So you want to learn InDesign, eh? If you’re starting from scratch, it can feel overwhelming, with so many concepts, features, and options to grasp. But there are some great resources to get you started with a solid understanding of how objects, text, and images come together to create an InDesign layout. For example, take David Blatner’s brand new Lynda.com course, InDesign CC 2017 Essential Training. It offers one-stop shopping for all the fundamentals of using InDesign. And from there, you can explore other courses to dive deeper into specific topics like print production, ebooks, interactivity, styles, tables, animation, color management, graphic effects, etc, etc, etc. But ya gotta start somewhere, and David’s course is a great place to begin your InDesign journey.
Here’s the official description:
InDesign is an essential tool for design firms, ad agencies, magazines, newspapers, book publishers, and freelance designers around the world. InDesign CC Essential Training presents a thorough explanation of the core features and techniques that make this powerful page-layout application fun and easy to use, providing a foundation upon which advanced skills and workflows can be built. Watch the quick-start chapter to learn InDesign in just 30 minutes, or explore the entire course. David Blatner shows how to navigate and customize the InDesign workspace, build strong and flexible master pages, work with text and graphics, export and print finished documents, create interactive PDFs, and much more.
Topics include:
- Learning InDesign in just 30 minutes
- Creating new documents
- Adding, editing, and formatting text
- Managing pages
- Applying master pages
- Threading text frames
- Importing and editing graphics
- Working with color, transparency, and gradients
- Drawing and editing paths and frame shapes
- Scaling and transforming objects
- Applying paragraph and character styles
- Creating tables
- Building interactive documents such as interactive PDFs and EPUBs
- Packaging InDesign documents for output
- Printing and exporting
In the free movie below, David introduces the basics of working with pages. Check it out!
Inserting, deleting, and moving pages
For Lynda.com members, if you are currently signed in to your account, you can also check out these videos from the series.
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New documents
Applying basic text formatting
Importing graphics
This article was last modified on August 8, 2019
This article was first published on November 18, 2016
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