Adobe InDesign Classes in NYC or Live Online

About InDesign

Released as Adobe PageMaker in 1985, InDesign is the oldest program in the Adobe Creative Cloud suite. Since its public release, it has become the industry-standard tool for designing page layouts for print publications, with twenty million worldwide users working with the program. InDesign has become an essential tool for anyone hoping to work in the newspaper, magazine, or publishing industry, and designers utilize the tool in many other surprising ways, such as designing layouts for promotional posters, informational brochures, business cards, or even letterhead. 

One of the major advantages of learning InDesign is that it is a very accessible and user-friendly tool that is still among the deeper page layout design applications on the market. This means that users can start experimenting with the program after only a few hours of training, but they can also benefit from dedicating the time and energy to learning the program’s most advanced features. Noble Desktop has you covered with training options, whether you want to learn InDesign in a Day, enroll in an InDesign Bootcamp, or prepare for a career change in a Graphic Design Certificate program.

What can you do with InDesign?

InDesign allows users to create layouts and templates for virtually any print media project, ranging from single-page projects like posters and business cards to multiple-page layouts like brochures and magazines. InDesign lets users work with texts, graphics, and images, and the tool is well-suited for importing photographs and digital illustrations built with other Adobe programs. InDesign is also loaded with features built to help users prepare page designs for final publication, making the tool an all-in-one application for print publishing. 

From long documents (such as books and magazines) to short documents (such as brochures and business cards), InDesign is great at creating layouts that combine text and graphics. InDesign is ideal for creating designs that will be printed but can also be used for digital output, such as eBooks, PDFs, and more. This level of versatility makes InDesign a very useful tool to learn how to use. While it is primarily intended for page layout design and it is most commonly associated with print publications, there are a wide variety of different projects that you can work on using InDesign.

Books, Magazines, & Long Documents

InDesign is the king of long documents. You can import content from authors (Word files, Excel documents, etc.), style it, and lay out the page. InDesign has many features to help along the way, such as paragraph styles, character styles, object styles, master pages, powerful find/change, tables, footnotes, table of contents, and more. 

InDesign can even export eBooks as ePub files, which can be converted into Mobi files for the Amazon Kindle. This digital publishing functionality makes InDesign an excellent tool to learn for anyone interested in self-publishing or freelance design since new venues for publication have massively increased the amount of work that is being published regularly. 

Brochures, Flyers, Posters, & Short Documents

With only a small amount of training, InDesign users can create small documents such as business cards, brochures, and more. InDesign’s amazing typography features are useful in any design involving type, whether a poster or flyer. From one page to hundreds, InDesign is up to the task. In particular, learning how to design flyers and posters can be useful for amateur designers looking to help build awareness for their own projects, organizations, or causes. Students can learn to design an event flyer in only a few hours of instruction, meaning that you won’t need to enroll in a time-consuming, career-focused bootcamp if you just want to advertise community events. This level of versatility makes InDesign such an appealing skill to learn; users of all skill levels and investments can easily find ways to use their training.

InDesign is particularly useful for creating informational documents since its graphic design features help creatives build eye-catching, visually appealing layout designs. Anyone hoping to make promotional materials like posters and brochures can use InDesign to create these layouts quickly, populate them with graphic images and export them for final publication. The program is incredibly user-friendly and offers tools for professionals and beginners to start designing this material.

Print and Online Advertising

InDesign is also commonly employed for building single-page visual advertisements for print publications and some online contexts. Since InDesign is a visual graphics design tool, it is commonly used to create advertising spreads printed in magazines, newspapers, comic books or even on billboards or posters. Less frequently, InDesign advertisements are optimized for online display and run as banner or pop-up ads on webpages. This makes InDesign a valuable tool to learn if you are either hoping to work in advertising or want to advertise your product or service. There are a lot of affordable and accessible advertising opportunities available for business owners and entrepreneurs with InDesign skills.

PDFs

InDesign has many features that help you create professional PDFs. You can create high-quality PDFs that will be printed or optimize them for fast download via email or website. You can create PDF forms or add interactive PDF features (which, unfortunately, do not work well on most mobile devices). This functionality helps users build sharable and fillable PDF files that can streamline data collection or project management tasks. Using InDesign to construct these PDFs adds a decidedly practical functionality to the page layout tool.

Presentations

While InDesign is not as well suited for creating presentations as PowerPoint or Keynote, it does have a presentation mode for quickly going full screen. You won't be able to animate elements or add transitions, but if a static presentation is OK, you can design something beautiful that can be printed or exported as PDF for digital distribution. Thai added functionality isn’t a reason on its own to learn InDesign, but it is just another example of how InDesign training can be used for things other than designing page layouts for books and magazines. These useful applications are worth considering when choosing the program you plan to learn since every opportunity to take advantage of your skills training is a reason to learn a new design application.

Why learn InDesign?

Develop Creative Skills

At its core, InDesign is simply a tool to streamline the creative process that publishers and other creative designers have been employing for centuries. Page layout design used to be a manual process wherein a design was assembled and prepped for printing, and InDesign has only served to make that task easier and more efficient. This means that anyone learning InDesign will be learning a creative art form in regular use since at least the 16th century. Students will need to learn theories of composition, design and typography to learn how to make page layouts that guide audiences’ attention to the elements that a designer wants to centralize. This is a complex creative process, and anyone who learns InDesign will be learning the creative arts associated with it. Learning InDesign is a great way to help develop your creative talents and refine your artistic style. Students enrolled in an InDesign course will learn all of the different kinds of projects that the program is optimized for and will be able to gauge whether or not the program is right for them.

Find a new Career

Given the importance of mass communication, information sharing, and brand management, almost every institution, company and organization either employs or regularly contracts Graphic Designers who can produce the materials they want to distribute. While InDesign is only one component of a professional Graphic Designer’s toolkit, it is a vital one, so students looking to prepare themselves to work for any organization that regularly utilizes mass print media will want to learn more about InDesign. Since Graphic Designers are employed in such a wide variety of industries, students who have the necessary training will be able to find work in virtually any field that piques their interest. Graphic design is an in-demand profession, and students with the right training will be able to find themselves high-paying, stable employment.

Practice Soft Skills

Since building layouts with InDesign is a creative skill, anyone enrolled in an InDesign course will also be practicing all the important soft skills associated with creative design work. Students will learn how to use InDesign through hands-on instruction and practical projects. This means students will become accustomed to the kind of work they will be expected to do in a professional environment, which is a boon for anyone looking to start a new career. Beyond this, students working in a live instruction setting will need to work under controlled deadlines, giving them a taste of the working environment they can expect as professional Graphic Designers. Finally, one of the most important parts of excelling in a creative field is practicing your work and receiving feedback. In an InDesign course, students will be able to receive personalized feedback on their work from professional instructors, and they will be expected to respond to that feedback to improve their skills. This makes enrolling in an InDesign training program an appealing option, even for students already familiar with the program.

Lay the Groundwork for Future Training

One of the advantages of learning a creative design application is that once you’ve got a grip on the interface, it becomes exponentially easier to learn additional design applications. Not only will you become familiar with how computer-aided design operates but you will learn how programs interact with one another and how they can be used to complement each other. This is especially true of the Adobe Creative Cloud applications since they run on similar interfaces and are specifically designed to complement each other in the tasks that they serve. Given that so few careers strictly utilize InDesign functionalities, students who are hoping to find employment in graphic design or a related creative field will find it highly beneficial to lay the foundation of their creative design training by learning a program like InDesign (even if it isn’t one of the tools that they use in their daily routines).

Adobe Creative Cloud

One of the main reasons that InDesign remains the most popular page layout tool in the print publishing industry is its integration with the rest of the Adobe Creative Cloud applications. In 2012, Adobe moved all its design software tools to a software-as-a-subscription model, meaning that the programs are more accessible than ever and offer even more integration between related programs. Users can license a single application, such as InDesign, for only twenty dollars a month, or they can subscribe to all of the major design programs (about twenty in total) for approximately sixty dollars a month. A few programs naturally pair well with InDesign, including programs taught together in Noble Desktop’s Graphic Design Certificate program.

Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is the other Adobe Creative Cloud program most commonly associated with traditional print media publishing. Photoshop is a photo-editing tool designed to help creatives make large and small alterations to pixel-based images. Photoshop can be used to digitally alter the lighting in a photograph, change the color of certain aspects of the image or even remove objects from the frame entirely. This tool is especially useful for those working in the print advertising industry since it allows users to make alterations to the subject matter of their designs to make them look more attractive and appealing to audiences. It is also an important tool for publishers looking to design individual assets that will populate the page in a completed design project, such as internal illustrations or book covers. If you plan to work with InDesign professionally, Photoshop is likely to be the first skill you should learn to complement your training.

Illustrator

The other major graphic design tool offered by Adobe is Illustrator, a vector-graphics design tool used to illustrate digital drawings using lines, points, arcs, and shapes. The primary advantage to Illustrator is that because it doesn’t use pixels to build its assets, those designs are far easier to rescale and utilize in a variety of contexts. This makes it a valuable tool for print advertisers who are going to have to produce marketing materials and content that is presented in a wide range of shapes and sizes (for example, print advertisements in magazines may not all be printed in the same size and orientation). Illustrator is also an excellent tool for designing logos, mastheads, letterhead, or other graphical assets that you are going to use as part of your design work regularly. While less immediately applicable to InDesign projects than Photoshop, learning Illustrator is a long-term boon for students looking to work in graphic design.

Figma

With more and more design projects beginning to center around web design assets, students with InDesign training may want to consider branching out to learn dedicated online design applications. For a few decades, designers used tools like InDesign to create layouts for webpages, but in the last few years, specialized design tools have become far more common, since these tools can prioritize the uniqueness of the digital design space. One of the most popular of these tools is Figma, which was recently acquired by Adobe. Figma lets users take their page layouts and add customizable, interactive functions to the design, signaling to developers what kinds of functionalities they want buttons and other assets to have. Figma also lets users convert their designs into working prototypes, so users can test the interface and provide designers with practical feedback. Learning a tool like Figma can help InDesign specialists expand the scope of projects that they can work on, especially as more design projects emphasize digital components.

Who uses InDesign?

InDesign is most commonly associated with the print publishing industry, particularly book publishing houses, newspapers, and magazines. It is also frequently associated with print advertising (since those print advertisements are likely to appear in newspapers and magazines). InDesign is used to create elaborate layouts that are populated by graphics, images, and text, as well as more mundane aspects of the design process such as ensuring that text wraps around images properly or that important content doesn’t run into the gutter. These design features allow publishers to handle almost all of the important parts of the page design process using a single tool, freeing them up to do other important tasks in more dedicated programs.

InDesign is used in the advertising industry to design and publish print advertisements ranging from single-page spreads in magazines to posters to direct mailer advertisements. InDesign is almost always used as part of a larger collection of graphic design tools in this field, particularly as more advertising campaigns are targeting online marketplaces. Students who want to work in this field will want to pair their InDesign training with instruction in programs like Photoshop and Illustrator or Figma. Still, learning how to work with InDesign will greatly expand the kinds of advertising projects you can design or work on. 

Owing to its use in advertising, InDesign is also an ideal skill to learn if you are running your own business and want to design marketing materials to advertise your products. Students with only a few days of InDesign training can start building elaborate layouts for single-page advertisements, and they will be able to prepare those ads for publication and distribution. Even if you aren’t planning on using InDesign for a career in graphic design, entrepreneurs can take advantage of the tool’s accessibility to design their own advertising and promotional materials when they are just starting their business.

InDesign is also a useful tool for anyone interested in self-publishing to learn how to use. Whether you hope to publish your own novel, fan magazine, or organizational newsletter, making it look as professional and attractive as possible is a good way to help expand your reach and get your project noticed. Even if you are only publishing material as a hobby or you only plan on doing it a few times, learning the basics of InDesign can have a strong return on your investment, particularly if you find that self-publishing is something you enjoy enough to pursue in greater detail.

InDesign Careers

With the print publishing industry in decline, there has been a steady decline in design jobs that strictly utilize InDesign as the primary tool. However, InDesign is still an important part of many graphic design projects, particularly those with multi-media components. Graphic Designers will need to learn to use InDesign to design layouts for print advertisements, billboards, informational brochures and other marketing material. They may also find work in the public sector, producing infographics and informational materials for various employers, including non-profit advocacy organizations, public institutions like museums and theaters, or government agencies and political campaigns. In the US, Graphic Designers earn about $53,000 a year.

Graphic Designers who primarily work with InDesign most frequently work in the desktop publishing, print advertising industries, or electronic publishing. The rise of the ebook industry has made publishing easier than ever before, and the rise of self-publishing has opened up new avenues for editors and Graphic Designers to find work that utilizes their InDesign skills. Freelance designers are hired to transform manuscripts and collections of written content into publishable forms. This can take the form of ebooks, online magazines, or even digitally distributed PDFs sold on various platforms. Rates and salaries would vary depending on the kinds of work you are finding, but this is an emerging way to turn your InDesign skills into a profession.

Conclusion

These are just a few of the things you can do with InDesign, but we hope it’s given you a better idea of InDesign's capabilities. InDesign is an important app for designers who work in print or digital publishing, and anyone looking to start a career in graphic design will benefit from learning this design application. Regardless of the kinds of projects you hope to work on, the accessibility of the program makes it an ideal tool to learn how to use, and the applications for InDesign are broad enough that anyone who hopes to work on creative projects will stand to benefit.