Details
Included:
Videos of the major class projects & all class files are yours to take home!
prerequisites
If you are completely new to professional Desktop Publishing software, or if your experience is limited to Microsoft Office products, you should be familiar with the basic concepts and vocabulary covered in our Desktop Publishing Overview. If the topics outlined for that class are familiar, you're ready for this one!
Helpful for graphic creation, but not required to learn InDesign, is the Digital Drawing Workshop (to gain experience with the Adobe Pen Tool).
If you take both of these half-day classes, we will automatically refund 1/3 of their cost! They're almost always offered on the same day!
what we cover
recommended text:
InDesign is Adobe's premiere desktop publishing design and layout application. With hands-on projects, harness InDesign's powerful tools for layout and design, use colors correctly and create consistent and amazing type. Apply art from Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop, and learn to control output to print, Acrobat PDF, and Flash. Learn InDesign through hands-on projects.
(always customized for the students in attendance):
- Best ways to create and configure documents
- create document presets
- understanding slugs, picas, and other "creatures"
- why bleed is good
- margins, guides, grids, and best design practices
- Control your workspace
- controlling the panel/palette glut
- know how and when to pick different units of measurement
- menus vs panels vs keyboard shortcuts
- customizing menus, panels, and shortcuts
- page numbering options
- Placing various graphics formats
- when to use TIFF, EPS, and Photoshop Documents
- know your options and control them
- managing links: editing placed files, deciding on color modes (RGB, CMYK) and more
- Drawing basic shapes
- a touch of Illustrator in InDesign
- efficiency tips
- Control color with swatches; learn how to synchronize color across applications
- spot vs process color
- flat color and gradient swatches
- saving swatches and "stealing" them from other documents
- Working with type and text formatting
- understand and use type features like kerning, leading, and more
- optical margins
- fonts: OpenType, True Type, Postscript
- hyphenation and justification
- working with figures: make numbers pretty
- tabs for power spacing
- Building Character and Paragraph Styles for quick global editing of typography
- understanding why to use styles
- the many ways to build styles, and when to choose each
- nesting styles for quick, complex formatting of text
- Building documents of any size
- how to control your pages and spreads
- numbering rearranging pages
- understand InDesign's page iconography
- how and when to make different page sizes with a document
- Basics of building interactive documents
- how to add animation
- adding and using buttons
- Using master pages
- master pages: templates within a publication
- page numbers, running headers, and other page gear
- mastering the relationship of master pages and the pages that use them
- Using supplied text content
- MS Word
- plain text isn't so simple sometimes
- cleaning up badly formatted text efficiently
- converting well formatted text carefully
- Building and importing basic tables
- Is it like Excel?
- making it easy next time: Table Styles
- headers, fancy fills and strokes and other matters