(upbeat music)
- [Gareth] Hello and welcome to the Complete Beginners Guide
to Adobe InDesign CS5, brought to you by TastyTuts.com.
This is a course created for beginners
or newcomers to Adobe InDesign.
The topics that are going to be covered
in this course are the basics,
so whether you have InDesign CS1, two, three, four, five,
or above, you should be able to follow along just fine.
We won't be using any advanced features.
In this series, I will be demonstrating how
to create a small project in Adobe InDesign
from start to finish.
To help break down the process,
I have structured the course in three main sections:
preparation, implementation, and finalization.
Along the way, we will be covering many topics,
such as how to set up your document,
understand how the program works, use text in InDesign,
prepare and import images into InDesign,
and finally, export your document ready to print.
I will also be giving a little advice
and sharing my experience on how to organize
and manage your project to improve your workflow.
After watching this series, you will be able
to create your own compositions ready for print.
If you wish to follow along with this course,
you can download the entire project folder.
The link is in the description.
The download folder will include two folders:
start and complete.
The start folder will contain all the raw resources
I had before starting the project.
If you wish to follow along with the tutorial
from the very start, you can use these files.
The complete folder will contain the finished document
and all images after manipulation.
You can use this folder to take a closer look
at the finished layout and all the images within,
and what exactly was done to them.
If you want to skip ahead or back at any point
in the course, you can find every episode link
in the description.
Also, I suggest you download the PDF worksheet.
You can save this to your computer
and come back at any point.
This is an interactive PDF and contains
all the relevant video and project download links.
You can also download this in the description.
Okay, so what is Adobe InDesign?
Well Adobe InDesign is part of the Adobe Master Collection,
and in recent years has become industry standard
for creating design for print.
If you need to create layouts for brochures, leaflets,
business cards, books, menus, or flyers
InDesign is the program to create it in.
You are about to learn how powerful
this program actually is.
And the synergy this program has with other programs
such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.
So what are we going to create in this course?
Well, to add structure to this course
and make it a little bit more interesting and practical,
I have created an imaginary brief
that we are going to work from.
So, let's check this out.
Okay, so a local motorbike store wants
to create a double-sided, full-color leaflet
to promote a particular motorbike they have in stock
and hand these out in store.
The client has written and provided all the text,
and taken various photographs,
and also purchased a bunch of photos off the internet
from royalty free image websites that he wants to include.
They don't have a big budget,
so I don't want it to be any bigger than A5,
but they have seen some leaflets that open up and unfold,
so would like to see something like this.
So, let's take a look at the finished piece.
This is an A5 size, three page, roll fold leaflet.
As you can see, the document starts with a cover
which opens up to reveal the first spread.
With this particular design, we have a page folded in,
so if we fold out the page I can reveal
the full three page spread.
If I close the document and turn it upside down,
we can see we have a back page.
So once again, let me open up the cover,
reveal the first spread, then turn the page out
to reveal the full spread, and if I turn it upside down
we can see how it works on the back.
So, how was this made in Adobe InDesign?
So, let's take a look.
So here I am in Adobe InDesign,
and here you can see the finished document.
Here we can see the front
and back compositions of the leaflet.
We are currently viewing this in preview mode.
If I press W on the keyboard,
I can see the document in normal mode.
So let's zoom in and take a quick look around.
Now you can see we have a lot going on here.
But don't worry, if you don't exactly understand
what you are looking at right now,
everything you will see here will be clearly explained
in later episodes of this course.
So if we take a quick look around,
we can see we have many objects
that make up this composition.
We have text boxes, we have many images,
and objects, and we have a table here.
If I quickly come over to the layers panel,
you can see we have one main layer called main comp.
Now this works similar to Adobe Photoshop.
For this composition, all objects reside
on this one layer here.
If I toggle the visibility of this layer,
we can clearly see all marks and guides.
So, let's toggle back the visibility of the main comp layer.
So, this is essentially what we are going to prepare for
and eventually build-up to.
Once this is finished, I will export the entire composition
into a PDF document and it's going
to look something like this.
Here we can see the PDF open in Acrobat Reader
and we can see around the edge all the marks and guides.
Now these guides are all generated from InDesign on export
and it's these guides that printers use in order to trim
and fold the document correctly
and also collaborate the colors on their printers.
If you're interested, you can download this
and take a closer look yourself.
The link is also in the description.
So, this concludes the introduction of this course.
It's going to take a little while to demonstrate everything,
but I will try and explain everything as quickly
and as clearly as possible.
So, get comfortable and I hope you enjoy this course.
Now, let's begin with the first video
in the preparation section,
how to prepare for your Adobe InDesign project.