graphic formats
• Placing vector and bitmapped graphics
• Fitting graphics in frames
• Placing PDF files
• Managing links
• Wrapping text around graphics

Colour

• Understanding spot and process colour
• The swatches panel using swatch libraries
• Creating tints and gradients
• Applying colour to fills and stokes
• Using the gradient tools on fills, strokes and text
• Copying attributes between objects
• Moving colours between documents.
• Sampling colours from imported graphics

Working with objects

• Using layers
• Stacking objects
• Duplicating objects
• Aligning and distributing objects

Pages

• Moving and re-ordering Pages

Paths

• Drawing with the pen tool
• Adjusting points and segments
• Placing text on paths
• Creating paths from text outlines

Master pages

• Creating masters and based on masters
• Adding automatic page numbering and other
• Working with master page objects

Automating text

• Find/Change
• Defining Styles
• Headers and Footers

Libraries

• Creating, indexing and using InDesign libraries

Transparency

• Selecting blending modes
• Adding drop shadows and feathering edges
• Flattener Preview panel

Outputting documents

• Setting up documents for printing
• Printing options and styles
• Exporting PDFs
• Snippets

File Management with Adobe Bridge

• Using Adobe Bridge in conjunction with InDesign