11 Adobe InDesign CC Tips and Tricks that will blow your mind

the channels going here welcome everyone hello Portugal all Cheryl be welcome welcome welcome Paul's in the house Paul welcome Javan Colleen frequent viewer we love having you Joseph Harris sent or sent a and mark welcome as well see if we can get what's going on over here this is weird hello Rita hello BAE hello Victoria let me refresh this page the video dropped out everything looks good on my end could just be a Facebook thing oh there's the video now alright welcome everyone so I hope everyone can hear me or see me Lakia ray thanks for being a first-timer here and glad to have you all here for what's traditionally known here in my studio as indesign Tuesday so I usually dedicate Tuesdays when I'm in town and not on the road to do in design tutorials primarily focused for InDesign users on the InDesign Facebook page so if you are a Facebook user don't forget to head over to facebook.com slash InDesign and like the page if you're watching on other channels that's great too but just note that sometimes this this may not get broadcast to the other channels but it will more than likely always be broadcast to the Adobe property that it belongs to so with that said if you're watching this live thanks for joining me live you're watching the replay thanks for joining or watching it later my name is Terry White worldwide design and photography evangelist for Adobe it's my pleasure to be streaming to you live here today on InDesign Tuesday today we're gonna be taking a look at 11 tips and tricks most of which I've not shared before so these were all new they may not be new in terms of that you know feature has been around for a while but certainly new in terms of I've never shared them public so I hope that you get something out of this this is just a random set of tips to make your life easier and in design there's no rhyme or reason to the order that I'm doing them in other than the order that I came up with them in so that's it there's there's nothing that says you have to do them in this order or do them at all all right so with that let's go ahead and switch over the computer we never punish the people that are on time people that are joining later we'll have to watch the intro later if they miss something all right so I've got InDesign open let's jump to the first tip right off the bat I'm just going to go in creating a document that's not the tip I'm gonna create a new document here and let's just get a document open on the page this one happened to have three columns no problem this one might have multiple pages too so it's got two pages great and that's just a recent format that I used in one of my previous streams so it was just there for me to click on again that's not the tip so tip number one let's go ahead and get some frames on the page it'll show you what the tip is first I'm just going to go ahead and drag out a frame and I'm gonna go and put something in that frame and I'll let you know when we get to the actual tip I want to grab my CC libraries and I'm gonna go ahead and drag this image over I've used these images in previous streams let's go ahead and format that to fit these that the content to the frame let's do a proportionately Phil frame proportionally and of course we can use the alt we can also use the Adobe since a powered feature which I'll show a little bit later but let's now go ahead and duplicate that a few times and I probably could have done that before I put the image in it but let's duplicate this a few times matter of fact I'll give you a bonus tip and that is how do I replace an image so that's a bonus tip that's still not the tip that we're working on but if I want to replace one of these images with one I'm just dragging in if I click right now what happens is it just places that image full-size but the bonus tip is if you hold down your option or Alt key it will replace the image in the frame that you're hovering over so that's a bonus tip still not on the main that we're doing today I'm just getting this all set up alright just grabbing random images no rhyme or reason for these particular images other than they're just handy in my library okay so now for the tip let's say you go on this one and you go in and you create an effect let's say we just do something easy like a drop shadow and of course we can preview that drop shadow if we check the box we can set all the settings for that drop shadow we can add more things than just a drop shadow but whatever your effect is let's say you go ahead and do that and then later on you wish you had done it to the other things but you don't remember the settings and you know I have to go look it up and do it manual and you forgot to create a style or object sheet style sheet so how do I do this quick and easy if it's a one time thing first of all if it's not a one time thing meaning you're gonna use this over and over again then I highly recommend you create an object base style sheet but if it's a one time thing I just need this drop shadow on those other photos with whatever settings it has go to your effects panel which you can bring it up from the windows menu ok so now we're on the tip bring up your effects panel and it will have for the selected object you will see this little effects icon right there in the panel all right with that icon that's really the tip it's dragging droppable so if you drag that icon over to an the edge of another frame and let go boom it drags over the effect whatever effects you've done to that object that's selected and allows you to apply it to multiple objects just by dragging via the FX literally the FX icon from the effects panel onto another object copies that whatever the effects are to that other object so the fill of the stroke the effects multiple effects whatever you've done boom get applied to the other one so that's tip number one tip number two let's say you then later decide that you want to scale this I'm going to scale this down I'm holding down my command and shift key and then I decide dang I don't know I don't even remember what size that is but I wish all my other images were the exact same size so I'm gonna go ahead and shift select these other objects then we're going to go to the object menu we're gonna go down to transform again transform again so again again do it again do it again transform again and boom it will make all three the exact same size or whatever you've done tilt it rotate it whatever that you just did to the object that you had selected so just do it again next up and yes there Rodrigo there's more than one way to skin a cat or we shouldn't be skinning cats but there's more than one way to do something and yes you could use the eyedropper to the copying effect all right let's go next up so we did number one we did number two number three let's undo that last one I just want to show you one thing real quick number three is kind of a hidden fairly new feature and that is when you have any frame selected I should say you'll notice that you have the handles around the frame that let you scale it you've got your you've got the ability to drag it by this blue box to make it an inline graphic in your text but then there's this yellow one what's the yellow one for this little yellow box on the side so tip number three the little yellow box on the side if you click if you click it that will activate your alive corners so you can pull them in and round the corners of a frame and bone this tip if I can remember which key it is if you hold down your Shift key while you're dragging one it will do it independent of the other three corners bonus tip so clicking the little yellow box will activate your live corners and of course dragging any one corner will affect the others if you hold down your Shift key you can make one look different and you can go to each one with the shift key alright so with that said be you're just really giving a hard time here bees like the yellow box is an old one I said some of these are not new cut me some slack all right next up all right no one B so hang in there let's go in and do a new document and let's go ahead and grab this is just a template I grabbed it's a presentation style template all right now she's laughing and thanks for Dublin for coming in drawing freehand and listening to you okay cool drawing freehand listen to me want to do that okay great so this is a multi-page document designed to be a presentation and we all know that we can go into preview mode by hitting the letter W which hides all the non-printing stuff so it hides all a guy hides all the frame edges and basically let you see your document the way it's going to be printed but if you hold down the shift when you hit the W that will turn on presentation mode so you can actually walk your document through like a slide presentation or it could be a slide presentation to your client to your boss to your creative director to whoever it is that needs to see this document I'm just using my left and right arrow keys to go forward and backward while I'm in presentation mode so presentation mode not newbie I know but still for a lot of people don't know that it's there because they don't drill down in that box in the tool panel or they never hit shift W or if they did it by accident they never know why they got that so these are all located at the very bottom of a tool panel you can you can do normal which of course we're on preview was the W presentation mode was the shift W so those are there all right next up that was tip number four the ability to do presentation mode let's go back to my other document that I was working on here and let's go ahead and draw one more frame over on this side do this this is fairly new this came out at max and I showed this in or I didn't show this in the keynote but Danielle showed this in the keynote and that is let's bring an image into this there we go my libraries and let's bring in this one and this one will work perfectly let's bring that in and as you can see there's just a hand sticking up to the side because the image is at 100% size now any other time before max I would have gone up and I would be the keyboard shortcut or Phil frame proportionally but there's a new way to do it and so you don't have to do it every single time so you don't have to remember to do it it will just do it for you if you set this up properly so let me show you what the feature is first and then I'll show you how to set it the feature is if you go to your properties panel let's put this panel away so I get two properties Oh my properties panel is not there anymore I must have closed it all right let's go to properties all right in the properties panel there is a new icon so you had all these before feel frame proportionally that content proportionately so forth and so on but the last one is the new one it's Adobe's sensei power meaning it's artificial intelligence that looks at the content of a frame and it's not just a Phil frame proportionally it actually looks at the content of the frame and says what's the subject let me put the subject in the frame so it will intelligently do that so that based on the image it will figure out what part of the image should be there all right next up not advertising you are advertising you talk about check out my book you are advertising all right that's so if you wanted to have that not have to do it every single time I always forget where this is it's a preference it's either an interface or general I never remember where it is I should remember where it is I don't have to go through this every single time there it is make it's in under general so the first preference content-aware fit make content work fit the default fitting option so once you turn that on then you don't ever have to do it again when you draw a frame it will automatically be the default fit option so that you don't have to remember to do it each time all right and I believe it off only because I'm teaching but if this were if this were my work machine meaning the machine I was gonna use InDesign on every day I would absolutely have that on as my default all right next up so content aware fit was number five number six and this is kind of a I did not the other like this is one I did not know for a long time if you want to know the history of your document this is kind of an easter egg kind of feature what do you mean by the history of your document like how many times have you say it did it crash blah blah blah you restored it did you convert it from quark like all the history of the document if you want to know that hold down your command key on the Mac or your control key on Windows and go up to the about InDesign menu command so I'm holding down the key about InDesign will then give me the document information about this document and I don't know that I would ever need to know this kind of stuff about my document but if you get documents from other people that's where this could really be handy especially if you're a service bureau and maybe they use some weird plugins and you can't get the document to open right or look right then you can see what's required by this document to work right so that's just kind of a hidden mostly service bureau type or does your design shop type feature that for people that get documents from other people I doubt if you need to know this about your documents because you know you created them you know what they need but that's kind of cool to have so number six display document history number seven and this is another easter egg type feature so I'm going to come down here I'm going to draw a path I'm even gonna do with a pencil tool because I have a stylus all right so let's use the Wacom here let's kind of just draw a stroke like that all right so I got my stroke there and now I want to actually stroke it let's make it thicker right off the bat but I want to apply some strokes well you know that on the you can either do that from the new properties panel or you can go back old school and do it from the stroke panel which I don't have open let's go to the stroke panel there it is and you can choose between the various types of strokes that are here great that's been there since day one but what a lot of people don't realize that you can make your own so if you pop up the menu while you're in the stroke panel a little flyout menu in the upper right corner over there you can go to the stroke styles with will bring up a separate window where you can go and not only work with the ones that are here but create a new one so I'm going to create a new one and I'm going to make sure that the style type this is important is stripe and I'm gonna name it this is very important if you don't do this right it won't the tip won't work name it rainbow with a capital R rainbow and when we click OK and use it let's see if I can use it now there we go boom we have a rainbow stroke let's make it nice and thick rainbow I bet most of you didn't know that that's kind of like one of those hidden easter egg features that's kind of cool alright let's do one more stroke and let's do same thing so same exact steps this time we're going to go into stroke styles one more time we're going to create another new one one more time and this time instead of it being a stripe which we used last time we're going to make it a dash which was the default I just wanted to show you that we leave it on - and this one it's case sensitive so just like rainbow you have to use a capital R this one you're gonna type in I think it's beat yeah beat with capital F if you use lowercase it just won't work so we'll click OK and just make it - and we'll click okay again and then we'll switch that stroke style to feet probably need to make it thicker so we can see it and let's go ahead and thicken that stroke up house make the weight heavier and you get hey let's make it really heavy you get feet you never know you might need that one day okay so that's our that's kind of another Easter Egg rainbow and feet Easter egg strokes alright number eight let's get to actually let's move these off this page I'm gonna use this page for something else let's just move these up we'll stick these over here for now not worry about how they look we're just gonna come down here to number eight and this is kid it's kind of a useful keyboard shortcut so let's say you're drawing a circle so we know that if I just drag it it's going to be an ellipse and we know that if we hold down the shift key it'll be a perfect circle but what if I didn't start it in the right spot like what if I needed it to be in the middle column well I could let go and then move it or here's there's a tub hold on a spacebar and you can pick it up while you're holding down the spacebar and get it exactly where you want it to be so spacebar while you're dragging while you're creating the new shape will let you move it around while you're holding down the spacebar to get it exactly where you wanted it to be where on earth did you find these Easter eggs I work for Adobe I have sources okay that's good I was delete that one now this is one of my favorite ones this is not newbie but this is one of my favorite ones and it's kind of evolved over the years and I love it so let's say we're still on the ellipse tool let's say we drag out an ellipse like so we make it like nice and big almost the whole page but I don't want just one giant ellipse I want multiple ellipses is that the right pronunciation for plural that's yeah I think so alright so you take your other hand the one that's not holding down the mouse up arrowkey will give you more right arrow key will give you more shift key will still make them perfect circles and if I do enough I probably get a perfect circle in there to be just right alright so cool so I'm hold down shift key now to make it perfect circles before I let go up arrow key gives you rose right arrow key gives you columns when you let go boom you've got that many circles that you did not have to draw once and then duplicate or step-and-repeat or all of that alright so only an InDesign CC some of it is some of it isn't you'll have to experiment so if you're not on the current version which I can't imagine why you wouldn't be but if you haven't current version you have to experiment and see what doesn't work in your older version alright so now I've got these how many other circles it is I'm not counting now I gotta count but anyway I got these circles here here's the next tip so that tip was number nine by the way it's called grid a Phi that's the nickname for it so you can gratify the number of objects you're creating with the up and down arrows the next one is one of my favorites it's actually to take all of these and make them into a new frame because right now they're all individual frames I want them all to be combined as a single frame so any two or more objects you select go to your object menu and by the way it was great they don't all have to be the same shape I'm just using circles but they could be triangle shape some circles some other paths some custom paths however you want to make it and then go to your go to your paths menu under the object menu and come down to make compound paths or just command 8 on the keyboard or control 8 on Windows when you choose make compound path and there's an option to get rid of it release compound path but when you do that it takes the two or more objects you've got selected and converts them into one so now you see one big X going through the whole thing so that means the whole thing is now a frame so if I go back to my CC libraries for example and we grab this nice tree image and we click into it now the trees are kind of interspersed in the circles which again this could be countable for a cool effect so especially if I go ahead and fill that frame proportionally then we get back so depending on the image independent I would probably put the circles closer together I kind of mine are kind of far apart but if you put your shapes closer together or make different shapes or kind of like maybe spell out tree or the letter T or whatever it is then you can of course make that compound path and create that so that was number 10 we're already at number 11 already so here it is and this is I wish I had a better one to end on but it's still useful you know that lets say let's say we go back up here you know that if you want to let's grab a shape you know that if you want to fill that with a color you can go click on the fill and then you can go over to the color panel and then you can mix the color and then it will fill it with that color InDesign 101 you've been doing that for years but this color picker is more like InDesign based in some respects illustrator based but a lot of you are coming from the Photoshop world and you may be used to you may be used to the Photoshop way of doing things so here's a tip if you want the Photoshop color picker instead of the InDesign color picker double click on either the fill or the stroke icon in the tool panel just double click and boom and brings up the Photoshop style color picker so now you can type in your hexadecimal values you can choose RGB lab color CMYK and mix the colors in the spectrum the way you want you can work the way you used to from a InDesign slash I'm sorry for being a Photoshop user even though you're in InDesign so there is the unfortunately the last tip of the day tip number 11 so quick recap and here we'll pick that color quick recap you can apply the same effect to multiple frames or other frames by dragging the actual effects icon which I don't have because this one doesn't have any effects on it dragging that effects icon right there onto the edge of another frame number two you can apply the same size to multiple things that so you sized one we wanted the rest of these to be the same size so for example if I now size this again and I want these all to be that same size I can select them all and then I can do object transform again transform again and I don't know why that backfired on me but that did not work the way I did the first time Carly because I had done some other things in the meantime but transform again right after you do it should work fine just like I did earlier live corners clicking the layout yellow box here will make this bigger again clicking the yellow box activate your lot of corners holy bonus tip hold down your Shift key to make one corner work independently number four was the preview mode hold down the shift W while you're not typing text and you can go through your slides with your arrow keys shift W takes you back out and tip number five was content-aware fit so when you create a frame if you don't have this turned on in the preferences you can always turn it on in the properties panel so in the properties panel I can go to content work fit and then once I bring up or bring an image into it it should just oh I guess I did not have that on hang on it should just sorry it should just content to work fitted using it using Adobe sensei as long as I stopped clicking and making new frames there we go there we go and so we'll look at the content of the frame and then fit it perfectly on display document history hold down the command key go to about InDesign will show your history about your document not so much useful for an individual but definitely used for people to get documents from other people and we did the rainbow stroke and the feet stroke by creating new stroke styles named rainbow with a capital r corporation for a I'm trying to blink on what kind of stroke that is but it's not a - the opposite of a - let's do it this way cuz now it's gonna drive me crazy unless I look at it o stroke styles a new one and strike stripe rainbow that will give you rainbow or dashed name it feet with a capital F that will give you the feet one there may be others you never know try typing other things in it when you have nothing else to do when you're creating something new you have the ability to go in and reposition it without letting go so if you hold on your spacebar you can move it around before you let go and get it exactly where you wanted it to be that was number eight number nine was the grid if I feature so if I do the same thing but I use my up and right arrows and maybe down I can gratify that and create the frames that I want and of course number ten was making those into a compound path by hitting command eight or going up to object paths compound path and last but not least double clicking on the fill or the stroke to bring up the Photoshop style to color picker if you don't want to use the built in InDesign color picker eleven tips to blow your mind all right with that said cheers everybody thanks for watching I hope you got something out of this I look forward to seeing your sari I look forward to seeing your your rainbow strokes around your graphic design documents at least if you're doing gay pride stuff that'll work out perfectly and last but not least I may or may not do a stream in the morning but if not I'll be back next week because I'm on the road again starting tomorrow so with that said everyone thanks for watching and we will catch you on the next one now I will play the outro bye everybody [Music]

Channel: Terry White

Views: 48,870

Keywords: Terry White, InDesign, InDesign Tutorial, graphic design, tips and tricks, creative cloud

Id: 973M9j03bDE

Length: 29min 8sec (1748 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 26 2019