Tag Archive for: indesign

Building a Digital Mood Board to Get Your Team on the Same Page

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Aligning a project vision with your team is critical to producing the most successful and elegant designs. A mood board is where the rational and the creative aspects of a project come together to focus you team’s efforts towards a common goal.

Join Kladi as she shows you how to create digital mood boards that will allow you to assemble, organize, and share your ideas quickly and clearly.

Topics include:

  • Creating a dedicated library to store, organize, and share assets
  • Building a clear and consistent layout using grids and parent pages
  • Placing and managing content with frame grids
  • Extracting assets from images and adding them to your library without leaving InDesign
  • Best practices for sharing documents

How to Build Single-Source InDesign Files for Print and EPUB Output

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It is a ton of work to properly set up an InDesign document for professional print output. And to have to do that all over again just to get your EPUB file exported is just insanity.

Let me show you how to build your InDesign documents so that they are ready for both outputs.

Exporting PDF for Print and Digital Documents

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Making a good-quality PDF is one of the most critical steps in the design and production process, and yet most designers don’t have a good grip of this sometimes tedious process. Whether you’re making a PDF for commercial press, desktop printer, or on-screen viewing, it is important that you make the right choices in the export process!

Topics include:

  • Understanding which export dialog box to use
  • Figuring out the PDF/X presets
  • Why the presets should only be a starting point (and which settings to change)
  • Using and creating a .joboptions file
  • Crop and bleed marks
  • Tips for setting up and exporting your pages panel for pages vs. spreads
  • Export a greyscale PDF from your color InDesign file
  • Control the JPG export size for social media posts
  • Use Preflight Profile to check image, color and font problems
  • Tips for creating an interactive PDF

Putting it Together: Books, Covers, and More

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Long documents — such as books, proposals, or large reports — require a few special InDesign techniques. Learn from a master of book design and construction as we explore:

  • Building books from multiple InDesign documents
  • Synchronizing styles, parent pages, variables, and more
  • Managing page numbers across documents
  • Building an attractive cover (including front, back, and spine)

Tables of Contents, Indexes, and other Navigation in InDesign Files

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It’s no use filling your long documents with amazing information if the reader can’t find it! The good news is that InDesign has powerful tools for making indexes, tables of contents, bookmarks, and other navigation tools. The bad news is that these features are often confusing!

Let’s investigate these features and explore how to use them, why to use them, and how to make them bend to your will.

Topics include:

  • Creating digital bookmarks automatically based on styles
  • The difference between an index and concordance
  • Scripts and other tools that may speed your work
  • Building lists of images, figures, headings, and more

InDesign for Building Presentations

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You already have Adobe InDesign, so why not use it to help you make your presentations? After all, laying out a slide is very similar to laying out a page.

Join us as we explore:

  • Exporting InDesign documents to PowerPoint or Keynote
  • Amazing plug-ins, scripts, and resources to help you build high-quality slides
  • Why you should consider HTML5 (exported right out of InDesign!) for your next slide deck

Headers, Captions, Numbering, and Sections for Long InDesign Documents

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Adding page numbers is easy in InDesign, but managing them well — along with your headers, footers, sections, numbering, and more — can be tricky!

Let’s take a deep dive into the world of headings and numbering, and see how InDesign’s automation tools can help us produce long documents faster than ever before.

Topics include:

  • Building section and page headers (such as chapter titles) based on paragraph styles
  • Using document variables and section markers
  • Free scripts for working with long documents

Awesome GREP Tips and Tricks

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Once you get started with GREP, you keep finding more and more uses for it! In this session we share several amazing GREP tricks with you. Note: While these are advanced tips, any InDesign user can take advantage of them. Just copy and paste them from the handouts to achieve great results!

This session includes:

  • Using GREP with other automation tools and batch scripts
  • Powerful but simple undocumented codes
  • Finding, styling, and dealing with e-mail addresses and URLs

Managing Images and Captions in InDesign

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If your documents include images (especially numbered figures and captions), you owe it to yourself to learn these from-the-trenches tips and techniques to speed up your work!

Topics include:

  • Using object styles to control images
  • Managing captions with styles
  • Using XMP metadata to create captions automatically
  • Creating automatic figure or table numbering
  • Flexible cross-referencing to figures that may move around your document

Introduction to GREP in InDesign

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GREP is one of the most important features in InDesign, but sadly it’s one of the least used! In introductory session, we’ll get you up to speed with this amazing tool for finding, changing, and formatting text patterns.

We’ll look at some design samples and learn essential GREP techniques such as:

  • The basics of creating an expression to easily find text
  • Finding a range of characters
  • Automatically formatting text as part of a paragraph style, such as fractions