InDesign Frame Tips and Tricks

[Music] [Music] alright happy Tuesday everybody welcome welcome welcome it's that time of the week and ah yes I am back from vacation but it is that time of the week to do our InDesign Tuesday so welcome everyone I see a bunch of people come into the room already mark about dear Coleen as usual welcome it off to fear welcome as well Steve glad you're here all the way from New Zealand and that is awesome and Patrick thanks for being here from Ireland by a chess LOF hopefully I said that correctly did it justice Amy thanks for being here as well so today we're going to take a look at we're actually do kind of even though they're not directly tied together we're going to kind of do a continuation of my last stream my last stream was based on just all kinds of text linking techniques that people seem to really like especially people that are new to InDesign or maybe need of a refresher today we're gonna do the same kind of thing but we're going to talk about just frames in general not just text frames not just image frames kind of just frames or the sake of frames alright and let's see if that's welcome on Twitter I can't read your or your handle but it looks like I'm not gonna try I don't want to screw it up that badly but welcome on Twitter as well all right so with that said let's go ahead and dive in I got a lot to show even though on some of those some of the social media I said five tips gonna be way more than five tips but you want to leave after five you can so we're gonna do a bunch of tips today on frames in InDesign so InDesign Tuesday let's get to it I'm going to switch over to our computer and Byron thanks for being here and thanks for liking the streams glad to have you alright so as usual because people love to see things from scratch I've got I've got InDesign open with no document so we can just go ahead and do it from scratch with that sad I'm gonna start off with just a blank document first just to get some framing back to the basics couple of things off to right off the bat and then we'll open up one of the templates and talk about some more just slightly more advanced techniques all right so let's go new document but you can also do just do command in since we're doing a live stream I usually like to work with a wide document just easier to see on screen so this is 11 by 8 and a half instead of ending out by 11 no primary text frame no facing pages just one page to start off with and it is in the wide format we'll go ahead and create that and again that gives me a nice starting point to work with all right so my first tip so tip number one and this has been since day one and InDesign is that while frames are required they're not necessarily it's not necessary that you create them first you have an option with InDesign you have the option of laying out your page with the content that you expect to come in and then create frames ahead of time or you have the ability to lay out the content with lay out the page with the content placing it and having a career frames for you automatically or any mixture of the two so for example let's talk about what's a frame a frame is really any vector shape you can use any vector shape as a frame there are three specific frame tools right above my head here there's the rectangle tool get to it with the letter F the ellipse tool which is the one I was on and the polygon tool now again that seems like oh you only have those three nope those are just the three tools but like I said you can create a frame with just about any vector now you're gonna say well well if that's the rectangle frame tool then what's the difference between that and the rectangle tool and I used to use this joke way back in the day all the time has an accident and one doesn't that's pretty much it from a standpoint of functionality they both will do the exact same thing to be more to be more specific back in the days when InDesign first came out was competing with QuarkXPress the way you would place an image inside of QuarkXPress is you would draw out this this box picture box and it would have an accident so we basically simulated that kind of experience for the court express users to make it more friendly to them but whether I draw it with a rectangle or with the rectangle frame tool I can place an image in it so which one do I use then if I know I'm gonna place an image into a frame then I am gonna use the one with the X in it just logically it just seems to make more sense it doesn't matter either way though but if I'm going to draw a rectangle maybe it's gonna have something in it maybe it's not maybe it's just gonna be a color moon is just gonna do a border then I will use the rectangle tool and yes you can place an image in a frame and put a border on it too so you can use this pretty much any way you want alright so let's say we drag out a frame we can drag the frame out we get the ability once it's been placed on the page we can move it around we can resize it we can make it a very specific size by typing in the dimensions up here so if I wanted a frame that was exactly 3.5 inches by 2.5 inches I can make a business card size frame just like that so you can you can be you can draw it out freehand or we can make it very specific whatever size you want and of course you can always pick up any handle and move it around now there are two additional handles here that we're going to actually this one and this one we're gonna talk about those a little bit later but those are kind of fairly newer features of frames these weren't always here from back in the day so one is well I'll get to them in a minute anyway and if I wanted a elliptical frame switch over to the ellipse and if I want an oval just draw an oval if I want to square sorry a perfect circle I hold down the shift-key and if I were drawing the rectangle and I want a perfect square and hold down the shift-key now again he's complete put anywhere they can overlap each other they can be anywhere you want and whenever you get ready you can put content into them so how do we get content into them you can select the frame first you go to your file menu can choose place you can go grab whatever content you want it does not have to be an image you can place text into one that has an X in it it will say up you want text instead of an image no problem or you can let's see what this is this looks like an image yep that's an image where I can place an image in it either way so for example let's say I want to place that image in the image comes in we see a very muscular uh we know there's more to it than that and if I grab the ellipse and I do the same thing place and go grab text just get Ebert Gettysburg Address this time and there's my text and it's saying I'm missing a font but that's okay all right so there's my text inside of a frame and there's my my image inside of a frame now the next tip is about fitting fitting your content to make it to be able to see it so when I select this I can either do one of two things I can say well I do want the image to be a hundred percent the size it is which is what we got and I get this grabber hand in the middle and I can hold it down for a couple seconds this is my patient user mode because if you don't hold it down for a couple seconds you're just moving an outline and you don't know what you're gonna get till you let go but if you hold it down for a couple seconds you actually get to see what the content is and you can place it better and get it just where you want it to be maybe I don't want the text maybe I just want him and there we go we get it in place so moving the content around in the frame is one way to get it to look the way you want the other way is to use a fitting command and there are several so there is the the two that are the ones that are used the most have now been moved they used to be down further in the menu and down further in the icons now they're right up front Phil frame proportionally is probably the one I used to use probably 99% of the time but now there is a there is a content-aware fit which is brand-new as of October and that's the one I'm starting to use more you can also set that as your default so you won't ever have to do this again so let's go ahead and say Phil frame proportionally and that's exactly what it does it fills the frame proportionally so there's no white space left over and there's no white space left over but it may crop off some of your image so how do I know some of my image has been cropped off patient user mode press and hold count to two and then you can see oh the left and right side of this image will cut off a little bit do I care about that information nope it's just part of the background don't care I want my image to fit the frame perfectly that's what Phil that's what Phil frame proportionally does if I say fit content proportionally the difference is it scales the content down so you see all of the content in the frame nothing cut off but then you're going to have some white space left over because if the frame is not the exact same size as the proportions of the content it's going to leave white space either top bottom left or right so you decide what's more important if I needed to see the edges of this image maybe there's some data there maybe there's some text there then fit content proportionally it would be the best one if I don't care about the edges Phil frame proportionally is the best one and if I don't care about the frame size then I can say fit proportionately and then I can do one more operation which is fit the frame to the content this button right here that says hey I've got the the content size down I don't want that white space and I don't need it to be exactly 2 inches high click it will contract your frame to fit the content perfectly so now there's no white space there's nothing being cut off and the image shows the right size that I made it and everything's good okay now with this tech what happens here well we've already done this in the last stream with linking so I'm going to do a whole thing on linking again but we know with the plus sign there's more text than we can see here and we can either keep making this bigger we can make the text smaller we can delete some of the text so it does fit or we can continue it somewhere else those are pretty much your options so if I say well I like the oval the size that it is maybe I can make it a little taller to fit more of it but it's still not enough then I can click that red plus sign and I can go anywhere else in my document any page I want and continue it and this still may not be enough room it is enough room okay good so then I can now play around this frame I can say yep I want that down here scale down there's nothing being left over there's no more red plus signs and as we discover it last week or two weeks ago if we show our text threads we'll see the actual line going between them okay perfect so now you know how to create frames you know how to put your content into an existing frame but what if you want it to create the frame on the fly what if you didn't want to do two steps two steps would be draw the frame put the content in it but what if I just want to do one step put the content down and it makes the frame for me that's the way I probably do it most of the time so for example we go back over here to my libraries where I've got some content here and I want to go ahead and pull in let's see we got something here we haven't used in a while seems like I've been using these same images over and over again okay I don't think I've used this one in a while or maybe the tree I can drag over the tree and when I let go I get this preview of what the tree looks like and I get a placement we call the placement gun so I can click and put this anywhere I want now here's the problem if I click and I don't know how big that is because I don't 100 is gonna come in at a hundred percent size just like the guys aren't we only saw a part of his arm it came in at a hundred percent size because that's what it does by default if I click and I don't know it's just gonna be one giant treat okay so it's too big to fit in this space I can undo command Z and then I can say you know what no instead of me clicking and just being at 100 I'm not holding down any keys I'm just going to drag and it will proportionally make a frame that's the exact size that it needs the exact proportions it needs to be to fit that content and now I'm making a frame the exact size that I need so that way you you click drag your content over or place your content and you drag the exact size you want so now I've done two things in one step I placed my content I've got it the exact same size that I needed it to be and I didn't have to draw frame first so in the same thing works with text if I were to come down let's get rid of this for example let's delete all this and I were to go place that same Gettysburg Address again there it is I don't have a frame selected yep no missing that font and I were to go ahead and draw out a frame it will place the content in that frame that I drew out so one step versus two and of course you can do it either way all right so now that I've got that in place let's see what else the other thing is that I showed you the frame tools you know lips polygons rectangle but I said that you could make a frame with any shape so even if I were to use the pen tool the pencil tool or any other tool that will create a closed shape I can go ahead and make a frame for me so I'm gonna grab my stylus since I am using the pencil which is very freeform you draw any any way you want and let's say I want to draw a nice s alright so I've got my nice s there and now if I were to drag over some clouds and place them inside that frame I get clouds inside the frame and now if I do a fill frame before I see more of the sky filling up that so there's there's I can see all the clouds there's no white space left over but there's probably some of the image being cut off okay so frames don't think about them as oh it's gotta be a square got to be a circle got to be a polygon whatever shape you want even if you go get it from illustrator and copy and paste it into InDesign those shapes can be frames as well all right um what is the shortcut to show the top toolbar well there's not necessarily a shortcut but let's run a maybe I don't know I don't know what the shortcut is but what you're referring to is the control panel which is command I guess option six or just go up here at this and choose control that's that's how you get it all right so hopefully that answers our question Jenny all right so now next up let's let's do my next tip okay here's one I'm gonna go ahead and open up that template I talked about earlier so let's do new dude new document again this time we're going to grab a template this is a proposal template one you can get for free from Adobe stock just go search templates and I want to work with this frame right here so there's a frame already in this template here it is it's behind another shape and now I want to bring it in and by the way this frame is is gray so yes frames can contain color if I go back to this and I create a frame first let's set create this frame first and I go in and say hey I want that to have a fill color that frame has a fill color now now if I put something in it like a picture I may not see the color anymore because if the picture takes up the whole frame then obviously I can't see the color goes it's taking up the whole frame but if I give myself some padding or margin then I will be able to get I will be able to get the color and the frame so for example if we go back a color any image we go back here this is filled with grey I can see the gray fill color right up here at the top now if I go ahead and place something in it like my new chair image here or no I don't want that chair want the other chair there should be another chair there was another chair thought I had another chair maybe I don't have another chair but I don't have another chair we'll use something else so I'm going to say that chair but something else is why I'm not picking that one all right you know what though at the end of the day it doesn't really matter huh all right let's grab this one anyway all right let's pull it in I'm gonna go ahead and click and place it it comes in and fills up but and I don't see the grainy more but doesn't have to because the frame is whatever size it was made so the full size of the page whatever size page this is and the content came in and pretty much filled it up this probably yeah there's more picture than there is chair I mean more picture of the nervous frame but you don't have to live with that if you want to size it down you can we already know we can fill it proportionally we can size it down that way we already know that we can also use content-aware fit so that it puts the content in focus when it fits it down but you can also adjust the image independently of the frame we know that we can pick up the whole frame and move it around we know that we can move the image around we know that we can move the image around in the frame there's the whole image but you can also scale the image inside the frame so for example let me do a let me fit it down and get it smaller first and now let me double click because if I double click on the image that will take me into the mode that lets me select the image not the frame so I'm a shift key I'm scaling down the image and I'm moving the image around in the frame and making the image smaller so I'm not messing with the frame at all I'm just making my image smaller inside that frame maybe I want to make it the size of the margins so I can do that and then pull it up okay so that way there's one frame with a smaller image inside of it we get to see the gray background of the frame because the image isn't filling up the frame so this is another technique when I talked about drawing a border or doing something like that another technique is to just simply use a fill color and make your image or content smaller to fit within the frame but how does that work with text let's go back to our other document and let's get rid of this for a sec second and let's go ahead and place that text one more time so we'll do place and we'll grab whatever word text file whatever you have and yes and if the fonts missing I should fix that and we'll go ahead and place some text in a frame here now that text text will automatically go to the edges of our any frame so whether it's an ellipse an S whatever it is it will automatically go all the way to the edge and unlike an image there's no way to double click and move the text around inside the frame it doesn't work that way but what you can do is use the frame options to make your text to give yourself more padding around the frame to make your text come inside more so let's go up to our object menu let's come down to text frame options and you have the ability to control your inset spacing what I was referring to as padding this is the technical term for it inset spacing so the inset spacing says that hey I want to go in and instead of it being zero and I've linked it so yeah they're linked together started being zero I'm going to pre - I'm gonna go ahead and just add some space around the frame so that's giving me that inset setting where I'm saying hey make give me a quarter inch of space from the edge of the frame before the text starts all the way around or on specific sides if I unlink maybe I want the bottom to still be zero so the text goes all the way to the bottom of the frame but it comes in from the left right and top or not it's up to you maybe I want more space at the bottom 0.5 instead so now I have more space at the bottom than I do on the other three sides because maybe that I'm trying to put a signature or something down there so you can control the inset all you want now with that said if you having an inset then that also frees up the stroke and the color of the frame so if I go in and say hey I want this to have a nice [Music] anything nice and light I do the blue behind it for now we can also control oh we can control what color that is let's put a nice lighter color in there there we go and I can also put a stroke on it as well so I can say hey you know put a stroke around this and make the stroke the darker color that we started with and let's go and make the stroke nice and thick so we'll be able to see it and there we are and at the more I add to the frame the inset respects the measurements that says so if I made that stroke really thick still going to bring the text in by the exact amount that I told it so you can go in and create whatever boundary around your object you want whether it's images or text or either/or now while we're on this subject let me go back to this this document we started with another tip is applying your special effects special effects such as transparency effects and all of the things that you can do in special effects inside of InDesign are frame based so in other word if I want to put a drop shadow on this frame is the drop shadow gonna be on the chair image or is gonna be on the frame it's gonna be on the frame so for example if I go up here and I choose drop shadow and I were to do a preview so we can see it see how the drop shadow has nothing to do with the chair image it's on the outside of the frame itself so just keep that in mind if I needed the drop shadow to be on the chair I'd probably want to put the chair in its own frame on top of this frame so if I click OK that gives me a drop shadow around the outer frame because their frame based but if I said hey I really wish that were around the chair instead then what I would do is bring the chair over I make the chair whatever size it needs to be move it over I wouldn't have two chairs I'm just doing this for the sake of speed command shift to scale and then I would go ahead now if I put the drop shadow on the chair don't you don't need to we get rid of the first one then I would go ahead and just simply say drop shadow and now the drop shadow is gonna be on that frame of the chair so that's the difference and if you need it both then you would still have the gray frame with nothing in it and you'd have the chair frame with the shadow on it and you'd have two shadows or two whatever effects you wanted all right next up speaking of that chair you'll notice that that chair has a watermark on it because this image is from Adobe stock and it has a file number so you know which it which image it is and it has not been licensed yet so that means that I'm just working with a free preview previews are great you can place them right in InDesign show them to your client your client signs off on it or your boss signs off on it then you can go purchase the license to the image so you can use the high-res version but until then you can keep using these previews and to your arts content mock-ups showing clients whatever it is you want but let's say I do decide to or my client decides yep that's the chair we want that's the image we want to use go ahead and license it where we approve your invoice well in that case I in any and most of the other Adobe apps that I have to figure out which library that chair came from and go you know license it from Maris over and so on one thing I love about InDesign is they make it very obvious that images can be licensed right in the frame so for example let's go back to this other southern document here and let's say I place the chair and this frame instead which by the way how do I replace something because if I click right now I'm going to have the tree and the chair but if I want to put the chair inside that image to replace the tree another tip hold down your option or Alt key you notice and here I'll see if I'm going to show it to you see how I'm getting a little curved brackets around it if I worked if I was just getting a little square around it low angle that's going to place it independently but if I hold down my option or Alt key then I get the little brackets letting me know hey this is about to replace whatever it is you're about to click on so let me zoom out and hold down my option key click so now the trees gone the chair is now replacing it and once again if I were to fill this proportionately there we go and now I want to license this because my client says yes then what I can do is simply go right up here there's an icon for it in the upper right hand corner called a license image so you can license it right on the canvas just by clicking that icon if that's the image you want to buy just click it you don't have to worry about where is it in the library once you license it it will download the high res it'll replace the high res in the library and therefore replace it everywhere you've used that image so it's doing that now in the background and at some point it will update and this that we stock will go away like it just did so now that it has a blue checkmark on it in the library so if I were to head over to the other document yep it's gone the watermarks gone here because now that image has been licensed and everywhere that image has been used and linked is now updated so I don't have to worry about going to replace it everywhere I've used it just license at once everywhere you've used it from the library it will get it will get updated all right one see I've got a couple more tips here let's let's get rid of this one for accept quick second and let's go in and let's start let's create a frame now another frame tip we created frames with the know you're gonna make if you know you're gonna put text down then there's no reason to create a shape and then click the type tool and then click into it unless you want a special shape but if you know you just want a rectangle full of text then all you have to do is just grab the type tool because when you drag out with the type tool it creates a frame that's already set up for text the cursor is blinking right there okay all right so next up if I want to put some text in this so let's say chairs are awesome alright I'm not being creative today with my text but there it has chairs are awesome notice that whenever you start typing into a frame it always types at the top left corner of the frame or or the top of the frame no matter what whether it's centered whether it's right aligned whether it's left aligned it will be at the top of the frame you make the frame taller the text goes right up with it you make the frame shorter the text stays at the top but sometimes you might want to have text in a frame but not at the top of the frame so we already know you could do an inset but what if you want it not inset by a certain measurement you just want it to be aligned differently in the frame maybe I want it in the center of the frame instead of the top or maybe I wanted the bottom of frame no matter what size the frame is so if you go back to those same frame options under your type menu you've got oh I'm sorry under your object menu text frame options command B you've got the ability to also do vertical justification so vertical justification is at the top right now because that's where it does by default I can say Center and now no matter what that text will always be centered in the frame top to bottom now if you wanted Center it left to right you would still use your alignment to do it that way but now no matter what that text will stay centered in the frame no matter how big or how short I make the frame so you have a vertical alignment top bottom center and fully justified if you want the text to spread out in the frame all right uh let's see we'd lose the licence stock we did the effects we did the size we did the fill and Stroke we did the vertical I meant I'm just making sure I did it got through everything ah there is one more let's do it on this one so I said I would talk about what these other two handles are I almost forgot so first and foremost let's undo undo undo undo undo undo undo undo undo undo undo undo undo undo why am i doing all these undo is because I want to get back to this it's just easier for me anyway let's go ahead now and let's um bring up the story editor and I want to delete everything after that okay perfect okay so now I've got this frame with some text in it I've got this image so what are those two extra handles for and I'm still going to need some more room let me get rid of this let me get rid of this let me move this over need more room all right let's do it perfect alright so the yellow one this is kind of cool actually the yellow one is for rounding corners so you click and now once you click it you get a diamond on each one of the four hand four corners you can just drag in to do your rounding so if you wanted to round your corners you could and one of the things that people always ask for whenever you do a rounded corner demo is can I make one corner not round it or only round one corner and so I made the one corner not round it by holding down the shift-key peel down the shift-key then you're rounding individual corners whatever way you want or if I can grab it there we go oh there's a limit as far as I'll go you can round individual corners any way you want or not so I pull that one back to the edge if I don't want that one round it that one stays not round if I don't let this one round it that one stays not rounded then I create a unique shape for my image all right next up let's go ahead and scale it oh I should probably point that out too here's another tip for beginners because this will definitely frustrate you if you don't know you're used to being able to pick up an object and scale it by grabbing the corners but in InDesign that works a little differently because it doesn't know if you want to scale the frame or the frame and the content for example if I just grab a corner don't hold down anything and I'll do that all I've done was make the frame smaller now I'm only seeing the legs of the chair if I want to make everything smaller undo hold down your command key on Mac ctrl key on Windows that's what lets you scale both at the same time more than likely you also want to scale them proportionally so gonna hold down command shift or ctrl shift on PC so when I do command shift and scale now I'm scaling both at the same time all right why am i doing all this why am i getting this all set up because this is to get the next table the next button or handle situated so what is this let me do one more thing let me just I know this is a bad break in the sentence but it's one point so now alright there are something called anchored objects and an anchored object is is something it's the ability to anchor a frame into another frame so that they move together so for example let's say you were making a textbook and your and your will use this we'll just switch these you were doing it okay so we can leave it the same way we'll put it here and we'll move this over here let's say we're doing a textbook like this and you you were making illustrations on in the gutter or on the side there like that well if that illustration or photo was with this text you would want to make sure that if the text moved maybe you added some more text at the top you want the image to move down with it you don't want to have to constantly manage oh what does that image go with again oh you guys it goes with this passage for scores several years ago if the four score and seven years ago moves down I want the image to move down with it so what you can do is anchor the text and now there's an easy way to do that with that blue square you drag the blue square wherever you want it to be anchored it creates an anchor to that spot so now they're tied together and it even puts a little anchor to let you know hey this has already been anchored to something that's why the Blue Square has gone and now there's an anchor there so now if I were to add more text everything moves accordingly if this gets shifted to the next page you can even have the anchor flip it over to the right side if it needs to so you have complete control over how your anchor objects work and that's what the Blue Square is for for one frame to be anchored into another alright that's it for the tips way more than five probably more than you thought your going to get today but hopefully you will find this information useful especially for my beginners and maybe even some people that were InDesign experts that maybe forgot some of this but either way hopefully you got something out of this and not seeing any burning questions alright yep okay alright let's be from different countries great tips okay alright so with that said we're going to call it InDesign Tuesday rap so with that said thanks everyone for watching we will catch you on the next one bye everybody happy Tuesday continue on with your day great in designing hi everybody [Music]

Channel: Terry White

Views: 6,732

Keywords: Terry White, InDesign, InDesign Tutorial, InDesign Frames, How-To, Page Layout, Graphic Design, Adobe, Creative Cloud, Tips and Tricks

Id: 7mE3_8eB3-M

Length: 38min 50sec (2330 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 09 2019