InDesign CS6: Introduction

Print Design Courses

Adobe InDesign allows you to deliver beautiful layouts and highly sophisticated documents for print quickly and easily. This two day Adobe authorised introductory course is designed to enable you to make the most of the power of Adobe InDesign. Day one of the course concentrates on building a document layout from scratch. Day two will explore more advanced layout and typographical controls, clipping paths, working with layers, creating multipage documents and using Live PreFlight for trouble-free production and printing. This course will give you an excellent grounding in Adobe InDesign. This is an introductory course for new users of InDesign. If you are a QuarkXPress user migrating to Adobe InDesign, there is a two day Adobe InDesign Migration course designed specifically for your requirements.

Course Description

DAY ONE

The InDesign interface
• Creating a new document
• Creating and using frames
• Selecting frames and content
• The N-up View

Working with text
• Placing text
• Selecting and editing text
• Handling missing fonts
• Drag and drop text
• Using the Content Indicator
• Smart guides and smart spacing

Formatting copy
• Character-level formatting
• Paragraph-level formatting
• Using the Eyedropper tool
• Creating drop caps

Working with styles
• Character and paragraph styles
• Creating styles
• Editing and applying styles
• Introducing nested styles
• Removing style formatting
• Organising styles using Style
Groups

Working with graphics
• Using Mini-Bridge
• Different file formats
• Placing multiple graphics
• Wrapping text around images
• Manipulating graphics
• Understanding fitting options
• Sizing images with Auto-fit

Layout controls
• Understanding the notion of
Gridify
• Working with the Gap tool
• Using Live Distribute
• PSD and PDF layer options

Understanding colour
• Spot and process colours
• Working with swatches
• Using stroke and fill options
• Creating tints
• Sampling colours from images

Laying out pages accurately
• Using rulers, grids and guides
• Working with layers

DAY TWO

Multi-page documents
• Using the Pages panel
• Targeting pages and spreads

Editing copy
• Using the Story Editor
• Using Find/Change
• The Track Changes feature
• Using the Spell Checker

Working with transparency
• Creating drop shadows
• The Flattener Preview panels

Transforming objects
• Scaling objects vs contents
• Transforming objects
• Rotating a spread
• Grouping and ungrouping

Finessing text content
• Threading/unthreading frames
• Flowing text through frames
• Text frame options
• Document baseline grids
• Multi-column text frames
• Allowing text to flow across
columns
• Hanging punctuation

Working with Master Pages
• Master Page guidelines
• Creating and editing Masters
• Applying Master Pages
• Auto-numbering pages
• Mixing different pages sizes
in InDesign
• Using the Page tool

Combining text and graphics
• Image import options
• Images with clipping paths
• Creating a new clipping path
• Removing image backgrounds
• Editing clipping paths
• Tolerance and threshold options

Exporting and printing
• Exporting as a PDF
• Using multithreading for faster
PDF exports
• Using Live PreFlight
• Anticipating potential problems
• Packaging files for handoff