InDesign Classes Live Online: Best Remote/Virtual InDesign Training

Learn More About Live Online InDesign Courses

Adobe’s InDesign is the leading software for desktop publishing and page layout design. Adobe released InDesign in 1999 to replace its PageMaker software. Users of this software can create complex, dynamic multipage documents incorporating text and images which includes everything from magazine spreads, eBook layouts, and product brochures to interactive PDFs and prototype web pages. InDesign is now industry-standard software for those working in fields like graphic design, advertising, marketing, and public relations, and print and digital publishing.

While InDesign is widely used by graphic designers and the publishing industry, in recent years InDesign has also started to be used for corporate communications. This allows someone to use InDesign to create dynamic, interactive PDFs with hyperlinks, multimedia elements, and page elements that can be shared internally or externally for a variety of purposes. Additionally, it is common for those learning InDesign to learn other Adobe Create Cloud software like Illustrator and Photoshop. Learning all three programs allows someone to design a brand logo in Illustrator, add effects to product images in Photoshop, and bring everything together in a professionally created marketing brochure in InDesign.

What Can You Do with InDesign Training?

Learning how to use InDesign will give you the training necessary to create organized, attractive, professional page layouts and documents. Graphic Designers can use their skills to manipulate text, images, and shapes and create product brochures for a brand’s new line of clothing or design a custom newsletter that highlights a company’s best selling products and upcoming events. Those in publishing might instead use InDesign to create book covers or format a magazine layout with specific text, columns, and graphics. Increasingly, InDesign is being used for corporate communications, so one with this training can add sound and video, create page transitions, or embed hyperlinks into a document to make it more interactive and dynamic.

While learning InDesign provides you with the necessary skills for creating and customizing page layouts for multi page documents, InDesign is often used along with other software from Adobe and Microsoft. This is an additional benefit to learning InDesign, as it often also allows you to learn how to integrate and import content from Photoshop, Illustrator, Excel, and Word. Many who use InDesign will end up creating precise images, like brand logos, in Illustrator and then importing them into InDesign. Recently, Adobe has added AI capabilities to InDesign, allowing designers and artists to create their own unique text-to-image graphics to add to their documents.

Many people learn InDesign because it can be a fun way to flex their creative muscles and give them another skill set that they can use to create professional documents for their personal use. Learning how to use InDesign offers you a useful way to create your own resume or business cards that can be used when navigating the job market or to hand out at networking events. InDesign skills can also allow you to impress friends, family, and colleagues with professionally created posters and flyers inviting others to a neighborhood BBQ or birthday get-together. You can also volunteer your InDesign skills to help local nonprofits create professional documents to aid their causes and spur on their fundraising efforts or awareness campaigns.

What Will I Learn in an InDesign Class?

InDesign classes will teach important skills like professional layout design for multi page documents, how to format and style text, working with color, manipulating objects, images, and other graphics, and preparing to print and export documents. Along with these technical skills, learners will focus on the creative design process and how to problem solve when designing different documents.

Layout Design

The main function and purpose of InDesign software is creating and editing professional page layouts, so this will be a core skill one learns in any InDesign class, bootcamp, or certificate program. This will involve determining what kind of document one is creating and how to integrate various components like text, color, shapes, and images to make an interesting and informational document. InDesign courses are likely to cover design principles so that one will learn how to balance and arrange different elements of composition, text, and color. Most courses should also cover document templates, creating master pages for a consistent layout, and setting up facing pages for multipage documents.

Typography

The art of typography will also be a core skill one learns in an InDesign course. Many marketing and informational documents will need a particular style and format of text, so one will learn everything from importing text to choosing the right font, size, and spacing for one’s text. InDesign classes will also teach one how to create a consistent style across multi page documents, how to use frames for your text, and how to connect, link, or thread frames to flow text in your document.

Color & Visual Element Manipulation

In addition to page layout and typography, one will also learn how to work with color and how to work with objects, shapes, images, and other visual elements. How you balance these more visual and eye-catching elements with text can be an especially useful way to create promotional material and interactive PDFs. These skills include importing, formatting, and styling images and graphical elements in InDesign. Learners will also become familiar with managing color and learning how to work in different color modes, create tints and gradients, and manipulate the color of images, frames, texts, and objects.

Print Preparation & Export

A key part of any InDesign course will be thinking about how to finalize documents. This can include how to proof documents, resolve any errors, and set up any marks or bleeds. One will also learn how to save, export, and print in a variety of file formats. It is common for a class, bootcamp, or certificate program to cover both print documents and digital documents like EPUB files so that one will be able to work with a wide variety of media.

Creative Problem Solving

Along with the technical skills one learns in an InDesign course, these classes teach using creative thinking to solve problems. Designers and artists use InDesign to create documents for specific purposes or to execute a client’s vision and ideals. This will involve a lot of creative thinking and finding the best way to achieve the necessary goals for a document while also creating something that might be interesting to look at and engage a client's or a consumer’s interest on a more emotional level. A client might also come in with the idea that they want a trendy, eye-catching design and the artist or designer is the one who needs to figure out how to make that happen by taking into account design principles, marketing trends, and the history of different aesthetics and styles.

How Hard is it to Learn InDesign?

As long as you have basic computer skills, you can learn InDesign fundamentals easily. It will only take a few hours for someone to become familiar with navigating the software and learning how to work on simple documents. Within a day, you can be adding and formatting text, objects, graphics, and other elements. Someone learning InDesign as a hobby can also rely on built-in templates, making it even easier to create professional-looking documents with this software. Those wanting to use InDesign professionally will need to learn more advanced features of InDesign as well as take into account industry-specific design standards and how to use InDesign alongside other, complementary software. While this might initially present a challenge, depending on one’s educational background, it should not be too difficult for one to learn to use InDesign within their chosen career.

What Are the Most Challenging Parts of Learning InDesign?

If you ask professionals what the most challenging aspect of learning InDesign is they will likely tell you it is the need to implement one’s own creativity and style when coming up with novel and interesting designs. Most learners do not find it difficult to master the technical skills of InDesign, though someone without a background in design might need to learn basic concepts of design, like composition, color, and typography. Many professionals need to combine their knowledge of design and InDesign techniques with their own knowledge and intuition of what looks good, what works, and what will impact viewers. Continued practice with InDesign will help someone develop their own style and it can help to collaborate with others or look to design history and current trends for inspiration.

How Long Does it Take to Learn InDesign?

Beginning InDesign users can usually learn the basic features and techniques in as little as a few hours or a day-long InDesign class. Within a short amount of time, learners can become comfortable creating, formatting, and styling a variety of simple, multi-page documents like brochures or magazine spreads. Depending upon how much effort one puts into learning and then practicing InDesign skills, it can take between a few weeks to a few months to become fully proficient in using InDesign to create professional materials for use within one’s industry. It can take longer to master InDesign for those who also need to learn additional programs, like Illustrator or Photoshop, and most professionals will tell you that they didn’t fully master InDesign or other Adobe Creative Cloud software until using it on the job and for specific projects.

Should I Learn InDesign In Person or Online?

To determine whether to learn InDesign in person or online, consider course availability, schedule, cost, and your own learning needs. Studying and learning a topic or skillset in person is considered the best way to learn and retain information. In-person learning allows you to receive hands-on training and individualized attention from an instructor who is there to guide you and other students in learning the subject matter. Many learners find that learning from an instructor in a designated classroom makes it easier to pay attention and focus on the task at hand. However, it is becoming harder to find in-person InDesign classes, they can cost more than some online options and often have less accessible schedules for busy individuals.

Online learning also has its own benefits and disadvantages. Live online classes can be very similar to in-person classes as these are instructor-led and often follow a similar curriculum. With a live online class, you get the benefit of having access to a live instructor and can learn at home and on your own schedule. Live online classes are much more likely to be offered with weekend, evening, and part-time options so that those with busy schedules or who work full-time can attend. This mode of training also has disadvantages, the main one being that many people find it harder to focus and remain engaged when learning through a video call platform. Motivated learners can find ways to stay engaged, like making sure to participate in class discussions and activities and reaching out to instructors or other students outside of class time.

Another online option are asynchronous online classes or on-demand classes. These are self-paced courses where students are given access to course material like video lectures, tutorials, and practices, and can work through this material at their own speed and entirely on their own schedule. This is the best option for highly self-motivated learners with busy schedules as it allows this group of people to learn quickly and when it is most convenient for them to do so. On-demand classes can be a great way to learn the basics of InDesign and there are free and low-cost options from providers like LinkedIn Learning and Udemy. This training format is not without its own disadvantages. Many students find it hard to complete on-demand courses as there are few external motivating factors like instructors, deadlines, or other students to keep them engaged and moving through the course material.

Can I Learn InDesign Free Online?

Yes, there are free online seminars, tutorials, and short workshops that one can use to learn the basics of InDesign. Beginners or intermediate-level InDesign users will find Noble Desktop’s free InDesign seminar useful. This seminar offers four video tutorials that cover InDesign fundamentals like typography, working with images, and how to attend to composition in one’s design. For further resources, consider navigating to Noble’s YouTube channel which has a full playlist for learning the full Adobe Creative Cloud, or reading articles from Noble’s blog which has additional free tips and tutorials for learning InDesign and related programs.

In addition to these resources, YouTube is a great place to find comprehensive and document- or industry-specific video tutorials. Adobe also offers short tutorial articles for important InDesign skills that beginners will find useful. Consider checking to see whether your local public library offers access to LinkedIn Learning, LinkedIn’s on-demand learning platform that has InDesign classes that will get you started learning the fundamentals. Make sure to look for the most updated, user-tested free materials, and for more advanced skills, mentorship opportunities, and career-ready training consider taking a live online or in-person InDesign class, bootcamp, or certificate program.

What Should I Learn Alongside InDesign?

Many learning InDesign are doing so as part of a graphic design or other design-focused class or program of study. Alongside InDesign, consider learning other software in the Adobe Creative Cloud like Illustrator and Photoshop. InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop all integrate well together and each has a specific role to play in the design process. Certificate programs, degree programs, and some bootcamps will even teach all three of these programs together in the same class.

Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor that those in publishing or marketing will often use to design and edit brand logos and other important graphics. Photoshop will be more useful for editing images and adding layers and effects. All three programs are often used to create one multipage document. An artist or designer can create a brand logo in Illustrator, use Photoshop to edit images for a brand’s product launch, and then import the logo and product images into InDesign to create a visually appealing, informative document like a seasonal lookbook, product brochure, or dynamic PDF to be shared with stakeholders and even consumers.

Industries that Use InDesign

Many industries use InDesign to create informational and promotional documents with professional page layouts. Learning InDesign can allow you to work in-house for companies and organizations or in a design firm where you can end up working with clients from a variety of industries. InDesign skills are necessary for many working in the advertising and publishing industries and these skills are often valued in retail and web design, as well.

Advertising & Marketing

Advertising and marketing is one of the prime industries for those with InDesign experience. Much of the advertising industry uses print and digital documents to convey information and generate awareness about a product, service, brand, or important message. Graphic Designers, for instance, will often find themselves working on promotional material like flyers, brochures, newsletters, and pamphlets. Those in advertising can find themselves needing to know how to create and export a wide variety of both print and digital media that can be used in various campaigns for different companies and industries.

Book, Magazine, & Newspaper Publishing

Publishing is one of the central industries that relies on InDesign. InDesign is used to create page layouts for books, newspapers, and magazines, to format text and margins, and to create graphic- and text-rich magazine spreads or book covers. InDesign is still being used within publishing even as many traditional print publications move to digital formats. EBooks are increasingly popular in education and for leisure reading and InDesign has specific features one can use for eBook formatting and exporting.

Retail & ecommerce

Many designers and artists find themselves putting their InDesign skills to use in the retail industry. Similar to the advertising industry, InDesign is used in retail to create promotional material and also to design product catalogs or seasonal lookbooks that can be shared with stakeholders and consumers. Retails can also use InDesign to create point-of-sale signs, banners, or displays alerting customers to sales or new product launches. Many of these documents have ecommerce corollaries, allowing designers and artists to work with both brick-and-mortar retailers and those who have an online retail presence.

Tech & Software Development

While UI Designers and Software Developers will often use specific software for prototyping and building websites and software, some do use InDesign to generate a visual layout of their design plans. For UI Designers planning a website or application or Software Developers working on a program interface, one can do wireframing using InDesign. InDesign excels at offering useful typographical formatting features and supports exporting to HTML and EPUB formats. Using InDesign can also allow one to communicate visual designs to other stakeholders, including other designers and artists who may be more familiar with the ease of creating and editing documents in InDesign.

InDesign Job Titles and Salaries

Those with InDesign training can find themselves holding many job titles. Some of the most common are Graphic Designer, Production Artist, Digital Designer, or Social Media Manager. While all of these professionals have InDesign training, their roles within companies and organizations large and small will be distinct and often industry-specific.

Graphic Designer

A Graphic Designer is in charge of creating and revising visual assets that communicate important ideas or messages to a specific audience. They are the professionals who manipulate text, color, graphics, and composition to design print and digital materials such as advertisements, product packaging, brand logos, event flyers, and book covers. Not only will Graphic Designers need InDesign proficiency, but they often will work with other Adobe Creative Cloud software like Photoshop and Illustrator.

Graphic Designers typically earn around $60,000 a year in the US. What you will earn as a Graphic Designer depends on location, education, experience, and other factors like one’s industry. This yearly salary can range from about $36,000 to $105,000, as entry-level Graphic Designers will often make less while more experienced, senior Graphic Designers will earn more.

Production Artist

Production Artists often find employment in the entertainment or advertising industry. Similar to Graphic Designers, these professionals design and revise visual assets and often create for both print and digital environments. The Production Artist is often the person in charge of reviewing all designs to make sure they meet project standards. These individuals need to know how to use InDesign to create visual assets and also edit formatting and styling issues later in the design process.

According to Glassdoor, Production Artists in the US are earning an average salary of $72,000 with bonuses, commissions, and other profit-sharing endeavors. Their salary range is $58,000 to $89,000 a year and as with other jobs, this will be based on factors including one’s skill level, experience, and location.

Digital Designer

Digital Designers create visual media for digital interfaces. This can involve working on UX or UI design to prototype the look of a website or application interface or working in graphic design to create visual assets for digital promotion via email, social media, or a brand’s website. Digital Designers can have a similar design-focused educational background to Graphic Designers and Production Artists, but will often also have a background in coding, as well.

Digital Designers are some of the top-earning professionals who often need InDesign training. The average annual salary for a Digital Designer in the US is currently $101,000, though this can range from around $50,000 to over $200,000. Pay will depend on location, experience, education, and industry, with some of the top-paying industries for Digital Designers being medicine, aerospace, and computer systems and software design.

Social Media Manager

Social Media Managers are in charge of a brand, company, or organization’s social media accounts. This can mean planning ad campaigns, creating posts, curating social media feeds, assessing consumer engagement through data analytics, and collaborating with businesses to determine how to execute their brand vision. Along with education in advertising and marketing, Social Media Managers will often use InDesign to create content for their clients. InDesign has specific tools for optimizing one’s digital and social media content which makes sharing dynamic content on channels like Facebook and Instagram easier and makes one’s content viewable on a variety of devices.

In the US, the average yearly salary for a Social Media Manager is currently about $59,000. Important factors like education, experience, and location matter here, as those in San Francisco are making an average of $86,000 a year while those in Houston are earning an average of $45,000 a year. With this career, as with others, one will need to weigh salary against the cost of living to determine which location is best for one’s needs when entering the job market.

Live Online InDesign Classes

Noble Desktop offers comprehensive, beginner-friendly, and career-oriented InDesign classes. Every Noble Desktop class is led by an expert instructor who provides hands-on training and one-on-one mentoring in fundamental InDesign skills and techniques. Small class sizes allow learners to receive individual attention and students are guaranteed to learn the skills in the syllabus. Total beginners should consider Noble Desktop’s one-day InDesign in a Day class. This class provides learners with the basics so that they can start using InDesign to create simple designs of their own choosing.

For more inclusive, comprehensive, and career-oriented training, enroll in a bootcamp or a certificate program. The quickest way to learn comprehensive InDesign skills is Noble Desktop’s three-day Adobe InDesign Bootcamp. This bootcamp will cover everything learners need to navigate the software and start creating professional page layouts for documents such as brochures, magazine spreads, and books. Another option for career-oriented learners is Noble’s Graphic Design Certificate, which will teach design principles, InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop over the course of one month for full-time students and three months for part-time students. Additionally, if you’re looking for certification to boost your resume, consider the InDesign Certification Program which will include the skills learned in Noble’s bootcamp plus six hours of one-on-one tutoring, additional study material, and the exam itself.

Ledet is an Atlanta-based training center with classes in popular digital advertising software, including InDesign. A good option for those wanting to learn introductory and advanced InDesign quickly is their beginner-friendly Adobe InDesign 501 - InDesign Bootcamp. Ledet’s bootcamp is a five-day live online class with hands-on training in digital and print publications that combines the training of their InDesign 101, InDesign 201, and InDesign 301 classes. Students can expect to learn how to set up documents, work with text, graphics, and layers, and how to print and publish physical and digital documents. In addition to this comprehensive bootcamp, learners can take Ledet’s singular InDesign classes or enroll in InDesign classes focused on XML publishing and print production guidelines.

Professional IT training center Certstaffix Training also offers live online courses in Adobe InDesign. Their three-day Adobe InDesign (2024) Course aims to cover fundamental InDesign skills and is a good choice for both beginners and intermediate-level learners. In this class, students can expect to learn the basics of working with text, graphics, typography, and color as well as how to import designs from Illustrator and Photoshop and prepare documents for print or export. Certstaffix suggests that this course can help prepare students for the Adobe Certified Professional (ACP) exam in Print & Digital Media Publication using Adobe InDesign.

HeadTrix provides digital skills training and corporate consulting services. They offer a two-day InDesign Level 1 class for beginners and a two-day InDesign Level 2 class for more intermediate-level InDesign learners, both of which are taught live online by Adobe Certified instructors. Level 1 focuses on teaching students the fundamentals of navigating the software, working with text frames, typography, color, importing text, and preparing for publication. Level 2 builds on these skills by teaching students how to work with tables, combine text and images, do advanced text formatting, and use InDesign’s drawing and Illustrator tools. In addition to these live online classes, they offer in-person classes in some major US cities like Los Angeles and Austin, and private, group, and corporate training is also available.

Based in Illinois, Computer Training Source, Inc., offers software training in the Chicago area and live online from any location. For InDesign, they have an entry-level one-day InDesign Part 1 class, an intermediate-level one-day InDesign Part 2 class, and an advanced-level one-day InDesign Part 3 class. Part 1 teaches students everything they’ll need to get started creating and customizing a document, working with objects, layers, and text frames, building tables, and exporting documents. Part 2 focuses on more advanced features so that students learn how to work in multiple formats, with long documents, use advanced page elements, manage styles, build complex paths, and publish documents in different formats. Part 3 teaches students how to import and work with graphics, sound, and moving images, add transparency effects, add form fields to PDFs, and create interactive EPUB documents.

InDesign Corporate Training

If you are looking to upskill or reskill your employees, consider Noble Desktop’s corporate training options. For InDesign, Noble offers short classes like InDesign in a Day, more comprehensive classes like the Adobe InDesign Bootcamp, and full programs of study that will teach InDesign and other Creative Cloud programs like the Graphic Design Certificate. Corporate training classes are offered in person at Noble’s facility in Manhattan, live online from any location, and can be scheduled in person at your location.

Noble Desktop also offers a discount for purchasing bulk vouchers for attendance in regular Noble classes. This option makes it easier for you to choose which courses to offer to your employees and it is a convenient way for employees to decide which courses fit best with their training needs and schedule. For more information about these corporate training options and to schedule a free consultation, email corporate@nobledesktop.com today.

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Key Insights

Learn More About Live Online InDesign Courses

What Can You Do with InDesign Training?

What Will I Learn in an InDesign Class?

Layout Design

Typography

Color & Visual Element Manipulation

Print Preparation & Export

Creative Problem Solving

How Hard is it to Learn InDesign?

What Are the Most Challenging Parts of Learning InDesign?

How Long Does it Take to Learn InDesign?

Should I Learn InDesign In Person or Online?

Can I Learn InDesign Free Online?

What Should I Learn Alongside InDesign?

Industries that Use InDesign

Advertising & Marketing

Book, Magazine, & Newspaper Publishing

Retail & ecommerce

Tech & Software Development

InDesign Job Titles and Salaries

Graphic Designer

Production Artist

Digital Designer

Social Media Manager

Live Online InDesign Classes

InDesign Corporate Training

Top Bootcamp Programs That Include InDesign

Live Online InDesign Courses by School

InDesign Certification Course Online (Self-Paced)

Introduction to InDesign (Self-Paced)

Intermediate InDesign (Self-Paced)

Adobe InDesign 101

Adobe InDesign 201 - InDesign Advanced

Adobe InDesign 301 - InDesign Tablet Publishing

Adobe InDesign 303 - Automated publishing using XML with InDesign

Adobe InDesign CC (2020)

InDesign Level 1

InDesign Level 2

Adobe InDesign basics

Advanced Adobe InDesign

Accessible PDF creation with InDesign

Adobe InDesign Compact

Adobe InDesign Core Skills: Level 1

Adobe InDesign Core Skills: Level 2

Introduction to Adobe InDesign

Intermediate Adobe InDesign

Advanced Adobe InDesign

Transmedia

Introduction to Adobe InDesign

Intermediate Adobe InDesign

Advanced Adobe InDesign

Adobe InDesign: Advanced

Live Online InDesign Corporate & Onsite Training Noble Desktop

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