Adobe InDesign Tutorial - Basics Course

Overview

Hi there, my name is Dan. I am a graphic designer and Adobe Certified Instructor (ACI) for InDesign.

Together we will work through real life projects starting with a simple company flyer, then a brochure & a company newsletter. We’ll make business cards & take control of a really long annual report.

We will work with colour, picking your own and also using corporate colours. You will explore how to choose & use fonts like a professional. We will find, resize & crop images for your documents.

There are projects for you to complete, so you can practise your skills & use these for your creative portfolio.

In this course I supply exercise files so you can play along. I will also save my files as I go through each video so that you can compare yours to mine - handy if something goes wrong.

Know that I will be around to help - if you get lost you can drop a post on the video 'Questions and Answers' below each video and I'll be sure to get back to you.

I will share every design trick I have learnt in the last 15 years of designing. My goal is for you to finish this course with all the necessary skills to start making beautiful documents using InDesign.

What are the requirements?

You will need a copy of Adobe InDesign CC 2018 or above. A free trial can be downloaded from Adobe.

No previous design skills are needed.

No previous InDesign skills are needed.

What am I going to get from this course?

76 lectures 5+ hours of well structured content.

You'll learn to design a flyer, newsletter, brochure, annual report & business cards.

Learn how to create PDF files ready for printing.

You will get the finished files so you never fall behind.

Downloadable exercise files & cheat sheet.

Forum support from me and the rest of the BYOL crew.

Techniques used by professional graphic designers.

Professional workflows and shortcuts.

A wealth of other resources and websites to help your new career path.

What is the target audience?

No previous InDesign experience is necessary.

This course is for people completely new to InDesign. No previous design or publishing experienced is necessary.

This is a relaxed, well paced introduction that will enable you to produce most common publications. Only basic computing skills are necessary - If you can send emails and surf the internet then you will cope well with our course.

Course duration 6 hours 20 mins + your study.

3 Ways Learning InDesign Can Save You Money

The software offerings from Adobe have always had a somewhat fearful reputation for being far too complicated for the average person to learn for themselves. However, whilst it’s certainly true that the likes of Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator are professional tools that have not been built to be ‘user-friendly’ as such, this shouldn’t mean that these programs should be the sole reserve of professional designers.

Adobe Creative Cloud has made the pricing of Adobe software much more accessible. In the past, each program would set you back £100s, whereas now, a simple monthly fee is payable. This means that it’s simple to work Creative Cloud into your budget and access this incredibly powerful software. What’s more, if you or your staff learn to use the software, you can further slash the cost of design.

Adobe software products don’t require users to embark upon years and years of formal university training in order to be able to create images and documents to a professional standard (though that’s not to say that experience counts for nothing with these programs – for it most certainly does). But they do, however, demand a certain level of time and commitment to training that will not come entirely for free.

Adobe Software – Overcoming ‘The Fear’

Because Adobe software has not been designed to be particularly intuitive to first-time users of the various products, there prevails a certain reluctance amongst non-professionals to go to the added efforts of learning how to use them.

This is quite understandable in today’s modern world. We’ve come to expect that everything we use (especially online) should be straightforward and simple. In essence, a lot of the time we expect our hands to be held right the way through the whole creative process, with perhaps the most complicated task being to drag and drop a few pre-created graphics into place on a pre-designed template.

Adobe creative software doesn’t work like this. The products on offer will require users to learn how to create graphics and images from scratch – and this can be quite daunting to those who have never tried their hand at design in the past.

However, it should neither be overlooked nor forgotten just why Adobe software products are as complicated as they are. In fact, describing them as ‘complicated’ rather does them an injustice. It’s not that they are complicated – rather that they are just big.

InDesign, for instance, is an enormous program, incredibly powerful, and capable of realising pretty much any design that can be conceived of. And this power and these capabilities are enabled through learning how to use of the software’s extensive tool chest, which, in reality, is the only thing standing in the way between a layman’s success and failure with the product.

Learning InDesign

For print design, Adobe’s InDesign is hands down the leading software that’s available. And, despite the ‘fearful reputation’ that surrounds Adobe products, the reality is that it’s actually not all that difficult to learn.

If you are already well-versed in other Adobe products, such as Photoshop or Illustrator, then adding InDesign to your CV will quite literally be a doddle (or should that be a doodle).

But, even if you’re completely new to the world of Adobe, so long as you’re proficient in using a mouse and a keyboard, then, with a little commitment, time and concentration (and only a little of each I’d like to reiterate), it won’t take long before you’ve learned new uses for these trusty instruments that will have you producing some of the finest quality print documents in no time.

And even better, this means that you can, where appropriate, avoid paying for professional design and do it yourself.

3 Ways Learning InDesign Can Save You Money

Traditionally, InDesign has been the go-to tool for the creation of print documents – flyers, posters, brochures, magazines, books and the like. However, with the rise of digital and e-publishing, InDesign is now increasingly being used to publish content for e-readers and tablet devices in conjunction with Adobe Digital Publishing Suite.

No matter what you’re planning on publishing, however, learning InDesign for yourself will inevitably save you money in the long run. And below we have listed the top 3 reasons why.

#1. Designer Fees

Hiring a designer every time you’ve got a new publication going to print is going to cost you north of £50 per hour for their services – and that’s before you’ve even factored in printing costs. As long as you’re hiring a professional designer, then you are going to be passing on those costs to your customers, which will mean that you may end up struggling to stay competitive in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

Learning InDesign is especially useful for small businesses and startups which perhaps don’t have the budget for professional design projects.

#2. Productivity

In design circles, it’s a commonly accepted fact that it’s often difficult for the customer to effectively communicate their ideas to the designer. This leads to consultation meetings which you will of course be charged for. Understanding how to use InDesign will not only mean that you can handle some projects yourself, but it will stand you in good stead when it comes to talking to designers. This in itself will save you money going forward as even when you do use a professional to create print and eBook designs, you’ll have a much clearer idea of the process and what’s possible and what’s not.

Of course, you’ll also then have the skills to create designs yourself, which means that you can either do away with the designer entirely, or prepare files to go to the designer to cut down the amount of work carried out at their end. Either way, you will be able to cut costs considerably and boost productivity. This can be through more effective collaboration or simply by doing it yourself.

#3. Becoming A Self-sufficient E-publisher

If you don’t plan on providing any actual printed material for physical sale or other distribution, then you can cut out what will likely prove to be one of your biggest and hardest-hitting overheads by learning how to craft your electronic publications yourself.

Indeed, the money you will invest in equipping yourself with the skills to use Adobe’s InDesign will be set off in a matter of just a few short weeks or months against what you will have saved by hiring a professional designer each time you’re set to publish.

The more self-sufficient you can be in business, the greater the benefit to your bottom line. By learning how to use InDesign yourself before taking on such an endeavour will dramatically minimise the risk of the venture, which in turn will make things easier for you when it comes to attracting investors or accessing finance from a bank or an alternative funding provider.

Check out our Online InDesign Course and our classroom based InDesign Training courses to see which suits you. Get in touch today to discuss which course to choose based on your needs, experience and budget.

How Long Does It Take To Learn InDesign?

How Long Does It Take To Learn InDesign?

One of the most reassuring aspects for newcomers is that InDesign is a user-friendly programme that is simple to learn. If you start to get hold of it, as time progresses, you can discover more and more functionality. Layer after layer, tool after tool; as the months go by, this app can be your best mate. Although in-person lessons function great for those residing near a city with public InDesign classes, this is not feasible for all. If you want to learn InDesign but do not have a classroom nearby, the easiest way to learn InDesign is to take the graphic design course by Blue Sky Graphics online. Online classes are often a decent way to study InDesign, even though you reside in an environment where classroom instruction is available to choose to stop transferring or choose online learning. The live online course involves an InDesign mentor, helping you to get responses to questions in real-time, and also make the instructor reiterate or illustrate concepts.

What is InDesign?

Adobe InDesign is the industry’s leading interface and page design applications and for tech-savvy-it is a laptop publishing app.

What is the InDesign used for?

Single page records, such as business cards, newsletters and posters; Multi-page papers such as catalogues, brochures, abstracts, books and e-books, annual accounts, journals, zines and other types of EPUBs.

Why is it so necessary to know InDesign?

InDesign is far more than mere plain applications. Instead, it is a complete, interactive, industry-standard app. Knowing InDesign is a must while operating in such conditions. These industries involve but are not limited to architecture and printing agencies that manage multi-page, text-heavy papers.

The following sectors are:

Marketing & Distribution Firms (producing sales and promotional material)

Graphics Departments (requires knowing InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop)

This brochure can be finished by the end of the week thanks to the best online InDesign courses and the user-friendly app of InDesign. Gain the confidence of your manager, and maybe even a bonus!

One of the main benefits of using InDesign to build the documents is that, unlike other options, InDesign provides access to a wide variety of already-made, high-quality resources.

You can find almost every possible form of InDesign template, such as newsletters, annual reports, business cards, resumes, and more, and use them to build your documents professionally and easily.

A medium for digital and written, personal and commercial purposes, Adobe InDesign, can inspire your imagination and encourage you to produce awesome documents in all kinds of formats.

Five tools for InDesign

Styles

Styles are a vital part of Adobe InDesign, but shockingly many consumers are not taking advantage of them. In short, styles are preset of text styling that can be added to a phrase, a line of text, or a whole paragraph with a single click. It requires a bit of configuration time, but styles will save you a lot of time in the design process in the long run. Apply styles with a simple key, and you are going to ride through your formatting.

Tables

Tables are another key aspect of Adobe InDesign; yet, many consumers are not acquainted with them. The tables seem fairly straightforward and maybe even a little dull, but you would be shocked how many places you can use the tables and how you can streamline the design process even more. You may use the InDesign table method to build tables, references, worksheets, planners, organisers, calendars, catalogues, price guides, graphs, or even mind maps. To take tables a bit forward, there is another method to make you function better and quicker – table types. The same principle as character + paragraph types, table styles help you to build saved settings for table formatting (like the line colours, line widths, column and row sizes and spacing, and plenty of other places to customise your table design).

The Liquid Layout

Liquid templates is an innovative InDesign tool that lets you alter your page size, orientation, or aspect ratio automatically, changing all of your page material along with it. For e.g., if you have a full-letter file size (8.5 x 11 in) and you wish to build a half-letter version of the file (8.5 x 5.5 in), this tool will alter the size of the document + alter the contents appropriately with one click. It almost seems too amazing to be real, but in certain respects, it is. This tool is not a fool of evidence, and it can be fine-tuned depending on the sort of material you have on your website. But, considering the additional fine-tuning it requires to bring your material back in order at a new scale, it also lets you avoid many measures and saves a lot of time in the long run.

Master Pages

Master Pages is the jewel of InDesign! Think of them as mini page models that you can build and use in your document for pages that have repetitive material on them, such as a page number, history, or header/footer. They are not part of the final page count of your text; they are different pages (and you can build as many as you need!). With only a few taps, you may add these mini-templates to pages inside your text. Elements of your master page would appear locked on your standard document pages, but you can unlock certain elements if you need to. This is super useful for PDF documents that require page numbers or headers/footers.

Loading Assests

This underused method is accessible in a few locations and helps you to easily take artefacts from other InDesign files to use in your new file without needing to rebuild them from scratch. You may load colour swatches, master pages, and even three types – character styles, paragraph styles, and table styles. This is ideal if you have a range of InDesign files that are all part of a common project or brand, allowing you to streamline the design process even further. And they may also benefit from being used as a starting point for a new project – for example, loading master pages from a similar paper and customising the template from there.

Conclusion

These are important if you want to learn and use InDesign like a pro. These InDesign resources enable you to function quicker and smarter than any other design software out there.

Adobe InDesign is the go-to software for artists who wish to be recognised while designing print content – articles, records, directories, archives, magazines, and more. The software supplies millions of free images, thousands of font types, impressive editing features and leaves the viewer with a little question regarding the professionalism of the result. But much as so many other extraordinary creative suite programmes created by Adobe, many of the functionality and characteristics of InDesign go overlooked because most creative students study just what they need for a specific project, and not more.