From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training
New documents - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training
New documents
- [Instructor] Now that you know your way around InDesign a little bit, it's time to make a new InDesign document. And as I mentioned in the last chapter, this is called the Homepage. You can jump to the normal InDesign user interface by clicking the InDesign icon in the upper left corner. That lets you see all the panels and so on. Some people prefer that, or you can click the home icon and it takes you back. From here, you can make a new InDesign document by clicking the blue New file button or just head up to the file menu, choose the New sub menu and then choose Document. Up comes the new document dialogue box, and the very first thing that you need to decide on is what kind of preset to use when creating your new document. Up here at the top, you have three options, print, web, and mobile. I should say that web is a bit of a misnomer. This does not mean web like a webpage, you know, not HTML. It just means a document that is going to be delivered on screen like an interactive file. They really should change that name. Now two things happen when you choose a web preset. First, of course, it shows you page sizes that are typical screen dimensions and the measurement system is set to pixels. Also, all of your colors in your document are set to RGB by default. Now, mobile is not really that different than web, so I usually just ignore it. In most cases I use Print, but just to be clear, print does not mean that you're necessarily going to be printing this file. For example, maybe you're making a PDF that you're putting on your website for somebody to read and maybe they'll print it out, like a product sheet for some business. You can still use print for that. Now down here you can see that Adobe is offering you a number of templates from their Adobe Stock Service. A lot of these are free and some of these are pretty good and some are, well, they're not the best quality, but in this case, I'm just going to start with creating a new file from scratch by clicking one of the blank document presets at the top. Like if you know you're going to be printing on A4 paper, which is the European letter standard, then just go ahead and click view all presets and then click A4. Now these presets are just starting points. You can always adjust the settings over here on the right side of the dialogue box. For example, you can change the width and height fields and you can choose which measurement system you like using from this pop-up menu here, for example, I'll choose centimeters. If you want, you can click these orientation buttons over on the right. All these do is literally swap the values in the width of the height field. Now the next thing you need to do is decide whether your document should be set up for Facing Pages. Facing pages should only be used for documents that have a left hand and a right hand page called Verso and Recto, like a book or a magazine. If you're doing a one page flyer or maybe a two-sided brochure or something like that, then you want to turn this off. Anything that does not truly have facing pages, turn it off. The next checkbox down here is Primary Text Frame. This is also used for things like books where you have a story that goes from one page to the next over a lot of pages. Primary text frame will automatically add a text frame to your parent pages. I'm going to be covering this in a later chapter, but for now I'm just going to tell you that unless you're making a book, you probably do not need that on. Now, down here, most documents just have one column, but if you know that you're going to have two or more columns in your file, go ahead and change it. The gutter amount is the amount of space between each column. So for example, I'll change this to one centimeter. Okay, there are two other important settings in here, but a lot of people don't see them because they're kind of hidden. Here's the trick, the whole side of the dialogue box scrolls. Make sure you check out all the options in here. For example, margins. Margins are just guidelines. There's nothing stopping you from putting objects outside the margins, but they're helpful reminders of where you should put your text frames and pictures and so on. And see this little button on the side that looks like a chain? That tells InDesign to keep the values in these fields all the same, but if I click it, it unlinks those fields. So now I can do something like change the Top Margin to 6 picas. Then when I hit Tab, you'll see it changes that field independently of the others. I'll talk about this last feature, Bleed and Slug in a later chapter, so great. I'll click create and I'm good to go. There's the document. You can see the column guides and the margin guides, but after you create your document, you might realize that you need to make changes to the margins or the page size. That's fine. Don't panic. In a later chapter, I'll show you how you can change all of those settings. Making a new document with the proper settings is the first step in creating a strong foundation for your publication, but it's just the first step.
Practice while you learn with exercise files
Download the files the instructor uses to teach the course. Follow along and learn by watching, listening and practicing.
Download courses and learn on the go
Watch courses on your mobile device without an internet connection. Download courses using your iOS or Android LinkedIn Learning app.