#fifteenthpost

he first thing that we did today was create a new InDesign Project on an A4 document. Once in there we needed some random text to use to practice stylisation on. To do this, we first created a text box the size of the margins, and then within that text box, we could go to Type > Fill With Placeholder Text. This filled up the entire text box with a bunch of latin gibberish.

After that we went to Window > Styles > Paragraph Styles, to open the Paragraph Styles Window, where we would be able to add, edit and change paragraph styles within our project.

Once we had done that, Toby showed us about Carriage Returns and how InDesign recognizes paragraphs. Each time you use a Return, it classes the text beforehand as a paragraph.

Knowing this, we went through the text sectioning different pieces of text into big paragraphs and what would be headers.

We first edited the Paragraph Styles for Body Text. To do so we highlighted the designated paragraph, changed the Font to Verdana Regular, the Font Size to 10pt and the Leading to 14pt. Once these changes were made we went into the Paragraph Styles window and clicked the [+] button down at the bottom to create a new style with the current settings.

Toby Showed us that if you double click on the Paragraph Style in its window, you can open up more settings to play around.

Here you can see the settings we used before creating the Paragraph Style saved as a preset.

Once we were happy with our paragraph style we went through the document and formatted all the rest of the text using this Paragraph Style. This was very simple as we could just select all the text and then select the Body Text Preset in the Paragraph Styles.

Before Moving on, we quickly went back into the Paragraph Style Settings and changed the indentation and spacing for the Body Text preset. We added 3mm before and after each paragraph.

After that we needed to create a new paragraph style for the Headings. So we decided to create it in the Styles window first, and edit the settings within that preset.

Below you can see the changes we made to the formatting, changing the font to Verdana Bold and upping the Size to 14pt. 

We then went around selecting each of the areas that needed to be formatted as headers. As you can see below, Toby showed us that you don’t necessarily have to select all the text to change the style, you can just click in the line of the paragraph.

Next we learnt about the little brother to Paragraph Styles, Character Styles. As I mentioned before, selecting even the smallest piece of text within a paragraph and attempting to solely format that with paragraph styles will always format the entire paragraph too. This is where Character Styles come in. Using them we can make adjustments to as little text as we need. This comes in handy when trying to adjust singular words to italic, bold or underline, as well as changing colour, sizing and other variables as well.

Below you can see me creating a new character style where the text becomes italic.

After that Toby showed us that if you make changes to a bit of text that has already been styled by a Character Style, you can choose to redefine all instances of that style to be consistent.

Next we learnt about formatting text boxes, only slightly though as all we did was learn how to split the text box into multiple columns. See below.

After that we inserted a section of text that would be bullet points, then created a matching Paragraph Style for it.

In the Paragraph Style settings there is a Bullets and Numbering Menu where you can change whether or not text is a list. This menu has features such as character style, indent and alignment. To make ours look good Toby showed us that when you make a left indent, you should also make a First Line Indent, but have the value the negative of the Left Indent. This provided a good look for the bullet points.

The last thing to learn today was images and links. Firstly we opened up the frog image in photoshop, then by going File > Place in illustrator we could add in our image.

Any changes we made in photoshop to the image would be reflected in the image in Illustrator. This is the handy way the image sharing works with Adobe products. Usually if you embed an image in a project, it creates a new save for that image, and any changes you make to it will not be updated. However with the way that Adobe does it, multiple files with the same instance of the image will all share the same image file and any updates will be consistent over all projects. Below we had a look at the Links Window.

After that Toby showed us how the different types of scaling works in InDesign, if you try to scale an image normally it will scale the ‘frame’ around the image, which is essentially like cropping. If you want to scale both the image and the frame together, you have to hold Shift + Alt/Cmd when dragging the handles.

Here we changed the text wrap settings so that the Image would fit nicely in with the text in the text box, instead of simply overlaying itself and obstructing the text. We played around with values in here until we got what we wanted.

The same can be done with circles and other shapes. If we make a copy of our image using Ctrl + C, Cut it out of its Frame with Ctrl + X and then paste it like below into a shape, it will use that shape as a frame.

We also messed around with the Wrap around Shape Setting in the Text Wrap Editor. This would allow the text to conform to the edges of complex shapes. 

Once again we edited this to look nice.

I quite enjoyed today’s exercise, Toby mentioned at the start all the disciplines InDesign is handy in, I can see how it would be a very effective tool for Marketing in Video Games, as well as making Pitch Presentations for Publishers and Clients. I think I’m getting the hang of it quite well.

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InDesign Keyboard Shortcuts Learnt :

T = Text Tool

V = Selection Tool

[ Space ] = Pan ( when using selection tool )

Z + Left Mouse Click + Scroll Mouse Right/Left = Zoom

W = Toggle Preview Mode

Shift + [ Return ] = Soft Return ( in text )

[ Shift ] + Drag Handles = Scale Frame

⌘ + [ Shift ] + Drag Handles = Scale Image and Frame

[ Alt ] + Drag Corner = Scale Frame from Center

[ Alt ] + ⌘ + Drag Corner = Scale Image and Frame from Center

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Current Software Skill Rating :

Windows : 10

MacOS : 9

Photoshop : 9

Illustrator : 9