Creating Your First File: Installing Fonts and Setting Up in InDesign

In this video, we'll be creating our first file. Before we begin, let's first install our fonts. To do this, we'll open up our File Explorer and go to our folder. From here, we'll right-click the fonts zip and select Extract All.

We'll click Extract, and we now have our fonts extracted. If we double-click, we can select the first of many fonts that we have available to us. We'll double-click and we can see a preview of the first font, Chivo Black.

In order to utilize this font within InDesign and on our computer, we'll need to install it. We'll select Install, and depending on whether you've already installed these fonts from potentially another VDCI course, you can either click Yes to replace it or No. If you don't have these fonts installed on your computer, please install each of them by clicking Install and closing them before moving on to install the next one.

Once you've installed all of these fonts, we're ready to begin our first file. So let's close these windows out. We'll begin by going to File > New, and again, we'll choose Document.

From here, we'll be creating our first document and we'll go to Print for our template. Rather than choosing a template ourselves, let's create our own preset details. We'll start by dragging this window out, if yours is small here, so that we can see many of the options.

Next, let's double-click our preset details and we're going to title this file Basic Business Card. Next, we're going to change some of the details for our file. The first thing we'll change is our units by clicking the drop-down, and we'll select Inches.

Then for our width, we're going to double-click 8.5 inches and type in 3.5. Next, we'll double-click our height and type in 2. When we click outside, we'll see that we have a width of 3.5 inches by 2 inches. For this file, we'll only need one page, and we can start at number one. Scrolling down, we'll see that we have one column, and this is fine.

For our margins, we're going to double-click the first margin and type 0. When we click outside, we'll see that the remainder of the margins change to 0 because on the right-hand side we have the option Make All Settings the Same checked. If they didn't all change at once, you can go through and double-click and type 0, then click outside. For our bleed and slug, we'll be reviewing these in future videos, so for now, let's leave them at 0. Remember, if they're set to a number, you can simply double-click and type 0. Finally, we'll select Create.

The first thing we'll want to do when starting with our file is save it. So let's go to File > Save As, and in this instance, we're going to go to our folder and save it right in here. As we can see below, we already have the file name selected here from what we typed into our preset, and we'll make sure to save it as an InDesign CC document.

From here, we'll select Save, and we've now saved our file. Let's now go over a couple of tools that will be helpful in navigating our file. The first tool is our Zoom Tool.

We can find the Zoom Tool on the left-hand side within our toolbar, and we can use the shortcut (Z) on the keyboard to access the Zoom Tool. With the Zoom Tool, we can simply click, and we'll see that we zoom in further into the page. If we want to zoom out, we can hold ALT on the keyboard and simply click to zoom out.

While it can be helpful to have the Zoom Tool to zoom in and out, another shortcut to do so is to use CTRL and Plus on the keyboard to zoom in and out. Feel free throughout this course to either use the Zoom Tool to zoom in and out or use CTRL + Plus (+) and CTRL + Minus (-) on the keyboard to zoom in and out. Another tool that can be helpful is the Hand Tool shortcut (H) on the keyboard.

With this tool, we can click and drag to change our perspective. Additionally, there's another shortcut I often use within InDesign, and rather than using the Hand Tool, I'll simply hold CTRL on the keyboard and scroll down to move right with my mouse and up to change the perspective left with my mouse. The scroll can be helpful in moving up and down as well without holding CTRL.

Therefore, throughout this course, you'll see me using CTRL + Plus (+) and Minus to zoom in and out and using the scroll wheel to scroll up and down or holding CTRL and using the scroll wheel to move left and right. Feel free to use whatever method you prefer. Next, let's go over another tool.

We'll be utilizing our Type Tool shortcut (T) on the keyboard. Because InDesign uses many different objects and type materials, it's not as easy as simply beginning to type like you might in another text-based software. For InDesign, we need to actually create a text frame to be able to fill with type.

So utilizing our Type Tool shortcut (T) on the keyboard, we need to first begin by drawing our text frame. We'll do this by clicking and dragging, and here we have our text frame. In this text frame, I'd like you to type your name.

Once you've finished typing your name, let's select all the text by highlighting it or hitting CTRL + A to select all. From here, we're going to go to our Control Bar on the top, and we're going to change the font. With the fonts already installed, let's type in Chivo, and scrolling down, we can select Chivo Black.

Here, we can see that we've now created text that's filled our text frame. When we'd like to exit this text frame, we need to now exit by either hitting CTRL + Shift + A to deselect and exit the text frame typing mode or we can select our Selection Tool and click outside of the text frame. Let's now save our work either by going to File > Save or we'll use the shortcut CTRL + S on the keyboard to save our work.

In the next video, we'll continue creating text for our business card. See you there