Adobe InDesign Essentials: $795
Course Description
This introductory class is instructor led with students learning how to use Adobe InDesign to its full potential by completing exercises producing stationery, brochures, magazine, newsletter layouts and forms. Best practices relating to design and typography, as well as shortcuts, are emphasised.
What you will learn
During the 2 day InDesign course, the following topics are covered:
- — InDesign's Interface & Preferences
- — Document Setup & Navigation
- — Document Shortcuts
- — Working with Text including Styles
- — Working with Objects, including images
- — Working with Colour for digital and offset printing
- — Creating Master Pages
- — Designing Forms
- — Creating Tables
- — Importing Graphics
- — Automation & Troubleshooting
- — Preparing for Print & Exporting PDFs
Day 1
Get up to speed quickly with InDesign’s interface, investigating the many panels used to format and arrange your artwork e.g. Control, Info, Links, Layers, Align, Pages, Stroke, Swatches, Text Wrap, Tabs and Character and Paragraph Styles. Automation is also a focus, with key ways to set up and edit your documents for global changes and changing both document and application preferences.
Navigating your page(s) effectively and learning to use the appropriate tools is part of the first session. Other techniques learnt on day one include the following: creating, reshaping and positioning frames. Entering, editing and formatting text, importing images, resizing and manipulating. As part of the brochure exercise, a form is completed using tabs and tab leaders.
Design considerations
The course also explains terminology and methods relating to good design habits relevant to page layout and typesetting.
Areas such as the importance of leading, tracking, kerning, correct typesetting (ie en, em dashes) and baseline shift controls, proportional spacing relating to margin and columns, line weights and using gradients and reversals, etc, are covered.
Day Two
Day two of the InDesign course, students produce a multiple page document which demonstrates the features that replace repetitive tasks, and are a must for effective editing, such as Master Pages, Auto Page Numbering, Character and Paragraph Styles, Find/ Change, Spell checking, Paragraph Rules, Hyphenation, Defining and applying colours and Text Frame options, etc.
The last session looks at preparing your document to send to your printer using the Preflight and Package commands, managing your fonts and linked images and exporting your document to various types of PDFs.
Course Outline
Using Help
- Online Adobe InDesign Help
The Interface
- Using panels
- Customising and saving workspaces
- Application bar
- Smart Guides
- Smart Cursor
- Tools overview
- Setting application & document preferences
- Tabbed windows / multiple documents
- Screen modes
- Zooming, panning and document navigation
- Viewing defaults / fit in window / 100%
- Display performance
- Contextual menus
- Using the Status bar
- Keyboard shortcuts and assigning shortcuts
Documents
- Creating and setting up documents
- Facing pages
- Bleed & Slug
- Saving document presets
- Inserting and deleting pages
- Pages panel
- Ruler guides, margin and column guides
- Gutter
- Reverting, undo and redo
- Saving and opening documents
- Rotating page spreads
Selections
- Shift selection, Marqueeing, Select all
- Group and ungroup
- Shift to constrain horizontally and vertically
- Alt/Opt for duplicating objects
- Paste in place
- Arrow keys to nudge
- Eye dropper tool to sample
Frames and objects
- Creating frames Rectangle / Ellipse / Polygon
- Rectangle Frame tool vs Rectangle tool
- Creating and customing starbursts
- Unassigned frames / Text frames
- Strokes and fills
- Shift to constrain
- Alt/Opt to create from centre out
- Moving & resizing objects
- Locking and unlocking objects
- Rotating objects
- Scaling & Transforming objects
- Selecting reference point on control panel
- Positioning items using X & Y
- Arrangement Order / Send to back or front
- Step and Repeat
- Aligning objects / using Smart Guides
- Distributing objects / using Smart Guides
- Creating Lines
- Adding arrow heads
Working with Text
- Frames and text frames
- Entering text
- Selection processes word / line / paragraph
- Editing and formatting text
- Kerning and Tracking
- Leading
- Character Formating - font, size, bold, italic, superscript, subscript etc
- Paragraph Formatting - alignment, space before/ after,
- indents, etc - Vertical Text
- Hyphenation
- Fonts - serif & sans serif
- Ascenders, descenders and X height of types
- Special characters - en & em dashes, non breaking spaces
- Using the Glyphs panel
- Check boxes
- Importing text
- Dynamic Spelling
- Drag and drop text editing
- Story Editor
Working with Text (continued)
- Paragraph styles
- Character styles
- Basing a style on an existing style
- Redefining a style
- Clearing local formatting overrides (+)
- Assigning keyboard shortcuts for styles
- Creating Bulleted & Numbered Lists
- Custom Bullets
- Find / Change panel
- Spell Check
- Hanging Indents - Bulleted or Numbered Lists
- Displaying hidden characters
- Working with tabs and tab leaders
- Linking text frames
- Text frame options
- Working with text flow - manual / auto / semi-auto
- Text wrapping around images and objects
- Paragraph Rules
Master Pages
- Setting up master pages
- Applying master pages
- Releasing master page elements in document
- Duplicating master pages
- Automatic page numbering
Tables
- Creating a table
- Converting Text to Table
- Formatting Rows, Columns & Cells
- Adding a border to a table
- Header and Footer Rows
- Merging and unmerging cells
- Adding diagonal lines to a cell
- Inserting Graphics into tables
- Table styles
- Selecting cells, rows, columns and entire table
- Context menu to edit table
Working with Colour
- Swatches Panel
- Spot colour
- Process colour CMYK
- Colour modes
- Adding colour swatches to swatches panel
- Using eyedropper to sample colour
- Strokes and Fills
- Applying a tint and creating tint swatches
- Gradient swatches
- Transparency
- Effects
Working with Images
- Placing Images
- Placing multiple images
- Using Adobe Bridge to import images
- Image file formats - EPS, tifs & native image files
- Links panel
- Relinking & embedding graphics
- Info panel
- RGB & CMYK
- Modifying placed images
- Fitting and resizing images proportionally
- Display performance
Exporting and Printing
- Printing a document and print options
- Print Presets
- Preflight & Packaging
- Exporting to PDF and PDF options
| MELBOURNE | January | February | March | April | May | June |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| InDesign Lite | 19 30 |
20 | 13 | 16 | 8 30 |
21 |
| InDesign Essentials | 19 & 20 30 & 31 |
20 & 21 | 15 & 16 | 16 & 17 | 8 & 9 30 & 31 |
21 & 22 |
| InDesign Advanced: |
— | 22 & 23 | 29 & 30 | — | 10 & 11 | 25 & 26 |
| InDesign Advanced Long Documents |
— | 22 | 29 | — | 10 | 25 |
| eBooks: Creating ePubs | — | 8 & 9 | — | 4 & 5 | 28 & 29 | — |
| eMagazines: InDesign to iPad | 19 & 20 | — | 5 & 6 | — | 1 & 2 | 28 & 29 |
| BRISBANE | January | February | March | April | May | June |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| InDesign Lite | — | 13 | 6 | — | 1 | 6 25 |
| InDesign Essentials | 30 & 31 |
13 & 14 | 6 & 7 | 2 & 3 | 1 & 2 | 6 & 7 25 & 26 |
| InDesign Advanced | — | — | 19 & 20 | — | — | 27 & 28 |
| InDesign Long Documents | — | — | 19 | — | — | 27 |
| InDesign Interactivity & Animation | — | — | 12 | — | — | 29 |
| eMagazines: InDesign to iPad | — | — | 13 & 14 | — | — | 4 & 5 July |
| eBooks: Creating ePubs | Currently not available as a public course in Brisbane. Private training can be organised onsite. | |||||
