From the course: InDesign 2020 Essential Training

Getting started - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2020 Essential Training

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Getting started

- [Instructor] My goal in this first chapter is to get you acquainted enough with InDesign that you could create a new InDesign file or edit one that somebody else has made. This is the basics of the basics. If your boss handed you a file, and you need to open it and do something with it before lunch today, start here. Okay, let's dive in. When you first launch InDesign, you'll see this thing called the homepage, which gives you quick access to any recently opened documents. You just need to click on any of these to open it. But in this case, we want to create a new file. So, you could click the create new button here or let's head up to the file menu, choose new, and then choose document. The new document dialogue box has a lot of options, but for right now, the first thing you need to think about is whether this document is going to be primarily for print or screen viewing. In this case, I'll choose print. Next, you want to choose a page size from this area on the left or you can simply type in the width and height here. Note that if you work in inches or centimeters, you can choose that from this pop-up menu here. Now, does your document have facing pages? That is, does it have a left-hand and a right-hand page like a book or a magazine? If it does not, then turn off the facing pages checkbox. Down here at the bottom of this dialogue box, we see the margins. You may have to open this little twirly triangle to see them. These just add margin guides. They're just guidelines. You can ignore them if you want. Now, let's click okay, and InDesign creates a nice, new, clean document for us. Now, you could start with an empty InDesign document like this if you want, but I find it's usually easier to start with a template, something that's partially created, and then you can change the text and graphics as you work. Now, we have a template to work with in our exercise files folder, so let's head up to the file menu, choose open, and then choose that file. There it is. This is the template we're going to use. Now, in the next few movies, we'll be filling this out by adding text and graphics. This template comes with the exercise files, but there are a lot of other InDesign templates available on the web, including dozens of free ones at InDesignSecrets or CreativePro.com. These are sites that I run with Anne-Marie Concepcion and Mike Rankin. This page, for example, includes dozens of free templates that you can download and use, including ones to create books, brochures, menus, and more. Just download them, open them in InDesign, and you're good to go. In this case, though, let's switch back to InDesign. Of course, getting your document open is just the first step on the adventure called InDesign. Next, we're going to learn how to get text and graphics in there and make it look the way you want.

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