From the course: InDesign 2022 Essential Training

Getting started - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2022 Essential Training

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Getting started

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- [Instructor] My goal in this first chapter is to get you acquainted enough with InDesign that you can create a new InDesign file or edit one that someone else has made. This is the basics of the basics. If your boss handed you a file, and you need to open it, and do something with it before lunch today, start here. Okay. Let's dive in. When you first launch InDesign, you'll see this thing called the homepage, and this gives you quick access to any recently open documents. You just need to click on any of these documents down at the bottom to open it. But in this case, we want to create a new file. So you could come up here, and click the blue new file button but let's go to the file menu, and choose from a inside the new sub menu document. The new document dialogue box has a lot of options, but for right now, the first thing you need to think about is whether this document is going to be viewed primarily on screen or print. I'll choose print. Next. You want to choose a page size from this area down here. Or you can type in your own document within height here on the right. Note, that if you're more comfortable in inches or centimeters, you can choose those from this menu on the right. Now, down here, does this document have facing pages? That is, does it have a left-hand, and a right-hand page like a book or a magazine? If it doesn't, then turn off the facing pages check box. Notice that the dialogue box actually has a scroll bar. If you scroll down, you can see more features. Down here you can set your page margins. They're just guidelines. You can ignore them if you want, but margins can be helpful. In this case, I'm going to click the blue create button, and there we go. InDesign creates a nice new clean document for us. By the way, if your tool panel over on the left looks a little bit different than this, that's okay. On some computers, this shows up in a two-column layout instead, but the features all work the same. Now you could start with an empty InDesign document like this if you want, but I find it's usually easier to start with a template. So that's partially created, and then you can change the text and graphics as you work. We have a template to work with in our exercise files folder. So let's head up to the file menu, and choose open. There's the file. So I'll select it and then click the open button. This is the template that we're going to be using in this chapter. In the next few movies, we'll be filling this out by adding text and graphics. Of course, this template comes with the exercise files but there are a lot of other InDesign templates available on the web including dozens of free ones over at CreativePro.com This is a site that I help run. I also used to run a site called InDesign Secrets but we took all of those thousands of blog posts, and downloads, and we merge them into Creative Pro. For example, this page includes free InDesign templates that you can download and use including ones to create books, brochures, menus and more. Just download them, open them in InDesign, and you're good to go. In this case though, let's switch back to InDesign. Of course, getting your document open is just the first step on the adventure called InDesign. Next, we're going to learn how to get text, and graphics in there, and make it look the way you want.

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