How to Make a Dynamic PDF Portfolio in InDesign

foreign got it okay so welcome to the group everybody my name is Cornelius show from the co-manager of the Adobe users group been part of the group for I don't keep track about 20 years I think it's been that long uh but uh as you know we meet Motley uh the second Thursday of every month uh most month I should say some months we make skip around the holidays whatever but typically the second Thursday every month and we talk everything Adobe and so uh we cover topics from flash well not flash anymore but uh Photoshop illustrator and many of the other applications I like to be able to teach them some additional application I think there's a new application called Adobe Express that just been recently uh released I need to look into that there's a 3D application I would like to look into and and teach on that so um anyway most of you guys are familiar with the platform so I'm not going to waste on waste any time I want to remind it to get started and uh with this presentation so Ramon you can get started as soon as uh I think uh Karen turns on the uh recorder if I think it's already our own it is yes the recording's on okay great all right let me go ahead and share my screen here and here we go all right let me close this down here okay all right thank you guys for having me and this as as Karen said this bit of a dress rehearsal I really do appreciate you guys letting me do this because uh I get all worked up and like nervous over this thing I just like I present all the time it's part of my job do you still get nervous yeah I get like I'm like uh and I can't sleep and it just like measures I just I don't know I guess I I want to do like a good job and sometimes I try too hard and then I like screw it up wow but no I hope I choose the resident expert when it comes to teaching Well normally but when it comes to going to Max when it really doesn't matter that much because you know it's it's not like they're paying me I mean they're paying me but the individual people that are there aren't being aren't paying me you know what I mean they're just attendees but I guess I want to put on the good show so uh and make it relevant and I guess I feel a little bit of competition because there's a lot of other instructors there and some really fantastic presenters and so um I sometimes get butterflies but uh they asked me what I wanted to do this year and I've had a lot of people come to me and ask me how to build a career uh and I'm not just talking about young people I'm talking you know older people too that want to reinvent themselves so I thought hmm I am going to present how to make a dynamic PDF portfolio in InDesign according to me okay uh my name is Roman I'm a designer teacher I'm also a work for a company called lumenbrite I'm also the founder of that company and we do digital design training mostly on the Adobe product line uh so you know why do you need to create a PDF portfolio you probably already have a portfolio online but creating a PDF portfolio allows you to kind of narrow your specialty so if on your website you do everything in the world you're a jack of all trades maybe on this PDF you are specialized and when you see that job offer for a graphic designer you're not sending them everything that you do but a very narrow specialty of what you want to present yourself with you can also keep your stuff more private uh I know my portfolio I keep it private because in the past I've had um actually some friends borrow some of the content and use it in their portfolio and I didn't I didn't really feel comfortable with that I once worked with a client who put everything up on his website and his competitors were taking some of those images and claiming that their those images belong to them and they were getting jobs and so uh putting things into PDF portfolio and sending it to them to a client emailing them that gives you a lot more control printable uh yes maybe and that's that can be a nice thing today because you can't print web pages very well and sometimes a client an employer may want to print that out and take it to the boardroom and be offline sometimes it's required a lot of these job postings that you'll find even on Google uh you'll have an upload that lets you upload a document there's no space for a URL it lets you upload a document and probably the most important reason why you might want a PDF portfolio is that sometimes potential opportunity will go to your website to see your portfolio and they're confused they don't know what they're looking at they're like okay what does this guy do he does all these things I want him to do this and so you can really make a portfolio simple and to the point so that even the lowest denominator can understand what you're presenting on what you're trying to show them so I have a couple portfolios that I want to show you these are real life portfolios this first one here is from a gent named John Reynolds I've actually built his website for his portfolio at Max a couple years ago and so he's a graphic designer uh works for a Disney Channel now and he's a seasoned veteran okay he's got you know silver Harry's a silver fox uh so he's got quite a portfolio in here and you'll see that there's some merch these are kind of like mocks right they're mock-ups of his work but in actuality these are real printed items that he's taking photos of but I also recommend using mocks if you don't have these uh on actual uh physical materials notice the little captions he has down here this is really simple like you know he's a graphic designer you're not wondering is he does he build websites um I don't know what does he do he does graphics and so you'll notice his little totem at the bottom his little icon at the bottom it's pretty nice and got a lot of different bodies of work logos posters and so forth um it got him a job it keeps him a job so this platform this kind of method of way he's building his portfolio is working well for him so on that topic you know you may be ready to build your portfolio and you're wondering you know where do I start I know personally I have a real hard time making my own stuff like I'm my worst My Own Worst Enemy I built things and I started looking at my portfolio and I'm like man I'm not good enough this sucks right start putting an emotion to my portfolio piece because it reminds me of that project and maybe it was a challenging project and then I just I get Frozen and so it's nice to go get inspiration from other places and I do this on any project but one place that you know Adobe likes to go into is I behance and I like going there too I just did a search for portfolios and I can find tons of portfolios up here some awesome portfolios and some not so awesome one thing I can tell you right now though don't put your face in your portfolio putting your face in your portfolio is a real fast way of getting your portfolio just completely rejected because that company may not want to be accused of racial bias and so you just put your face in there and that could jeopardize your chances of even getting in the job so behance is one option another place you can go Adobe stock they got some templates up here for portfolios I just did a search for portfolio and a lot of these are for free not all of them are great some of them are pretty cool here's one that is not for free it's going to cost you about 10 bucks and it's pretty Snappy looking I personally maybe I might buy this and borrow some elements from it but personally um it makes me feel like kind of my content is going to be stuck into prison uh and when you make your portfolio you want something that's going to be easy to update and you don't want the template to control the content you want the content to be fluid enough you want the template to be fluid enough that your content can flow into it and you're not having to redesign things every time you have a different graphic but this is another option another thing that I like to do when I'm looking for ideas is I'll go out in the world I live in Suburbia so when I go outside I see brick houses and trees and a lady walking the dog and I really need to see something that's a little more inspirational so I've collected stuff over the years is a small collection of things that I have that I use sometimes this is a little Zine uh door knocker for a hotel I think I was staying at the Virgin Hotel in Chicago and I got this and I was like wow this is really pretty I'm gonna take that postcards menus a magazine I got on the airplane and I collect these things and that way when I'm feeling like I need to build something I don't know what to make I needed some inspiration on how to line something up maybe add a caption or whatever I go and find content different places I'll go I'll go to Barnes Noble I'll go to a cool bookstore I'll go to coffee shops anywhere I can find information some of it's very corporate some of it's very Punk and very different some of it's even obscene but I'll take that information I'll grab things that I like even stuff from highbrow places like museums and I'll get ideas from that excuse me so what to present your best work only your best work don't show them the stuff that's kind of so so um because when you show everything it's said that you're only as good as your worst work and maybe I made that up but I think if someone sees something in your portfolio that's not very good compared to the rest they think well maybe he'll make that bad thing for me too and so only show your best work and that removes any doubt and it's the best work according to what you think you know it's all about your subjective opinions and ideas because you're the one making that presentation so I got another portfolio to show you that's kind of different from John's this guy here is named Scott writings he's one of our he actually met Scott he came to take some training with us in Premiere in After Effects and he showed me his portfolio and I just I really liked it first of all he's got his his information here uh and as I go through here he's got some logos notice that this Title Here throughout the pages stays consistent and it even changes it's got a nice separation bar he's got these captions he's using some mocks to mock out the work because some people will look at your work and they'll see these nice rectangles and they don't understand that this was actually part of the magazine I think his is very different than John Reynolds portfolio because it shows not a specialization but a really wide generalization of skills it's a different strategy and guess what he competed for a national job posting and he won it so now he works at UT Austin as a art director and he's doing very well for himself so um you know just a different strategy and it worked for him so how should you present your work we saw two different ideas there first of all good layout use some captions keep it simple okay keep it simple maybe use some mock-ups uh and we're going to talk a little about more about the good layout in a second in fact that's going to be my main presentation to you is how to do a good layout with InDesign I got some ideas to share with you recommendations for Success when you're making a portfolio make sure you know who you're sending this to at least a little bit so you're not sending something that's completely irrelevant you want to have a reaction from them make sure you specialize to fit the job so if they're asking for a creative director don't send them your ux portfolio send them the creative Direction work that you've done that's related to the job and good idea in my opinion maybe a bad idea to you I don't know submit your work for review to different people maybe the people that you respect in the industry maybe even to your mom but you know be patient with those results that you get back the feedback you get because it could be a little frustrating take with a grain of salt and if you're finding some commonality between everyone make changes make sure there's no typos or mistakes it's the most simple thing to screw up on and also uh the most silly thing to to make those mistakes on also again only show your best work quality over quantity if you only have three awesome pieces to show then just throw show that make sure you use a clean easy to use update design I'm going to show you some ideas right now and if you don't have a lot of work then create tribute work let me show you an example here uh this gentleman here drone van heerden he made a tribute to the Adobe Creative Cloud okay he wasn't commissioned by Adobe to do this work he did it on his own it's beautiful graphics and so I I ran across this just by chance well messing around on my hands I like them so much that I contacted him and we commissioned him and we used that artwork on our site and so we even use it in some of our other graphics and these Graphics here my daughter Dulce she's uh 24 now and she's actually a graphic designer as well and she's actually going to Max so we have a generational thing happening at Max which is kind of cool because I've been going to Mac since about 2003 I'm old um but now you know she's going to be there too and so these are Graphics that she made using some of these material assets that we got from this gentleman here so I mean tribute Graphics work especially if they're nicely done and I mean for drone here he Not only was able to present something that he thought was pretty cool uh he made a sale and he's here at Adobe Max uh showing his work I mean maybe not physically here but in his spirit is here through his work so tribute projects can be a good thing maybe you make something for Coca-Cola because you like Coca-Cola and you make some nice graphics and artwork uh and you present that as a tribute project to them there's nothing wrong with that so we're going to use a grid system to do our design we're going to use color typography space and geometry so that things look symmetrical or at least interesting so when building the project uh I look again for found content and I wanted to build a PDF portfolio for my daughter Luca so this is her website and she's got her portfolio already up here so I thought you know what I'm going to take some of these elements some of the design of her site and I'm going to build a PDF portfolio but again it's not a website it's going to be a PDF so what I did is I went ahead and looked around and I found some catalog samples in fact I got this in the mail the other day this was a advertisement for Amazon notice it's got a nice grid system in here that's the first thing I noticed I'm like I get these uh this thing from Amazon's this beautiful uh Christmas guide for buying toys and I don't have kids anymore not little kids so I'm assuming uh Mr Bezos daddy Bezos wants me to buy things for for myself I suppose but I look at over there there's another one for floor.com look at these nice beautiful images look there's a there's like a common gutter right here hmm nice grids more gutters okay it's very consistent in this floor.com a brochure come over here and oh look at those sexy grids I mean they're so nice they really are I just I can look at these Furniture magazines all day long and not buy a single thing but I just like how nicely they're laid out with these cool pieces of furniture this is from the same company more grids very consistent very well presented this is another one which uh here that didn't display very well but uh this one here is from I think CB2 and it's a grid system but you know they're cool cats so they kind of broke the grid a little bit so I'm going to show you what I mean about this grid system here in just a second so you got this grid system down here it's a little different than the others so we're going to take a look at that right now so I have a an example here let's say you didn't have a grid you just you got into InDesign you're ready to start designing something and you got a graphic I found this cool graphic on Adobe stock and I pull this over here and do something like this I'm like okay uh should this be up here should this be snapping to the margins I I don't know where to put it um and that's always been my problem is I don't know exactly where things should be like well you're a designer you're supposed to know and like ah I don't know so instead of randomly just throwing things out here I can add a grid system I'm going to go to layout and choose create guides I get this create guides menu or a little panel show up a little window show up and I can add rows add these little teal or cyan row colored rows out here and these are columns I'm just going to add several in here this gutter is the space in between here I'm going to leave those as they are and make sure I have my preview checked on and I can move these to the margin or the page I'm going to make them fit within my margins that I have here and hit okay then I take my graphic and maybe I stick it right here I can stick it you know wherever I'd like to but I'm going to stick it right there I'm going to make that fit right within that grid system there and I can go to my properties and I can use a fit frame proportionally and that looks pretty good when I have titles like this I don't like them separated from their text these headings so I'm going to go ahead and remove this and I'm going to put it within the body of this content here and paste that in hit enter and the reason why I like doing that is I can go to this title and I can add space after here in my paragraph section A lot easier and it's one consistent unit it's not separate bits and pieces that I have to work with now this has a lot of words going across so I'm going to bring this in rule of thumb is that there shouldn't be more than about 10 words per line in any particular column so I could bring this here and drag that up if I zoom in a little closer I can see that this is not lining up to the grid so I'm going to line that to the grid and this one here I'm going to lie to the grid as well it gives me a nice gutter space in between here and I can move this here or if I'm like okay it's too narrow I want it wider well I can move it there and a lot of this kind of like unsureness if you will uh is kind of solved by doing uh using a grid I can turn off that grid here and I have my nice looking document everything is even on the sides I don't have to worry about being off a little bit and that works pretty well so let's take a look at a grid I know I just threw that as an example here but let's look at the anatomy of the grid so I have this example here with a grid these are called modular grids okay I have columns I have rows these little sections in here called modules these lines are called flow lines the space in between all these little modules is called the gutter spatial zones make up more than one module and then of course you have your whoa that looks freaky there design it's my bleed line I have a slug for notes and then of course I have this little area down here for markers Runners folios Etc if you're not using a lot of Graphics you could use a single column Grid or a two column grid if especially let's say you're a copywriter or if you have a lot of testimonials a copy you could use these types of grids again try to keep it about 10 words per line otherwise people have a hard time reading your columns they lose their place if you see someone reading your portfolio with their finger then they either need glasses or you have too many lines too many words per line so keep it to about 10 if you can here's a two column grid and a multi-column grid with some images and then the modular Grays okay this is going across a spread across a like a magazine and I can move this here these little grid these little flow lines tell me where I can move this but at the same time you don't have to keep these as they are you can put things halfway in the middle if you want you can break this Grid it's not something that you have to adhere to the grid is there to serve you not the other way around so I can move these modules around I can even move them off to a bleed if I want to like you saw in that CB2 advertisement they even had some of these images overlapping other images which creates kind of an interesting appeal does that work sometimes it does sometimes it looks awkward but you as a designer have to make that choice because you're the one that's making this stuff right the grid is there to help you is an example of a three by four grid with no gutter an example of an 8 by 12 grid with no gutter and this is 11 by 15. my favorite my magic numbers are 11 by 15. okay you could pick up a design book and they say no use 12 by 16 but personally I've been using modular grids for quite a while now I've been doing this stuff for about 20 years now okay oh my gosh I'm getting old but I found that I didn't use grids for a long time because I didn't like the busyness of them but now I use them and I find that there's a lot of columnists in here there's structure you know where things should go but you can always change things you have flexibility to do so so I'd like to uh get into a bit of a project here let me let me start that project now I'm going to do file new document and I actually have a something already kind of ready to go so I created a new page I have my branded colors from dudas portfolio and I have a grid this is a grid is kind of locked down because a lot of times instead of just putting a grid right here in your regular body Pages you can put your grid instead of your pages here you can put them in your master page so if I go to my master page I have this uh grid here and I can move these grid lines around I can change this or I can just completely overwrite them so I'm going to go to layout choose actually I'm going to go to ruler guides ruler guides will let me change the color of this grid I have a hard time seeing these cyan lines so I'm going to go to Orange and hit OK and then I'm going to go to layout create guides and from here I can make sure previews on and I can add my magic numbers this will be 11. and this will be 15. and I can remove the existing guides that are there because I don't need them anymore I'm going to hit OK and there you go we got a nice tight grid that will accept lots of beautiful content I'm going to go ahead and use this placeholder rectangle frame tool and this just allows you to draw something that would represent an image eventually and plop that there and I'm also going to add another one this is going to be for my text frame that I'm going to stick in there this is going to be my caption for this image in fact I'm going to make that maybe a little more narrow and I want some more space in between these so I'm going to break the grid because I can do that that's what the grid is for it's for you not for itself okay I'm going to move this down a little bit and that way I'll have more space between my images and my caption later on I'll add some page numbers and so forth this is just a placeholder I can change its size later when I want to when I go back into my regular Pages you'll see that everything is locked down so I don't accidentally move it I'm going to go ahead and add a few pages in here and I can move these Pages next to each other so that it's easier for me to see no one's going to see my InDesign document it's here to serve me so maybe I use my page tool over here to just kind of separate them page tool does a lot of it has a lot of features but I'm just using it to give a little bit of Gap here so it looks nice for me as I build this out so I have some graphics that do some build she's used in different projects and I want to put something in there and so it's all locked down so to unlock it I press Ctrl shift click or command shift click on the Mac and that will open up these placeholders so I can put content in them you can also unlock the grid if you need to in the same way so I'm going to insert an image here and the first image I'm going to insert is actually this illustrator graphic these are some logos that she made these icons she made for this company that she's been working for now I already laid them out in here and rather than try to drag each one of these icons in individually inside of InDesign I can just take these highlight them and drag them into my library as I did here these are the CC libraries which is part of the Creative Cloud if you're not currently using libraries I highly recommend it and maybe I'll sell you on the on these right now so if I go back to InDesign I have my CC libraries yeah I've organized these libraries already with these different Graphics because you can group things in here real nicely and I have this icon set so I can just drag this out and I can click right inside that frame if it doesn't land inside that frame you can undo and eventually it will land inside there it kind of takes a little bit of finessing and I can go in here and make that fit a little nicer within that frame down here I can grab my type tool and I can click inside here I'm going to type in here icon design set hit enter and maybe I go to type and insert some placeholder text so basically I'm going to do that on each of these Pages I've decided though that I want to add some more pages down here before I continue uh about you know talking about this project for these icons I want to work on a different project so add some more pages drag these up and again this is just a personal preference something I like doing you don't have to do this when you do your work but and just pull these apart so they're not on all on top of each other on this box right here again I'm going to unlock this control click Ctrl shift click and in this box right here I'm going to insert a Photoshop file but this Photoshop file isn't in my CC libraries file it's in a different folder it's in an actual folder so I'm going to do file place and in here I have this uh Adobe Forbes Magazine mock-up that Deuce it did a project for the Adobe advertising cloud and I'm going to go ahead and make this larger maybe something like that and go back to my fitting properties and fit that in there so this is from a folder this is not from a cc Library I could go ahead and type some text in there and move on now I have a frame in here that I'm going to unlock this placeholder frame but I'm going to select it and delete it because I want to add something different in here I'm going to grab my placeholder frame again and I'm going to click and drag out of frame and then I'm going to use my right arrow key to add two more frames and I'm just going to plop that down make sure it lines up within those cells Within These modules and now I can insert images in here I happen to have these images that I that she made if you use this cool like plexus look it's got these polygons so I'm going to stick that in there and put this this dude and this lady with her dog right in there I'm going to pull this one over a little bit because she's walking her dog and I want to see more of that I can pull that all the way over to the margin I'm going to go ahead and highlight all three of these go to my properties and from here I can go ahead and choose this fitting option all right I want to see more of this guitar man so I can just pull them over here and what's nice about the grid is I don't have to guess should it be here should it be here I just smack that over to the margin now oops I had all those selected let me try that again you can pull that all the way over here I can see more of this guy if you want rounded Corners remember in InDesign you can click on these images click on that little yellow rectangle you can drag that in to add some nice rounded corners now I want to show you kind of the power of the round tripping features from InDesign to illustrator and to photoshop so I'm going to take this image first and it's a Photoshop file so if I want to edit it traditionally I'll go to right click edit original and this would launch Photoshop and in Photoshop this PSD would open now this is a mock that those have found on the internet it's a free asset that she located and got a free license for and you can find mocks yourself all over the place in fact on Adobe stock uh you can find mocks for sale it'll cost you about 10 bucks a pop you can find a lot of them free on the internet too the nice thing about the ones you find on sites where you actually buy them is they're well built and the ones that you find on the web it's Hit or Miss she got lucky by finding this one here because I think it's pretty nice looking um but I can take this right side these have a bunch of smart objects in here and I can double click that to get into this PSB file and I can modify this because I decided that I want to feature uh this guy instead say I have all these Graphics in here but I want to feature that guy so I just save this file I hit Ctrl s or command s the mac and when I go back to this Photoshop file it's been updated I also have the left side and this took like nothing to make this mock because it was a free asset but I could also buy it especially if it's something important for me of my portfolio buy something nice for myself and look how professional it is no one's going to question what these assets are for it's for a magazine so I can save this document and when I go back into InDesign ta-da it's been updated sometimes it won't update immediately and you'll have to go to your Links panel there'll be a little yellow exclamation mark and you have to double click on it to update that image and that's something that's common when you're round tripping images between Photoshop and illustrator however if you're using images that are coming from your Creative Cloud libraries and I know this is from a library because it has this little icon versus linked assets that have a little chain link I can right click on this and I could do edit but instead I'm going to go to my library and find this asset right click and choose edit and what it does is it launches an illustrator but it opens up the asset that's located on Adobe server so this is a cloud asset I'm going to go ahead and add a different gradient background here so I'm going to select him and whoa excellent that looks really cool but that's not exactly what I wanted okay I'm going to select just the background here and so I got the background selected and I'm going to use this new freeform gradient tool what's interesting about this tool is that it's using adobe's machine learning platform Adobe Sensei and it just creates beautiful colors I can click off and back on it again and sometimes it'll give me different choices I think that one looks great I don't know exactly how it works I'm assuming it's probably taking some inspiration from the image in front of it but all I know is it does a better job than when I pick the dumpy colors that I usually pick when I'm making gradients so I can save this file go back into InDesign and Bam immediately there's no yellow triangle with an exclamation that I have to double click on Works immediately and go back into illustrator and I can even open up these assets here directly from here where I can go to edit to edit them and I can do the same thing so I'm going to select the background here that looks pretty cool save that one there I can open up this woman walking the dog select the background here and add that there and cycle back and forth to find something that's more appropriate that makes sense to me so pretty neat I'm going to go ahead and stick with that one there and save I go back to InDesign and they've been updated I don't know if I saved that one because I'm looking here oh I need to just chill out that's why you need to do it it's updating so this is a great way to round trip between these programs I prefer putting things in the CC libraries because it does operate faster but putting things in a regular folder works too um I do use zc libraries all the time but I also am a little paranoid so I usually keep a hard copy on a on a backup folder anyways uh I wanted to replace this one that looks like the guitar is is part of this guy's backpack so I want to use this other image instead and what's nice about this Links panel over here which is one of my favorite panels in InDesign is I can take this guy with the backpack and I can push this button right here that says relink from CC libraries and so what this lets me do is I can push that and select the graphic that I want to swap it with which is that one there and I can say relink and that image has now been re-linked and I didn't have to go and drag it out and resize it and whatever it just relink that and it'll also relink anywhere it lives within this document this PSD is not a library asset it shows me that this is also a raster image it's a resolution uh doc resolution based document so I can see that the ppis it's got to be at least 300 PPI right to be printable and its actual ppi is 300 but since I made it smaller than the original it's 392 so definitely ready for print these are illustrator Graphics so I don't really have to worry about them and uh that's how that goes I'll continue adding additional images so I've kind of done that already added some images just blink your eyes really hard right now okay and now open them oops open them now okay and so I have my Graphics in here and I can turn off my grid if the grid is getting on your nerves you can go to your properties and you can turn them off this way off and on you can also go to preview mode over here and you can turn on preview I like cycling between uh preview mode using shortcuts and so you can do that as well just cycling between preview mode and shortcuts uh so I got different Graphics in here these were some banner ads and I went ahead and laid these out inside of Illustrator like I did the icons because it'd be too much work to have to deal with a bunch of little bits and these are some door knocker and a brochure that she made and there's a a mock of a of a website that was related to this campaign I have some mobile apps that were using these icons she made and so this is a small sample of her portfolio I also added uh this up here now to finish this uh here it has her logo and of course some other information I'm going to add some icons down here from my CC libraries and so I have some social media icons that I got from font awesome I'm gonna drag these out here and instead of just clicking one at a time I'm going to click and drag and then push my right arrow key a couple three times and hold my shift key and snap that to there and there my icons get thrown out there all at one time I can also take all of this here click and drag on it and I can drag that into my library and that creates something called a snippet so I could go to my last page where it's my thank you page and I could just drag this out here and I can ensure that it looks just like the one on the front page so I can move that around as needed and I think that's really cool that you can copy and paste a whole chunk and use that in other projects as well so I got a pretty uh comprehensive portfolio here but I want to do some more so what I'm going to do here first of all is I'm going to go to this and I want to change and add some Styles that's one thing that you can do that's really going to save you time is making sure that you use Styles in this document even your portfolio so I'm going to change this here and I'm going to use this font I found on Adobe fonts called Rock grotesque it's the only one showing it here because I have these filters on I've turned on the Creative Cloud filter for Creative Cloud apps uh fonts and I've also favorited this font here so it's the only one that shows up so I'm using Rock grotesque here and this will be bold and then down here for the rest of this I'm going to go ahead and choose Rock grotesque again regular and I'll go ahead and add some space after there it looks pretty nice there you go and I'm going to make Styles out of this so put my cursor in there I can go up here and create a new style I'm going to call this head three now this text down here I'm going to go ahead and trade you style here I'm going to call this a body and I have that going on I would go ahead and open up my paragraph Styles panel from here and I would click in each of these sections and add my Styles going one at a time and changing that out so add Styles and we're going to revisit this here in just a moment but another thing I'd like to do is go back to my master page and add some variables variables are really nice because they do a lot of work for me and they make my portfolio kind of dynamic so I'm going to add a footer down here this is going to be matching the color of her branded site and I'm going to go ahead and add a little line here with a stroke of two and maybe add some Japanese dots just like her website has so I got that going on I think that looks kind of cool I'm going to use my type tool put out some text out here and this is going to say her name whoops too many r's that's a okay at a bar and then I'm gonna put her what she does which is going to be a graphic designer but I'm going to add this in just a little bit so I'm going to leave that there for now I'm going to jump back into my regular pages and go here and I'm going to remove this title which is you know graphic designer title and instead of adding a regular you know text title I'm going to go to type and choose text variables and I'm going to define a new variable I'm going to make a new variable called Java this is going to be a custom text variable and it's going to be called in fact we'll change it we'll call this a creative director okay it says create a director job that she's going for and hit OK I'm going to choose insert there it is and hit done and this is no longer regular text it's now a variable but I go back to my master pages and right here at this insertion point I can go to type text variables and I can insert oh look at that it shows up job and so I can put this in its place where it goes down below I'm just going to go ahead and change the uh justification here to the right and stick this somewhere down here for now I can line that up a little more perfectly later but if I go back to my regular body pages and I want to change this maybe uh I probably want to remove it from the home page too I can delete that from the home page and it'll be on the other pages but now I could go to this variable that I just defined you know job and choose edit and maybe she says no you know what I'm going to just stick as a graphic designer for this particular job offering and hit OK that she's now oh what that changed it there look at that did it change it on home it did so she's now a graphic designer and I can make those changes as I go along without having to worry whether or not I changed it everywhere um so as I go along these pages I can continue changing and adding things now this is a different mock and I may decide you know maybe this mock looks too busy go find something else a little tip is if you're looking for um app mocks like mocks that look like a phone or like a web browser go look for Adobe XD Max or aphigma Mox and you can download those usually for free and you can use those interfaces to put your web and mobile Graphics in so uh I'm going to show you next another example here but before I move on actually you know I really like to add some more decoration to this caption right here and so I'm going to go to my properties and this is called Head one head three I'm gonna go and go to the style options of head three and I can go to rules I can turn on the rule above and make this say you know two points and I'm going to change this to this color here and I'm going to add the Japanese dots and I can move this offset it so it's the top of this text but you'll notice that it's outside of the frame of the text frame so there's this little option here to keep inside the frame and that way it'll line up nicely with my beloved grid okay I can hit OK and this Style's been updated in fact anywhere I have this title now has that there and so this would provides kind of some separation maybe a little bit of decoration but adding these rules is another way of communicating it's kind of saying like this is important this is a box just like you would bold something I could also do things to kind of add balance with boxes colored boxes specifically so I could go here and maybe add a box Behind These Graphics maybe I would line that up just like so and I could add a gray fill maybe about like 25 or something and I could send that to the back and what that would do first of all It lines up to my grid easily I could even you know pull this behind this other one if I want to but it's kind of like look here's some mobile phones to have in your in your clutches and uh again the benefit there is so that you could have some emphasis some kind of interestingness on the page now one thing to keep in mind um is that you may want to put some page numbers up here and we can leverage those uh variables once again so I'm going to go back to my parent page and I'm going to add a another box up here and in here this is going to have a couple things first of all I'm going to add something called a running header and I'm going to add a page number so the running header is going to suck up the heading and pull it up into this text frame so I can do that by going to type text variables but before I add it it's right here I'm going to Define it so I'm going to go to Define I'm going to choose this running header and go to edit and running header is fine but it's not going to be called the basic paragraph it's going to be called the head 3. I'm going to hit OK and I choose insert there it is I hit done and right after this I'm going to add another bar and I'll put the page number which is type insert special character markers current page number uh that looks pretty go ahead and add that to the right and so now when I go to my regular bottom which is sucked up into the Touch number same here cons web icons this one doesn't work because this one doesn't have the style on it so I would need to go here and get to my paragraph Styles and apply that head three and as soon as I do that and swipe down back up again it is now it now says email marketing so just to show you kind of a more complete version of this I can go to uh this other file here and it's asking for an updated modified file because I modified this graphic earlier and so I changed my mind you know over here in this example I had these captions over here on the right hand side and I decided I didn't like that so I moved them over here to the left hand side and I did that with all of them in fact that's what you're seeing here you're seeing that uh I moved all these over because I thought it looked better and that's one of the great things of having a grid is that you can make these changes last minute without having to uh build a new Grid or something in this example here I went ahead and also added another colored bar to add some geometry maybe even some balance and symmetry I added color here add visual interest and and just kind of beauty okay um so as I go to this portfolio I don't know about this mock you know it's got a lot of business it looks cool but you know what am I selling your am I selling the mocker am I selling the web page you know that's something that you can analyze and kind of ask people when they see this and they're like what am I selling you're like an Apple computer Maybe and so as I go from page to page everything should look quite consistent I get to the last page I went ahead and did something with the header there and we have what I'll call a complete portfolio she has a lot more work but this is the body work that I chose to put in here now I want to export this as a PDF so I'm going to choose file export and there's other work that I didn't show you that we don't have time to see such as adding the hyperlinks and such but I'm going to save this as 0 3 PDF for now and I'll choose save and in here I'm going to choose all for all pages okay I want the view to fit the page I want everything to be nice and fit in the in the window in acrobat this is going to be a single page I want to this is my favorite button right here show me the PDF after you finish exporting it other times if you don't do that it's it's stored in your folder and you have to go look for it and find it to open it up optimize for fast webview if you intend on putting this on the web you can even tag it if you'd like if you're concerned about people reading this with a screen reader if you have hyperlinks make sure you turn that on and now I can go and Export this thing and so I've exported you know it's doing something right now you can see it's it's working and generating that PDF now I'm not completely done with this PDF because I have there's something else I want to do with it and for some reason it didn't open uh I think it it didn't like me today so I'm gonna have to go manually open it there we go okay so there's your PDF the hyperlinks work and I can hopefully someone that opens us up will understand that there are more pages and that they have to scroll but you know working with the lowest denominator it's that guy in higher in the HR department that's fantastic putting together all this all these different uh portfolios and resumes and so he's tired I want to make this really easy and I'd like to have this opened up over here so that he they can see all the pages of this document but if I open this up and save it and send it to him he's going to see this when he opens it up so I can go to file and choose properties and from here I can go to this initial view Tab and I can say Don't just show me the page show me the pages panel and page and that way this navigation pane will open up with those pages and it'll remember next time someone else opens it up another highly recommended thing is to go into description and add a title so I might say here graphic design portfolio or something and I could put the author name oops uh subject but I can add keywords so I could say Austin graphic designer comma designer uh Austin uh so forth these are all keywords and these keywords will allow this PDF to be searchable on different search appliances including uh on Google and so these keywords will help this PDF be found if that's what I want in fact you can put words in here that don't even exist inside the document and this document is has metadata that can now be searched for and found that way so I'm going to hit OK I'm going to save this document and I'm going to see if this works I'm going to close this document down and I'm going to reopen it ah look at that it opened up with the sidebar flung open and that's exactly what I want uh the only trouble is if I go back to InDesign and I re-export this well I'm going to lose all of this wonderful metadata and so what I suggest you do is instead of adding the metadata inside of acrobat you can go to file info and this is where you can add that information instead and that way every time you export it this information is retained so you can add your title your author maybe your description you can add as much as you want I recommend adding title uh description maybe author and for sure keywords and so when you export that you'll have a really nice PDF that has that information you will have to come back in here and open up this navigation pane each time but I think it's a worthwhile thing I've had situations where a client opened up my PDF and was surprised because there was only one page in the document they didn't realize that they had to scroll to the next page and so you know I don't know what is going on in people's heads and I want to make them very simple very simple for them so they can get to my portfolio and see what I want them to see uh anyways that's my presentation I hope it was enjoyable and interesting I'm here now to answer any questions I see that there's quite a few things inside of the document here uh and of course you can just shout them out now as well if you prefer um but yeah thank you very much for listening thank you very much Roman this was a terrific presentation I think it'll be useful to many many people and not that hard to follow um so thank you a lot of what went into the chat room I think were notes and comments about what you were saying uh but one question that I just added was you were talking about keywords would it be advantageous and a good idea to include keywords describing the objects that you design such as book covers or door hangers and yes that's a great idea in fact I'm going to write that down as a note um yeah because I mean PDFs aren't really searchable right I mean outside they're like this closed box you know when you do a search for PD for something it never looks inside the PDF you know and I'm also wondering if something um descriptive like great design putting you know if somebody were looking for a good designer would that be a keyword yeah yeah that sounds great and you know Geographic helps too right um uh Dulce applied for a job uh in London and she was very well qualified for it and everything but um she didn't get the job she didn't get considered for the job because the employment company considered only local people first and kicked out every other every other um and so in kind of working up this presentation I've been talking to a lot of different employment agencies and stuff and they say that generally they look for local people first because it's cheaper and it's just a lot easier to deal with people that already live in your city than having to have someone move on your behalf and so if you're applying for a job out of City you may want to just say that you're already in that City uh just an idea that's been a feedback that I've gotten from many people yeah so anyways do you have any other questions folks I see there's something else down here okay yeah one one sort of question is I think that and it could just be that you're used to calling Master Pages Master pages but didn't they rename them parent Pages or something like that they did they did they did they did they're no longer called Masters they're called parents now we only have edible issues with the pages not enslavement issues yeah there's no no one pay no pages are being uh oppressed okay yes well it's funny because Adobe made that version change and um they made this announcement that adobe is inclusive and they're not going to allow this instead of changing this to make people happy not trigger anyone however I taught frame maker today which is like a technical version of InDesign and they still call them Master pages over there so you know and he got around to it yet I guess I haven't gotten around to it right yeah we're like with apple got a pregnant man and everything so he got a pregnant man well icon you know yeah they do oh geez yeah you know um I don't know I mean I master does I mean tell me if I'm wrong but Master doesn't mean it's labor enslavement it means it means a master of of something yeah controls yeah you could be a master of your craft doesn't mean you you got a slave underneath you right right exactly in fact you didn't you have apprentices right yes that will eventually become a master and or like in this case the master it's really a boilerplate you know it's like a digital Master it's right it's all templates you know I mean it's a template it's a Master Copy the master key yeah I just think they wanted to be cool okay no they just you know everybody everybody got to bow down to the politically correctness yeah yeah I guess so there is another question in the chat room I think from Sherry which is how does the page tool and control shift click work to lock or unlock Pages would you show and recap that part more slowly sure sure thing so if you have um let me just make a more simple example here so let's say you have a document and you have um something that was made inside the parent Pages maybe a rectangle okay I'm just going to color this a more obvious fill color blue and it's in my parent pages thank you very much by the way for for that feedback Karen because oh my gosh at the previous Max I got a bad eval from one person because I told the audience I said I know web design is hard but you know you have to be tough you have to just be a man about it oh no no and I said or a woman or whatever you want to be I was like oh and I got a review from someone that says I and binary a non-binary and I don't appreciate the comment that he made and I hope that next year Adobe finds instructors that are more sensitive and I was like oh my gosh um so I got in trouble but um anyways I talked to my uh lead the guy that I work with at Adobe and he's like f them I'm like okay it wasn't I didn't mean that response because you can't please everyone whatever um but this item is locked right now because I put it inside my parent pages so to unlock it on your Mac it's going to be command shift click or PC control shift click and that will unlock that element from the master page so that you can manipulate it over here once you've unlocked it though as far as I know there's not a way to lock it back into the master page it's it's now it's now free okay and it's it's going to it's going to free it's now free and it's gonna get on a boat and go to Washington and become and become a senator okay hahaha and so yeah so I guess that's how that works um I think that's funny uh for the most part though you know you can always go back and and you know reapply a master page but for the most part you know like over here in this example you know there were some page numbers I routed this rectangle and when I did this master page element was underneath the rectangle so sometimes you have to unlock these types of things so that they can fit underneath other things on these regular pages on these parent on these uh child pages you know so that was a great question uh how do you want to chop up the pages with page tool um so what I do to separate these because I don't like it when they're all smashed together just like visually it bothers me so when you have a page you can just grab this page tool and just click on them and don't drag these insides or anything because if you do you're going to resize the page instead oops like I don't want to do that now that's like something yeah but in the middle yeah just grab it in the middle in negative space not where there's an object exactly and and you can even drag it downward if you if that's your thing you know what I mean if that's something you like yeah this is I I don't use the page tool for much but I love having some separation between my pages so that when I look at my documents it doesn't look like they're all smashed into one I like that and yeah that freeform tool I don't know how it's working I did some searching for it I've talked to the product manager and they're like it's AI I'm like yeah but how does it determine its colors and they're like and so uh I don't know I think it's really neat because I tend to make some pretty ugly gradients personally and this just makes you know really beautiful gradients for me but yeah yeah I didn't know about that page tool that's very interesting cool all right well thank you guys uh thank you for a great presentation Roman I'll offer one other suggestion for your presentation and this just might be my personal preference but if you can make your cursor Arrow icon larger it's easier to follow when you're presenting good deal and also try not to Jiggle It Around unnecessarily yeah that's not going to happen Okay let me tell you if it's a nervous twitch yeah yeah actually sometimes I will jiggle it because it makes it right it also calls attention to where it is yeah so in some ways I don't know if that's a feature but yeah that on the max it makes it bigger oh I didn't realize that that's interesting yeah I wish it was more controlled though because it's like you really got to jiggle it to make it big you know like that I think that it's a setting you can choose there's also an add-on called Mouse pose that is very very helpful oh cool m-o-u-s-a-p-o-s-a I think cool awesome well super thank you very much for this and I hope you are a big hit in Max too bad we can't write your evaluations from here yeah well I'm supposed to they they record it but I Got a notification today that some of uh that we have to be real careful on what we show and so like those magazine Snippets that I have in there and some even some of the portfolios are like uh we don't know if you should show that I'm like really uh because they're afraid that it's like copyrighted or something I'm like well it's in a presentation it's not like I'm trying to make it my own you know um but yeah we'll see they're always real sensitive about that stuff but no I really appreciate the feedback folks it's really helpful thank you well super thank you yay Cornelius do you want to do your demo with InDesign at this point oh you got my Adobe Illustrator yeah actually I don't know why I keep saying InDesign because I've been listening to in design all night okay I'm Gonna Give You Up I'm gonna give you a quick uh quick version of it and then uh you can review the video to um you know figure out how to do it because I'm not

Channel: Austin Adobe User Group

Views: 10,182

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Id: HRIlRCvdqJE

Length: 64min 6sec (3846 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 23 2022