InDesign Fundamentals

Design professionals rely on Adobe InDesign to create powerful layouts for print and digital publishing. AcademyX's InDesign training in Sacramento will provide you with the real-world examples and practical experience necessary to develop proficiency with InDesign's essential typographic, design and publishing features. In this training, you will learn to:

• Master InDesign basics rapidly.
• Design rich, interactive documents and presentations with sound, video and custom navigation controls.
• Work smarter with the InDesign Story Editor.
• Maintain document consistency with styles and master pages.
• Make the revision process simple by grouping items.
• Avoid unnecessary repetition with document templates and effective layout management.
• Build a custom palette of "swatches" to keep the colors, tints and gradients you use most often readily available.
• Draw on object libraries and "snippets" to accomplish more with less time.
• Use the vector path tool to convert freeform paths, pictures and type into professional quality images.
• Transform the position and size of an object quickly.
• Control a document's typography precisely with leading, composition, hyphenation and justification settings.
• Use shortcut keys to work faster.
• Divide longer documents into sections for faster navigation and greater usability.
• Control text formatting automatically with conditional text formatting rules.

Incorporating an impressive array of creative tools for digital and print publishing, Adobe InDesign enables graphic designers and production artists to craft vivid print media and interactive documents for web publishing. AcademyX's InDesign Fundamentals training will prepare you to create sophisticated documents, including magazines and books, and presentations enhanced with video and sound. This hands-on class is taught by an Adobe-Certified Instructor, and will equip you to accomplish more with advanced productivity tools, such as object libraries and reusable "snippets" of content, exercise precision control over typography and composition, easily manage the complexities of long documents, and prepare finished work for the commercial printing environment.

Getting Started with Adobe InDesign

• Explore the various elements and workspace of the Adobe InDesign environment.
• Learn to customize InDesign through setting preferences and defaults.
• Navigate and view single or multiple documents with ease and efficiency.

Creating a Document

• Set up a document in the way most suited to your needs, and use presets to minimize repetitive effort.
• Work with text frames to arrange and place text exactly the way you want it.
• Enhance the look of your document by placing and altering graphics as well as placing pages from other documents.
• Create alternate layouts for various projects.

Using Elements and Objects

• Position elements and objects precisely in a layout using ruler guides, smart guides, and the control panel.
• Align and distribute repetitive objects easily and evenly throughout your document on various pages.
• Use the grid mode, Live Distribute, Gap tool, or Page tool to easily distribute multiple objects in your document.
• Modify and transform objects to control how text or images look in documents.
• Learn how to group items and manipulate items within groups
• Maintain consistency of objects formatting throughout a document by using object styles, book synchronization, and the eye dropper tool.

Working with Multi-page Documents

• Utilize master pages to create and quickly modify things like layout, margins, page numbers and columns in long documents.
• Insert, delete, and move pages within a document.
• Manage text, pictures, and other objects by implementing layers to manage all objects in a layout through assignment, stacking order, and hiding layers.
• Make various alternate layouts for bigger documents with multiple page sizes and orientations.
• Learn to create templates with text and graphic placeholder objects

Controlling Typography and Styles

• Format texts by learning how to use tabs, indentation, tacking, kerning, drop caps, and paragraph spacing.
• Apply character, text or paragraph styles to further enhance the look of your pages and document.
• Take more control of text formatting through threading text between text frames, adding jump lines or text wrapping, keep options, vertical spacing and much more.
• Insert special characters to create more appealing typography
• Use column, frame, and page breaks to organize and manage the flow of text
• Create, import and edit styles to make rapid, document-wide typographical changes.
• Generate a library and manage library items
• Use vector paths to modify the appearance of text paths on a page

Colors and Graphics

• Adjust graphic formatting by learning how to scale, transform, apply frame fitting, and hide and show layers
• Utilize the color panel and color swatch dialog box to streamline design efforts by maintaining consistency across multiple objects and graphics
• Apply gradients, grayscale, or lighting effects and adjust transparency to create beautiful pages.
• Work with linked content and learn how to manage and troubleshoot links with the Links panel and the Content Collector.

Preflighting and Preparing Documents for Print

• Check font usage, spelling, and links for graphics before finalizing documents for printing.
• Preflight documents to check for problems like missing fonts or links, blurry images, overset text, or other errors.
• Package documents to ensure that the printing process produces no errors.
• Produce a copy of a layout as a PDF file to preview and share before the publication is printed.

Prerequisites:

• Basic Mac or Windows skills: copying/pasting, right-clicking (contextual menus), finding files, switching between programs, exploring windows.