Discover the step-by-step process of creating a web-published project using InDesign. Learn how to set up a new project, add design elements, and implement animations to enhance user interaction.
Key Insights
- The guide walks through the process of setting up a web-published project in InDesign, from creating a new document to adjusting width and height, and setting up margins and columns.
- It further explains how to create an effective layout by dividing the page into three sections using guides, and how to evenly distribute these guides for accuracy.
- The process also includes saving the project, resetting the workspace, and ensuring that the design settings apply across all pages in a project using the master page feature. The guide hints at adding animations and interesting effects for a unique online experience in subsequent stages of the project.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
In this video, we'll be creating our next project. We're going to be working in our Domus Interior Design folder again.
So let's double-click and let's open up a sample of the project we're about to create. This is our Digital Display sample. We'll double-click, and this PDF here provides us an example of the project we're about to create.
However, the actual project we'll be creating and publishing can be found online and will have different attributes and animations. It'll have buttons and other things that can only be done online. This sample here is provided to you to be able to print out and follow along.
So let's quickly observe this project. For our first page, we have a logo on the left and an image on the right. While it seems simple enough, within the project, we'll be creating different animations that can reflect this page specifically.
On our second page here, we have one image and some left and right arrows, as well as text. On the third page here, we have The House on 44th with a title, a description, and a button for photo details. And finally, on the bottom here, we have a logo, a couple of icons, and some text.
While all of this would be relatively simple and we're prepared to create this within InDesign currently, we're going to be creating some animations and interesting effects so that, as we interact with this project online, we'll have a different experience. So let's now close this out. However, feel free to print it out if you'd prefer.
And let's go into InDesign. We'll start by creating a new project. Go into File, New, and we'll create a document.
This time, since we're creating a web-published document, let's go to Web, and from here, we're going to create our own details. First, we'll start by titling this project Domus Digital Display*, and let's set our width and our height. For our width, let's set it to 1200 pixels, and our height we can leave at 600 pixels.
We'll make sure that Facing Pages is unchecked, and let's create four pages total. Finally, for our columns, we're going to want to set this page up so it has three different sections in each page. We'll increase this to three, and for our gutter, let's simply keep it at 10 pixels.
Next, for our margins, we'll click the dropdown, and for our margins, let's set this at 10 pixels. We'll click outside, and because all of these are linked, they'll all change to 10 pixels. Finally, we'll go to Bleed and Slug and make sure that this is all at 0 pixels.
Since this is digital, we don't need to have a bleed because we won't be printing it out. Finally, let's check our preview here, and we can see what this looks like. Here we have our digital display and our margin, as well as three columns.
So let's click Create. From here, let's start by saving our work, going to File, Save As, and we'll save this as an InDesign document and click Save. Next, let's zoom out.
Before beginning this project, let's first start by resetting our workspace, going to VDCI on the top right-hand side, and let's click Reset VDCI. This way, we start with our fresh workspace settings, and we can all work forward together. Looking at our page right here, we currently have it broken up into three different columns, and while this may help us to designate three different sections of our page, I also want to set up a couple of guides.
To do so, I want to make sure that my rulers are on, and we can go to Properties and make sure that we have our rulers showing. And because it's 1,200 pixels across, we know that at 400 and at 800 we've separated it into thirds. In addition, a quick trick to make sure that we're separating into thirds is to simply drag from our ruler and let's create four lines anywhere right above our page. By clicking and dragging above the page, we can see that the guide extends beyond the page. However, if we only drag in the page, we'll see that the guide stops right at the top.
In this case, we're going to drag it right to the top, and for our fourth guide, we'll hold Shift and make sure that we end right at 1,200. Obviously, these four guides right here are not spaced appropriately and evenly, and while 1,200 is relatively easy to separate into 400,800, and 1,200, some measurements aren't quite as easy. So here's a quick trick that we can utilize to make sure that we're evenly spreading out our guides.
So, right-clicking and making sure that our guides are not locked, we're going to make sure that we have all of our guides highlighted, dragging a selection box. And then, when we go to the top here in our control bar, let's select Distribute Horizontal Centers. When we do so, we'll see that they're now evenly spaced, splitting up our page into three different sections. In addition, if we zoom in here, we'll see that our columns weren't exactly set to the center of our page, and this right here is because we have margins on the left and the right-hand side, so we're subtracting the pixels of our margins from here.
Now that we've established that the thirds laid out by the columns are not actually accurate, let's remove them. We can do this by going to our Properties panel, and within our Properties panel, we're going to be editing our page. We'll click here, and then we'll click Margins and Columns.
Here we have our margins with a 10-pixel margin. However, if we go down to Columns here, we're going to simply decrease it from three to one. We'll click down until we only have one column. We'll then click OK, and we've now set this up.
If we zoom out, we can see that Page 1 now has four guides across the top, and this will be helpful for splitting our page up into three sections. However, I'd like these four guides to be on all of the pages that we have, so to do this, I'm now going to highlight all four guides with a selection box, and let's hit CTRL + C to copy. Next, let's go into our Pages panel here on the top right-hand side, and rather than just applying these to Page 1, let's apply them to our A-Master page.
As we apply elements to our Master page, we can have them show throughout all four of our pages. So let's simply click on the page and hit CTRL + V to paste, and we now have our four guides on our page. In addition, while we changed the columns from Page 1, we haven't changed it on the Master page, so let's change this again by going to Edit Page within our
Properties panel, and we'll click Edit Page Margin and Columns, and we'll drop our columns down from three to one and click OK.
Now we need to go back out to Page 1, so let's click back. We'll double-click Page 1, and here we can see that we have the guides on Page 1, Page 2,3, and 4. With this, our document is now set up to move forward in the process of designing our four pages. So let's hit CTRL + S on the keyboard to save our work, and in the next video, we're going to begin designing Page 1. See you there!