From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Getting started - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Getting started

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- 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, which gives you quick access to any recently open documents down here. You just need to click on any of these to open them. But, in this case we want to create a new file, so you could click the New file button up here, or you could go to the file menu, choose the new sub menu, and then choose 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 in print or on screen. I'll choose print. Next, you want to choose a page size from this area over here on the left. Note that you can click view all presets to see more, or you can always type in your own width and height here on the right. I should point out that if you work in inches or centimeters, you can choose those from this menu. Now, does your document have facing pages? That is, does it have a left hand page and a right hand page? Like a book or a magazine? If it doesn't, then turn off the facing pages checkbox. Note that you can scroll this panel down with a scroll bar on the right. And down at the bottom you'll see margins. These are just guidelines. You can ignore them if you want, but I find them helpful. In this case, I'll just click Create and InDesign opens a nice new clean document for us. Over on the left side of the screen, you'll see the tool panel. And if your tool panel looks a little 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, something 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. Inside the exercise file, I'll open chapter one. There it is, brochure.indd. This is the template that we're going to use in this chapter. So I'll click open. Great. Now, in the next few movies, we'll be filling this out by adding text and graphics. Now, this template comes with the exercise files, but there are a lot of other InDesign templates available on the web, including some free ones 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 merged them into Creative Pro. I suggest you start by downloading the free starter kit over here in the resources menu. This includes a free InDesign template that you can download and use plus cool art and sample eBooks with great tips. In this case though, let's just 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 texts and graphics in there and make it look the way you want.

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