From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Drawing path and frame shapes - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Drawing path and frame shapes

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- [Instructor] InDesign has a wide variety of Drawing Tools, including a fully featured Bezier Pen Tool, just like Illustrator. Now, I wouldn't use InDesign to do a detailed technical illustration, but it's perfect for basic drawing, such as most logos and relatively simple shapes. Let me show you how it's done. I have my magazine document open from the Exercise Files folder, and I'm going to hold on the Spacebar and then the Command key on Mac or Control key on Windows, and then I'll zoom in on this side of the page. That just gives me a little bit of room to work on. Let's move up here. Also, I'll go to the View menu and turn off Match Pasteboard to Theme Color. That just makes it easier to work out on the Pasteboard. Now, over here in the Tool panel, there are a number of tools for drawing, including the Rectangle Tool, the Ellipse Tool, and the Polygon Tool. The Polygon Tool draws hexagons by default, which I guess is okay, but you can get other shapes if you double click the tool. How about, say, 20 sides and a 20% inset? I'll click OK and then draw out the shape, and you can see it's a Starburst. Of course, this line has no stroke or fill, so it's basically invisible. That is not helpful. So here's a quick trick. Press the D key on your keyboard and it assigns the default coloring, which is no fill and a one-point black stroke. In fact, if I deselect everything on my page by pressing Command + Shift + A on the Mac or Control + Shift + A on windows, and then press the D key, it changes the default for this whole document to that one-point black stroke. Let's take a look at the Line Tool next. The Line Tool just draws simple lines. You can draw any angle you want, but notice that if you hold down the Shift key, then InDesign constrains the line to either a horizontal, vertical, or a 45-degree line. Also, see how it now has that default black stroke automatically? Okay, the next tool down is a little bit more interesting. That's the Pen Tool. Here, you can click and drag to draw more interesting lines. Bezier, curve lines. All you need to do is click and drag. You might use a line like this for text on a path. To edit this path, you want to use the Direct Selection Tool over here in the Tool panel. That's the second tool down. Also sometimes called the White Arrow Tool. When you choose the Direct Selection Tool and place your cursor over the path, it highlights. Now, you can click and drag points on that path or the handles. You can even drag the segments between the points, which changes the curve. Here's another way to change the path. I'm going to switch back to the Pen Tool, and now whenever I place my cursor on top of part of the path that has no point, that cursor changes. I now see a little plus symbol next to it, and that indicates that it's going to add a point. I'll click and drag, and you can see it's added a point on the path. On the other hand, if you place your cursor over a point, it changes into a Pen Tool with a minus symbol. Click, and the point goes away. Now, also, when you're editing paths with a Pen Tool, you can always hold down the Command key on the Mac or Control key on Windows, which temporarily switches you back to the last used Selection Tool, in this case, the Direct Selection Tool. That way you can drag these points around or adjust their handles, and then when you let go of the Command or Control key, it switches back to the Pen Tool. Okay, let's draw some more paths. I'm simply going to click out here and click a few times, and you can see that you can very easily make a path with sharp corners. When you're done, you can either switch to a different tool, or Command or Control + Click in a different area to finish the path. I'll choose the Selection Tool, and now let's go up to the Object menu and look at these features way down here at the bottom. Here, you can see the Paths sub-menu, and this lets you do all kinds of interesting things to paths. For example, you could join two paths or close the path, like turn it into a closed frame. There are other Path Tools here too, like Convert Shape. I find these things really useful. For example, it's really hard to draw a perfect triangle in InDesign, but if you select this, then boom, there it is. Now, as you can tell, I'm not the greatest artist, but I do find these Pen Tools useful inside of InDesign, especially when I already have a frame that I want to tweak a little bit. If I want to make it a little bit more interesting. For example, I'm going to scroll down to the bottom of my page here and I'll use my Spacebar to simply move over a little bit. Now, this is just a regular text frame. It's fine, but it might be nice to give it a little flare. So let's head over and choose the Pen Tool, and now I'm going to place that Pen Tool over the left edge of the frame. Can you see that little plus symbol? Now, I'll click and drag. Of course, as I drag, it changes the shape of the frame. It's still a frame, but the text reflows into that shape. Much more interesting now. Of course, if you really need heavy-duty illustration tools, you should probably switch to Adobe Illustrator. But in most cases, when you're just trying to make your design look interesting, InDesign gives you everything you need. In fact, in the next movie, I'll show you how you can take your paths to the next level with Corner options.

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