Explore the InDesign interface and effectively utilize its features to create stunning images. Learn how to customize your workspace, use the menu bar, and interact with different panels to improve your design process.
Key Insights
- The InDesign interface offers a range of tools and panels, including the properties panel for file details, the pages panel for managing pages, and the CC libraries panel for importing libraries.
- A workspace in InDesign consists of a custom arrangement of panels and tools. Users can create their personalized workspace, such as the VDCI workspace, for a more efficient design process.
- Every tool in InDesign comes with relative options that can be accessed through the control bar. Also, the Color and Stroke panels are essential for designing images, and their location can be moved around the workspace as needed.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
In this video, we'll be going over the InDesign interface. So with the application open, let's begin first by opening a new file.
We'll go to File, New, and we'll be selecting Document. From here, we'll see that our new document window shows up, giving us tabs of different templates that we can use for our file. In the case of this video, it's not really important which one we utilize, since we'll simply be using it to go over the interface.
So let's go to Print, and we'll select Letter. From here, on the right-hand side, we'll have different options for our template or our file, but we're simply going to click Create. Welcome to the InDesign interface.
Here, we have many different opportunities to further explore the InDesign application. Let's start on the top left-hand side, where we'll see our menu bar. Within our menu bar, we have many different options for how we can work with this file or other files.
And to the right of this, we have two additional Adobe options for Bridge, working with multiple files of different types, and Adobe Stock for stock footage. On the right-hand side, we have our zoom level and some additional options for how we're viewing our files. Beneath this, we have the actual file that we're working with.
In this case, mine's titled Untitled 2 and is zoomed at 92%. As we continue adding additional files and working with them together, we'll see that they are added as tabs along the top, and we can easily navigate between different files. Beneath this, we have our actual file.
On the top and left-hand side, we have rulers, and in the middle, we have our page. Outside of our page, this is called our pasteboard, and we can place many different images, text, and graphics that we'll utilize within our pages. To the left of this, we have our toolbar.
This contains many of the tools that we'll be utilizing to create our images. On the right-hand side, we have three panels within our dock. The three panels are our properties panel, which shows many of the details of our file, including width, height, margins, page, and this may change depending on the object selected.
To the right of this, we have pages, and we can click on the title to select our pages panel. And to the right of this, we have CC libraries, where we can create different libraries or import them to the Creative Cloud. All of this combination of panels and bars together is called our workspace.
If we go to the top, we'll see that we're currently in Essentials. If we switch from Essentials to other workspaces by clicking and selecting them, we'll see that the organization of panels changes. In this case, we're going to want to create our own workspace, so we're all on the same page.
Let's go to Essentials, and with Essentials selected, let's go all the way to the bottom to Reset Essentials. This will make sure that it's consistent with the Reset Essentials layout before we make changes. Now, let's go and add a couple things.
To do this, we're going to go to Window, and we'll go to Control. When we do this, we'll see that we now have a control bar right on top. With different tools selected, we'll notice that our control bar will change, and this will be important as it gives us the most relative options for that tool.
Let's go back to our Selection tool. Next, let's add another important panel. We'll go back to Window, and we're going to be selecting our Color panel, and we'll select Color.
Here, we can see that we have our Color panel as well as our Stroke panel on the left-hand side of our dock. If we want to change the location of these, we can do so by simply clicking on the title of our panel, and we can drag it out and place it anywhere within our interface. If we want to re-dock it, we can again click and drag the title, and I'll drag it within the Stroke panel.
If we want to change the order, we can again click on the title, and I'll drag it to the left so it's on the left-hand side. Additionally, we can collapse this panel by clicking on the icon. If we want to expand these icons, we can also click on the triangles on the top right-hand side.
So as we can see, there are multiple ways to customize our workspace. Let's make one more change. We're going to select our Properties panel, and personally, I like Properties to be on the top left-hand side, so we'll click and drag it until we see the blue bar right on top of the Color and Stroke.
From here, we'll select it so it's open on the left-hand side. If we want to change the size of these panels, we can hover over the center line until we see the arrows, and click and drag as necessary. In this case, I'll leave mine right about there.
And again, if we want to collapse, we can do so by clicking on the icon. Feel free to customize your workspace however you'd prefer, and throughout this course, I'll be using this layout. Next, we want to create our own workspace.
To do this, we'll go to Essentials, and we'll go down to New Workspace. From here, we can simply type the title of our workspace. In this case, we'll type VDCI, and click OK.
Now, on the top, under our Workspace Options, we can select different workspaces, including the VDCI workspace that we've just created. Throughout this course, we'll be utilizing our VDCI workspace to create all of our images. Because this file itself isn't important, let's now close out the file, and in the next video, we'll be creating our first project.
See you there!