Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To. And today I'm going to show you how and why to use
master pages in Adobe InDesign. Alright, let's
get started. The idea behind master pages is when you have a lot of pages and you want the same
objects on every page, master pages is perfect for that. You can create the objects one time, put
them on a master page, and they will automatically go onto the pages that you want them on. And then
if you want to edit something, you just edit the master page and it will update across all those
pages. So they're pretty cool. A good example is a calendar. So I have a calendar InDesign file here,
and I'll just open that. So I'm going to double click on my master page. And you can see that
we have the calendar grid here, and we've got some things that will be on every single calendar page,
except the very first page, which is the cover. Now you'll notice when we zoom in here, that all
of these calendar pages with a grid have a little A on them, and the cover doesn't have the little A
on it. And that is because the cover does not have the A master page applied. But all of these that
need the grid have this A master applied. So I'll double click on A master. And let's say I want to
change this color to a darker color like this. If we go in, we can see that it's changed everywhere
on all the calendar pages. Now generally speaking, if I only have a one or two page document,
master pages isn't something that makes a lot of sense, because I don't have a lot of repeating
elements throughout a lot of pages in that case. Alright, so let's jump in and start designing in
InDesign. I'm going to close this, and then I'll start a new document. So I'll come over here to
Create New, I'll come up here to Print at the top, and choose Letter. And I'm going to want
this in inches. So I'll change picas to inches. And I think I'm going to have 16 pages...whoops!
And we'll want them to be facing pages. Facing pages is kind of like this where you have the
left and the right side of a magazine spread. And we do want a bleed, we'll put the bleed at .125,
which is the standard bleed size. When I hit tab, it'll automatically populate these. And if that's
not happening for you, just click this Link button right over here. Okay, so we'll create this.
As you can see, we've got a cover and then we've got our spreads all the way to the bottom. And
here's the back cover. Now the first thing I want to do is add a little footer right down
here at the bottom of the page with my business name and tagline. And I want this to be on every
page but not the front and back cover. So I've downloaded a little tree logo from Vecteezy and
made a little business logo from it. So open that now in Illustrator, if you have a PNG or JPG file,
you'll want to come out here to InDesign and go to File > Place and place it in that way. But if you
have a vector file in Illustrator, I usually just select it, and then copy it with CMD C or CTRL C.
Go back to InDesign and paste it in. I'm going to make this a little bit smaller. I'll get on a
corner and hold SHIFT and just drag it down like this. This looks pretty good. And you'll notice
that right now I'm on page one. And I don't really want this on page one anyway, but I also want to
put it on a master page. So I'm going to cut it with CMD X, I'll double click on my master page,
and then I'll just paste in place, which is Edit > Paste in Place. Now we can kind of position
it wherever we want. Now I'll zoom in here and I'm just going to move this over a little bit.
I'll hit M to get a rectangle, I'm just going to draw a little thin line right here. It's got
a stroke only. So I'll flip the fill and stroke. And we'll make this kind of a dark blue. And then
I'll hit T to get my text tool. I'm still on the master by the way. And I'll just click and drag
and type my tagline 'promoting green spaces.' I'll change my font to something a little less
ugly. I'll choose Montserrat. And I'm also going to make this that dark blue. I'll hit OPTION CMD
C or ALT CTRL C on a PC to fit the bounding box to my text. And then I'll grab all three of these and
group them with CMD G or CTRL G on a PC. And I'll just center it up visually in the space.
Now I also want one over here on this side. So I'm going to copy that, & I'll paste in place.
And then I'll hold SHIFT while dragging it over to the other side.
And I'll visually center this one too. Okay, so it's on both pages. And now we can come back
to our pages menu. We'll go to Window > Pages to bring it back up. If you're not seeing these other
windows, you can always find those in Window here. So if you're looking for swatches, that's a little
hidden - it's under Color and then Swatches. Let's double click our cover. You'll notice that the A
master is applied to all of your pages right now. And we don't want this on the front and
back cover. So to fix that, I'm just going to come up here to the one that says None. And I'll click
and drag that right on top of page one. And now it's gone. You can see that it's still on all the
other pages, and now I'm thinking this is a little much, so I want to delete it off of this side. So
I'll come back up here to the A master and double click, we'll select it, and then just delete,
and then double click on page two. And you can see it's removed it from all the other pages.
Alright, so let's say we're working along, we've got text and photos, and we want to add a photo
right down here, I'm going to pull it all the way out to the bleed like it should be. And I'll
just grab a random photo, I'll come on to object fitting and think content to frame. Okay, so now
we have a problem though, our picture is going right over the top of our logo. So to fix this
issue, we'll come back up here to master, we'll double click our master page. And then I'm going
to open the Layers palette. So we'll go to Window layers. And now I'm going to create a new layer.
I'll select this logo, which is on layer one, I'll click and drag right on this blue square,
and bring it up to layer two. And you can see the outline is now red, which is what layer two
is now I'll lock layer two, so we don't put images and text on that one. So now we're on layer one.
And if we come down here to our picture, you can see that the logo is on top of the picture. And
it will always be because it's on layer one. And all of our other stuff is on layer two. But you'll
notice we have another problem now. And that is this logo is a little hard to read, because it's
going over a kind of crazy background. So what we can do to fix this is create a new master page,
specifically for photo pages like this. So we'll come up here to our master pages area,
I'm going to right click here and choose new master, it's also going to be two pages. And this
one will have the prefix B. So we'll say okay, I'm going to double click on my A master, I'm going to
get my layers back up and unlock that layer, select this, and copy it. And then go down to
master page B, and we'll paste in place. Now I'm going to zoom in right down here.
Now I've made a white version of this logo. And usually you'll have access to a white logo too.
So I'll come back out here to Illustrator, and I'm going to select that one,
copy it and bring it over and paste it into InDesign. I'm going to click on our logo and
then ungroup that (go to Object > Ungroup). Now just click on the logo to find out how big it is.
It is 1.6785. I'm going to copy that number, and then I'll click on the new logo that I pasted in
and paste it into the width. I'm going to click this lock first, so it resizes proportionally
and we'll paste. Okay, so now it's exactly the right size. I'm just going to drop it
right on top of this other logo and use my arrow keys to put it in the same position.
If you want to get really technical with it, you can use the x & y coordinates to make it
exactly the same. But I'm not too worried about it because this is just a tutorial. And I really
don't think anyone would notice regardless. Okay, so I'm going to hide this with CMD 3,
or CTRL 3 on a PC. And then we'll select our other logo underneath and delete it.
And now unhide with OPTION CMD 3 or ALT CTRL 3 on a PC. Those are also under Object > Hide
and Show All right here. I also want to make this white, so I'll change that.
And then I'll get into my text by highlighting it and change that to paper as well. And now
I'm going to apply B master to just that one side of the page. So I'll click here and drag
right on to that photo page. Now when we double click, we can see for some reason we got just a
logo but not the line and the tagline. So to fix that, we'll have to go find out what the problem
is in B master. So I'll double click that. Okay, and when I highlight these, I can see they're two
different colors. I've got red stuff over here and blue stuff over here. And that means they're
on both layers, and I need these both to be on the top layer. So I'm going to click on the blue
square and drag it right back up to the top. Now everything is red, I can lock the layer,
and then we can come down here and click and we can see everything. So anytime you have a photo,
you can go ahead and pull down your B master and replace it like this. If you have a photo on the
other side, you'll also need to set up this side of the B master and then pull that side down over
onto the left side of the page. Let's say you have three photo pages that you want to apply B master
to. You can actually click each one, hold CMD or CTRL and then choose all of them that you want,
then right click and choose Apply Master to Pages. And then here, it'll give you the pages you want,
maybe you can add some or subtract some here. And then you can choose which master you want.
So we'll say B master. And OK. And now you can see that this one, and this one, and one below,
are using the B master page. Another thing that master pages is good for is page numbers.
So let's add page numbers to this, we'll come back up to our A master and double click. I'm
going to unlock my layer. Now I'm going to hold OPTION and SHIFT and drag this right over to the
corner right here. I'm going to delete what's in there, and then I want this to be right justified.
So I'm going to come up here to the top, and choose Align Right. And now I want to put my
page number in, but if I just type #1, if you'll notice, now we have number 1 on every single page
that uses the A master. And that's definitely not what we want: we want it to automate.
So I'm going to select this number and delete it. Then I'll come up here to Type > Insert special
character > Markers and Current Page Number, and you'll see a little A down there. I'm going
to select that and copy it and come over here and paste it over here. Then I'll move it down, about
in the same position as it is on the other side. I'll hit T on my keyboard to highlight that A
and then I'll Align Left. Now you might have noticed that for some reason we're
back on layer one again. And we always want the page numbers to be on top. So we need
to click this and move it up here to layer two. We'll also select this one and do the same thing.
And now we can lock this layer. I'm going to go ahead and change all these B master pages to A
master pages. So now we can check to see how it looks. Okay, this is correct, it says number two.
If we skip down here, it says number four. And then if we zoom out and look on this side of the
page, it's five. So it will automatically update your page numbers here. Now you would also need to
add page numbers to your B master page. And you'll probably want to make those white so
that they show up against a picture. Now if you want your page numbers to start in a specific
place in your document, I also have a video for that. And I'll link it at the top of the screen.
Now what if you want to change one thing on a page and you don't want to create a whole new
master page for just that one object? InDesign actually lets you override an object. You can
do this by holding SHIFT and CMD down and double clicking, or SHIFT CTRL double clicking on a PC.
So I'm going to do that now I'll double click and you'll notice we aren't able to select it.
And that's because we have that layer locked. So I'll get my layers up. I'll unlock it. And
now hold SHIFT and CMD or SHIFT and CTRL and double click. And we can go ahead and just change
something about this and call it good. If you decide that you don't want your overrides anymore,
you can click on the Pages flyout, come to Master Pages and Remove All Local Overrides.
And that'll put it ba ck to where it was. Alright, if you liked this video, please click on the Like
button. And I'll see you in a couple days with another graphic design tutorial. Thank you!!!