what makes InDesign different and how can it help you in today's video I'll be
answering all of that plus I'll show you how to use InDesign to create impressive
presentation boards so that you can feel confident using this software watch till
the end of the video for my thesis presentation boards as well as free
templates I will be using InDesign CC 2019 for this video
so let's start and open a new document I have my A2 preset already saved but if
you don't have anything saved, then you can go into print and choose a paper
size but let's go to recent and I'm gonna pick A2 which is four twenty by
five nine four and I'm just gonna leave it as ten pages for now and I'm going to
select horizontal for margins I like really thick margins because I feel like
it helps with the simplistic view so 20 millimeters is good for me for bleed and
slug you don't have to worry about slug you most probably won't use slug my
presentation boards were only for online view they weren't printed so if you are
printing your presentation boards add an appropriate bleed so now let's hit create
and start our presentation boards so I like using grids in my presentation
boards because it's just easy to use so I'm gonna use a shortcut F or use
rectangle frame tool to create rectangles which will represent where I
put kind of my images so a rough layout could be like a big image here and then
a site section here may be a few smaller images here take this into more detail
and then start making a bit more accurate boxes into the layout that you
want since this is a site analysis I always love sections to be at the bottom of
the page because that black line it gives strength to the board and as you
can see it is a grid but I've tried to make it a bit more interesting with
moving things and offline in them I'm gonna make a box between one space that
I like and I'm going to do that across all of the pages so that the space
between the images is consistent as long as this spacing is used throughout the
boards it will look amazing so now let's type a title for these boards I loved
using Times New Roman for titles in bold and then
Arial regular for body text so I'm gonna create another text box for the
paragraph and if I right-click I can place fill with placeholder text which
is really good if you're just preparing your presentation boards and you don't
really know what you want to say just yet and I like my text to be justified
so I'm gonna justify that but the problem with that is some letters end up
being hyphenate but what you can do is actually turn off hyphenate if you click on
these three buttons here and then uncheck - a it's automatically fixed for
you you can just create a new text box I don't know why I copied and dragged it
but you can just create a new text box for titles and these I'm gonna have them
as centered I like using text boxes in the beginning of the presentation boards
even if I don't know what I'm gonna say but it also helps with the composition
and I'll have a video linked in the cards for you about how to use fonts and
text in your presentation boards because it really does make a difference where
you place the text adding images to InDesign is literally the easiest thing
ever you can just drag your Photoshop file and then drag it where your box is
and it will automatically fit it for you one thing to know about InDesign is that
the blue line means the boundary of the image but the red affects the image so
as you can see I'm just dragging the images and once it's red I can then move
the image right and left but the frame still stays as it is which is a huge
advantage for InDesign over Photoshop because this is a site section and you
want to make sure that it is to scale you can then drag and click once on an
empty area and once you click once it will place the image in its original
size I know that this is now to scale I'm just gonna put it in place and then
crop it and then use the orange boundary to move it and adjust another way to add
images InDesign is for example you click from one corner of where you want to
place the image and then drag and hold to the other corner and again it will
fill it for you another cool way to add images InDesign is that you can add
multiple images at the same time using the same technique if I select these
three Photoshop files and then add them to InDesign
you can see it will show you a preview of which image it is so that you can
place it in the appropriate box for titles and consistency I always have to
have the titles in the same place in every presentation board so you can just
copy that and copy that in place into all of the
other presentation boards you can also use master pages but that's kind of an
advanced topic for now and I don't really use it for presentation boards
since it's only a few documents this is another layout that I love doing in my
presentation board which is such a simple layout it's a large image and
then smaller images and text boxes on the left so this could be anything but I
love having any site plans any ground floor plans when you want to show a bit
more context detail into the landscape I really want to show it off so this is
the best layout to do so I'm gonna add my master plan right now this
presentation board will fit 1 to 1000 master plan but I don't create my master
plan in 1 to 1000 I will create it in 1 to 500 and then scale that down to 1 to
1000 because that keeps the quality in your file and the detail so the best
thing about InDesign is that you can scale things as well if you go to here
where the height is or the width you can choose whichever one you want if you
type the backslash on your keyboard and then the numbers are for example I'm
scaling it down by 1/2 because it's from 1 to 500 to 1 to 1000 so I'm gonna scale
that down by 1/2 then I can put it back in place and I'm sure that it is the
scale and its high quality then you can add multiple images explaining your
master plan and the best thing about creating these horizontal boards is that
you get to focus on one aspect of your design at a time so the first was about
site analysis this board is about master planning i really suggest you try out
this technique of creating horizontal board only on one topic
so now the third layout that i want to show you is a very simple layout because
it focuses on the negative space this board will be about the hotel rooms and
its interior spaces do it pretty randomly and add them to the bottom of
the board
rearrange them so that for example the living space is the first image make
sure they're all aligned if you remember the other box that I've used I'm going
to use it again to make sure that the space in between all of these images are
the same so I'm going to add some text boxes now I'm going to add the plans for
these hotel rooms so I'm going to click once and that way I'm sure it is to
scale and then I'm gonna scale that down by a half I'm gonna crop each plan
separately so then I can control its space in and I'm gonna crop it right to
the edges of the image another benefit of InDesign is for example if you hold
down alt and you copy and drag then you can control the image and choose the
other plan but still the image is the same size and since these plans are
different in size it creates this negative space that's quite dynamic I
really like to make sure that the spacing is equal what you could also do
is select all of the images together and then if you go to align you can also
distribute spacing shortcut W will switch between the normal to preview
which is kind of how your boards would look like without all of the gridlines
and if you're concerned about your images looking blurry or looking
pixelated that is how InDesign works I will show you the images in low
qualities so that it can work faster but you can change that if you go into view
display performance and then press high quality display so now you can see your
images in high quality the other benefit to using InDesign to Photoshop is
since you've added photoshop files to your InDesign and not images it means
that your Photoshop files are linked so if I right-click on any of these images
and go to edit original I'm just going to add a blue
color overlay just to see massive difference and I'm gonna hit save now go
back into InDesign and see that it automatically changes so that means that
you can create your presentation boards in InDesign ahead of time and still edit
them in Photoshop but have them updated in your InDesign file one thing to keep
in mind is if for example you delete any of the files InDesign will kind of freak
out and it will show you that you need to relink them so if you change the name
of the file if you change its location you will have to relink them but it's
easy to do if you just click on this icon and that will open the real link
and you can just click on it and then we link to the original file or you can
also relink it to a different file if your example you change your mind about
different perspectives and that's another way to do so these are the
presentation boards that I curated for my thesis presentation I'm really happy
with how they turned out and the best part about creating these horizontal
boards is for example you can cut them and copy them into for example a one
posters which we were required by the university to submit A1 posters
because it had to be like with a template and it's so annoying I hate
that yellow it doesn't go with any of my images or diagrams but what can we do I
hope you guys found this video helpful let me know in the comments down below
do you use InDesign in your presentation boards or do you use a different
software and good luck on your thesis presentations
I'm Rasha Shrourou and i will see you next time
you