This tutorial will introduce you to the unique capabilities of

InDesign. While Photoshop specializes in digital raster image manipulation,

and Illustrator excels in vector image creation, InDesign is the program that
pulls it all together. In InDesign one can take photos, graphs and maps, text
documents and integrate them into a single or multi-page document. It is
excellent for laying out boards, creating presentations that do not reek of
Powerpoint, and making books.
This tutorial utilizes the images produced in the Illustrator 1 tutorial
because most of the material that will end up in any given InDesign
document will be generated in one of these two programs.

Creating the Document

1. After booting up the program, select File>New>Document

2. In this tutorial, we will be making a power point presentation. I am
assuming this will be shown on a screen that is wider than it is long (as
many projectors / LCD flatscreens are) and we’ll just use the standard
letter size (8.5x11’’) for simplicity. Make sure the “Page Size” is “Letter”
and the orientation is “landscape” or the right of the two buttons. Enter Above: Step 2 Below: Step 3
“5” into the number of pages and uncheck the “Facing Pages” option.
The columns and margins can all be adjusted later but for now just enter
“0.5in” into one of the margin boxes. It will change all of them.
3. Now that the document has been created, let’s make sure our workspaces
look the same.
a. Go to the Preferences>Units and Increments Menu
b. Change Horizontal and Vertical Ruler Units to “Inches”. Hit OK.
c. If you don’t see rulers along the top and left of your document right
click anywhere in the document window and click on “Show Rulers”.
d. Right click on each ruler to make sure its units are set to inches.
e. Go to the menu and select Window>Workspace>Default Workspace.
This might not change anything if you are already running the default
workspace configuration. This helps manage your “palattes” or the
little windows down the right side of the screen that will be your tool
sets.

InDesign CS3 Tutorial :: Fall 2009 :: By James Moore Page 1

Master Pages
Since we want all of our slides to have a similar basic structure and look,
let’s start by creating a master page. On it, we will place a title graphic,
text boxes, frames, and a few guides. Anything created on a master slide
will show up on all other slides assigned to it, allowing us to create
consistent design elements from page to page without having to copy /
paste over and over again.

1. Click on the “Pages” button on the right hand side to open up the pages
palette. Here you will see the page with #1 highlighted because the main
screen is on page one. This palette will allow you to jump from page to
page, including the master page. Double click on the “A-Master” Page to
navigate to the master page.
2. Using Guides
a. Guides are tools that help you organize and align your elements on
the page. They appear as straight horizontal or vertical lines but will
not print by default. They can be placed on any type of page, but in
the case of the master page, it allows us to create guides that will Above: Step 2 Below: Step 3
appear on all the other pages.
b. Create a horizontal guide by clicking on the top ruler and dragging
down. Looking at the ruler on the left, try to place the guide as close
4’’, 4.25’’, 7.5’’, and 7.75’’ to make two sets of space buffers.
c. .Now create vertical guides by clicking on the left ruler and dragging
to the right to make guides at 5.375’’ and 5.625’’ This will serve as a
reference when we place images and text later on.
3. Create a bar of color to contain title text.
a. Select the rectangle tool (M). In the “Color” palatte on the right side of the
screen, select a light shade that will allow dark text to be seen on top. In
this case, I’ve picked a light shade of blue.
b. Click and drag from the intersection of the left side of the page and
the lower horizontal guide to the right side of the page so the bottom
of the box aligns with the margin as shown.

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4. Now we’ll make a couple text boxes to hold the presentation title, a space
for each page’s title, and a character that autimatically shows the current
page number.
a. Select the Type tool (T) and drag a box from the intersection of the top
of the colored box and the rightmost center guide to bottom-right of the
margins.
b. Enter a title. We’ll use “InDesign Workflow Presentation”, hit Enter
and type your name. You’ll notice that InDesign’s default font
settings don’t make a great-looking title. Let’s change that.
c. Select both lines of text with the Type tool and open the Character
palatte. Instead of “Times” choose a cleaner font such as Helvetica
Neue and change the style to “Light”. Then, using the Type tool,
select only the top line and change the font size from 12pt to 18pt to
make it prominant.
d. Select both lines again and open the Paragraph palatte. Here, change
the text alignment (also known as “justification) from left to right by
Above: Step Below: Step
clicking on the small button toward the top of the palatte shown on
the far right.
e. Hit Esc to exit text editing mode.
f. While holding alt or option key, click and drag the text box you just
created to the left side of the bar. This is a quick way to duplicate an
object. With the box selected, go to the Paragraph palette and change
the justification to the left, so the text aligns nicely with the left.
g. In the new left text box you just created, double click to edit the text.
Replace the top line with “SLIDE TITLE”. We will change this on
each page according to what we need, but the master page prevents
us from having to create a new text box for each page.
h. Highlight the lower line of the leftmost text box, right click on the
text and go to Insert Special Character>Markers>Current Page
Number. Though on the Master page this will look like an “A”, on
each individual slide, it will show the current page number, saving
you a lot of trouble.

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Placing and Arranging Files
Now that we have completed our Master Slide, these elements will
show up on every page of our presentation. Multiple masters can be created
and assigned to different slides, but for now, let’s build the first slide of our
presentation. We’ll make a summary of Jill’s Illustrator 1 presentation with
text on the left and images on the right, much like this document.

1. Navigate back to page 1 by using the Pages palette. Another way to do

this is by going to the bottom of the screen and clicking on the downwards
arrow just to the right of the box that says “A-Master”. This will give you
a pop-up list of all available pages and masters. Click on the 1.
2. Here we have our first page, which looks a lot, on first glace, like
our master except that in the bottom left corner, the “A” has been
automatically replaced with the current page number, 1.

A Word About File Organization

This seems like an appropriate time to mention file organization. InDesign,
unlike illustrator or photoshop, does not automatically embed any images Above: Step Below: Step
or text you bring into the document. Instead, it links to them, meaning if
you just give someone an InDesign document, there will be a lot of missing
images and text. Instead, whenever you start an InDesign project, create a
folder where you will place all the elements of your document. You can then
zip this folder and give it to someone and it will include all the elements they
need to view and edit it. Think ahead!

3. Now, back to the tutorial. Remember that SLIDE TITLE text? Try clicking
on it, nothing happens. That’s because all elements on the Master Page
are locked on every other page so you don’t accidentally mess something
up. You can, however, edit an element from a page by shift-command
(cntrl on Windows) clicking on the text box. It will become active and
we can replace the text with “Illustrator 1”. Now the text is broken from
the Master, if you change anything else on the Master, it will recreate it
beneath this box and you will have to delete the old.

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4. Make two text boxes, one in the upper left quadrant and one in the lower
left quadrant created by the guides. There are many ways to get text from a
word processor such as Microsoft Word into InDesign, we are going to use
the “Place” function.
a. Make sure text boxes are unselected by clicking in a blank space with
the black arrow.
b. Go to File>Place. Select introtext.doc.
c. Notice how the arrow changes into a bit of the text itself. Click in
the top left text box you created. This “flows” the text into the box.
However, not all of the text fits in the box. You can tell this by the red
plus sign in a square at the bottom right corner. This tells you there is
more text than can fit.
d. However, you can make text “flow” from one box to another by
clicking on that red square and then clicking again on the text box
you want to connect with. Click on the text box below to flow the
hidden text into it. Now these two boxes are “linked” and editing text Above: Step Below: Step
in one will affect the other.
5. In InDesign, frames are used to hold images. Instead of having an image
sit directly in the document, as you would in Illustrator, InDesign requires
that they be placed in a frame. This has several advantages, the most
important being it makes cropping and arranging of images incredibly
easy. We will use frames to bring in and scale two images to show a before
and after of the Illustrator tutorial.
a. To create our frames, select the Rectangle Frame Tool (F) from the toolbar
and click and drag to create a frame in the upper-right quadrant and one
in the the lower-right quadrant. Empty frames appear with an X through
them, letting you know they are ready to receive whatever images you
would like to place in them.
b. Go to File>Place but this time, using the shift key, select both aerials.
psd and diagram.ai.You can select multiple files to place, allowing
you to drop them in to multiple frames. Notice how the pointer has
a faint thumbnail image of one of the documents, you can cycle
through the multiple images by using the left and right arrow keys.

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 c. Now that we have placed the .psd and the .ai files, you might notice
that they come nowhere near to fitting in the frame and are cut off.
We can scale and move the image within the frame by using the white
arrow. The black arrow changes the frame itself. Select the Direct
Selection Tool (A) aka the white arrow from the toolbar.
d. With the Direct Selection Tool, click somewhere inside the top-right
image box. You will notice the brown lines that appear, showing you
where the rest of the image is. It is, in fact, so large that it goes off the
page. To shrink this image you could start dragging one of the corners
down and to the right and then clicking and dragging the image back
up over and over again, but there is a faster way.
e. With the image selected look up at the top information bar. On the far
left is a array of nine tiny boxes. Click the top-left box. This sets an
anchor point for scaling. Whichever box is selected is the corner that
will stay put when scaling the image. To the far right, are two dialog
boxes, one on top of the other, that say 100%. These are a series of
small icons, hovering your mouse over them will reveal that they Fit
Content to Frame, Fit Proportinally, etc. Click on middle of the upper
row, Fit Content Proportinally. This will scale your image to fit the Above: Step Below: Step
frame without distorting its proportions. Do the same with the bottom
image.
g. Use the white arrow to align the two with each other like I have
shown in the picture.
Now we have finished our first slide. It has a title for the presentation,
a subtitle for the slide itself, summary text, and accompanying images.
If we were to continue this process, we would move on to the next page
using different text and pictures, but keeping a standard look and format
that would tie it all together. All of this, however, is no good if you cannot
take your presentation out of InDesign and get it on paper or on someone’s
screen. Let’s take a look at how to get your document into pdf form for
printing and presentation.

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Printing to PDF

Display Modes
It is helpful to sometimes look at your document without all the guides and
margin lines in the way. Also, images often look slightly pixelated because
InDesign creates lowres versions of them to prevent the computer from
slowing down when a document gets image heavy. You can change all these
settings in the View file menu. Overprint preview makes all images and
effects high resolution. It’s good for checking on things, but can slow down
normal work when images are large. In View>Screen Mode, you can choose
the Preview option which will do away with all those guides and give you an
idea of what your document will look like when you print or present it. You
can then go back to Normal mode in the same menu.

Exporting to PDF
PDFs are the best file format for multiple page documents such as the one we
have just created (granted we only made one page pretty but there are still
four others!). From a PDF you can then print it or present it from a program
such as Adobe Acrobat, availalble from the GSD. There are a couple of ways
to get a PDF, one easy and fine for basic things, and another that gives you a Above: Step Below: Step
cleaner pdf with a smaller file size that is a bit complicated.

Exporting
1. Go to File>Export
2. Type your file name and make sure the file type is “PDF”. Click save.
3. An intimidating dialog box will pop up giving you an array of options you
don’t normally need to worry about. The only thing you might change
is the “Adobe PDF Preset” box depending on how large your files are.
If they are just normal paper size (Letter, Tabloid) then use the Standard
setting, but if you are doing large boards (30x40) then use the Oversize
setting.
4. Test out your PDF by opening it in Acrobat.

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