From the course: InDesign 2021 Essential Training

Drawing path and frame shapes - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2021 Essential Training

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Drawing path and frame shapes

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- InDesign has a wide variety of drawing tools, including a fully featured Bezier pen tool, just like Illustrator. Now, I wouldn't use InDesign to do a detailed technical illustration, but it's perfect for basic drawing, such as most logos and relatively simple shapes. Let me show you how it's done. I have my magazine document open from the exercise files folder, and I'm going to hold down command space bar or control space bar on windows. And I'll just click a few times in this upper right corner to zoom in here, give myself of a better room to draw. Also let's open the view menu and turn off match pasteboard theme color. I just find it easier to work on this pasteboard that way. Now over here in the tool panel, there are several tools that let you draw shapes. For example, the line tool. The line tool just draws simple lines. You can draw any angle you want. Of course, this line has no stroke, so it's basically invisible, that's not helpful. Here's a quick trick, press the D key on your keyboard and it assigns the default coloring, which is no fill and a one point black stroke. In fact, if I de-select everything by pressing command shift a or control shift a on windows and now press the D key, it assigns that same default formatting as my default for the document. So all lines from now on will have that formatting. Okay, let's draw another line. Notice that if you hold down the shift key, it constrains the angle to either horizontal, vertical or a 45 degrees. Also see how it now has that black stroke. That's good. Next on down the tool panel. There's another tool, which is a little more interesting. It's the pen tool. This lets me click and drag to create Bezier curves. All you need to do is click and drag, click and drag, it's as simple as that. Now you might use a line like this for a text along a path. To edit this path, you want to use the direct selection tool, also called the white arrow tool. The second one in the tool panel. When you choose the direct selection tool and place your cursor over a path, it highlights. Now you can drag points along the curve, their handles, or even the segment between points. That changes the curve. Now here's another way to change the path. Let's switch back to the pen tool and now notice that whenever you place your cursor on top of the path, it changes. You get a little plus sign next to it. That indicates that it's actually going to add a point. I'll click and drag and you can see that it's adding a point onto that curve. On the other hand, if I move my cursor on top of a point that's already there, the cursor changes to have a little minus. And of course that means if I click, it'll go away. Here's another trick. Whenever you're editing a path with a pen tool, you can always hold down the command key on the mac or control key on windows. And that switches you back to the last used selection tool. In this case, the direct selection tool and that way you can drag these points around even while you still have the pen tool. For example, I'll change this curve, then when I let go of the command or control key, it reverts back to the pen tool. Okay, let's draw some more paths. I'm simply going to click out here and click a few times and you can see that you can very easily make a path with sharp corners. Then when you're done, you can either switch to a different tool or command or control click in a different area to finish the path. In this case, I chose the selection tool. So I'm going to go to the object menu, come down to the paths sub menu and you can see that we have a bunch of different path features in here. This lets you join two paths or you could close the path, you know, like turn it into a closed frame. There are other path tools here too, like convert shape. I find these things really helpful. For example, it's very hard to draw a perfect triangle in InDesign, but if you select this mope, boom, it's easy. Now as you can tell, I'm not the greatest artist, but I do find these pen tools useful inside of InDesign. Especially when I already have a frame that I want to tweak a little bit, you know, something I want to make a little bit more interesting. For example, I'm going to scroll down here and I want to make this text frame a little bit more interesting. Something that'll give it a little flair. So I'm going to head over to the tool panel and choose the pen tool. Then I'm going to hold on the command or control key and click once on top of that frame, that selects it. Now place that pen tool right over the left edge of the frame and click and drag. Notice as I drag, it changes the shape of the frame. It's still a frame, but the text will reflow into this new shape. Now that's much more interesting. Of course, if you really need heavy duty illustration tools, you should switch to Adobe Illustrator. But in most cases, when you're just trying to make your design look interesting, InDesign gives you everything you need.

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