Get a step-by-step guide on how to prepare for a digital design project using InDesign, from setting up file downloads to creating your first file. Learn the process of extracting, renaming, and moving files, setting up your workspace, and making necessary preference changes in InDesign.
Key Insights
- The article outlines the process of preparing for a design project, which includes extracting file downloads, renaming the folder, and moving it to the C drive for easy accessibility. It also emphasizes the importance of installing the necessary fonts from the course materials.
- Create your first design project using InDesign by starting a new document, defining its properties such as size, margins, and bleed, and saving it in the appropriate folder. The document can be zoomed in and out for a better view, and different objects can be selected and adjusted as needed.
- Customizing your workspace in InDesign enhances your efficiency and productivity. The article highlights the use of VDCI workspace, how to rearrange it to have properties, color, and stroke, and how to reset it if necessary. Moreover, preference changes are essential to maintain certain elements like stroke weight and effects, regardless of the changes in object size.
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're going to open up our file downloads as well as create our first file. So, with our Downloads folder open, let's right-click our File Downloads and we're going to select Extract All.
From here, we can extract them to the Downloads folder, clicking Extract, and we can close this window. Next, we're going to take this File Downloads folder and rename it by right-clicking and selecting Rename. We'll simply remove “File Downloads” and hit ENTER.
From here, we're now going to move it to our C drive, right-clicking and selecting Cut. Then, going to our C drive, let's paste it by right-clicking and selecting Paste. As one other change, if you'd prefer, we can add it to our Quick Access by dragging it right to the top under Quick Access.
This way, we'll easily have access to all of the materials for this course. The first thing we have is our Domus Interior Design files, and this is for Lessons One and Two, where we'll be utilizing them to create a postcard as well as a digital display. We also have our Hands-On Quizzes folder, and this contains the files necessary to complete your hands-on quizzes.
Finally, we have our Parks and Dwell Engineering materials. We'll be utilizing these in Lessons Three and Four. In addition, we also have our Fonts.
These are the fonts we'll be using throughout this course, as well as those used throughout other DAC courses. You need to install them. Simply double-click on them, and you can install all of these by double-clicking and selecting Install.
After confirming that you've either installed all of them or installing them yourself, let's go back out to our main folder. Next, let's look inside our Domus Interior Design folder. Within this folder, our fictional client Domus Interior Design has given us all of the necessary materials to create two different projects.
The first project we'll be creating is a postcard. So, let's scroll to the bottom here, and we're going to open up a postcard sample PDF. If we look at this here, we can see that we have the postcard that we'll be designing throughout Lesson One.
Feel free to print this out and use it as a reference throughout Lesson One while we create the postcard. If we now close this PDF, we can see we have all the necessary materials to create it. So, let's begin.
Now going into InDesign, let's create our file. We'll go to File > New, and we're going to select New Document. Next, we need to define our document.
We'll start by selecting Print, and let's give it a title. In this case, we're going to title it “Domus Postcard.” Next, let's change our units to Inches.
For our width and height, we're going to type in 6 for width and 4 for height. Keep in mind that many different postcards have different sizes. In this case, 6 × 4 is the postcard we've chosen to use. Next, we'll uncheck Facing Pages, and let's start with one page for now.
Moving down to our Margins, let's change them all the way down to 0.125 inches. For our Bleed, let's increase this to 0.125 inches. Finally, we'll click Create. We now have our postcard layout.
Let's begin by saving it. We'll go to File > Save As, and we'll be saving this within our folder under Quick Access. For the name, we’ll use “Domus Postcard, ” and we'll save it as an InDesign file by clicking Save. Next, let's quickly review a few things.
First, if we'd like to change our view of the document, we can zoom in and out using CTRL+PLUS (+) and CTRL+MINUS (-). In addition, with our Selection tool, we can select different objects or drag an area to select multiple objects. We can also utilize the Hand tool—shortcut H on the keyboard, or found in the toolbar—to adjust our perspective as well.
I often use CTRL + scroll up and down to scroll left and right, or I’ll simply scroll vertically to change my view. Next, let's discuss our workspace. At the top here, we have different workspace options. In this case, I'm utilizing VDCI as used in the first introduction course.
If you no longer have this workspace, we can simply recreate it by going to Window, and making sure that we have our CC Libraries, Control, Tools, and, of course, the File panel open. From here, we can rearrange these so that we have Properties, Color, and beneath that, Stroke. If you've made modifications to your VDCI workspace, we can also reset it by going to the top and selecting Reset VDCI.
As one final change, we're going to make a Preferences change. We'll go to Edit > Preferences > General. From here, the only change we're going to make is to apply it to content by unchecking “Include Stroke Weight” and “Include Effects.”
Essentially, this means that as we change the size of items such as a rectangle with a stroke of 5, if we scale it down, we still want to maintain that stroke of 5 rather than having it scale proportionally. So, in this case, we’re unchecking “Include Stroke Weight” and “Include Effects” so the stroke remains constant even when the object size changes. We'll then click OK.
With our work now saved by hitting CTRL+S on the keyboard, we're ready to begin actually importing objects into our file.
In the next video, we'll begin building out our library of elements and begin working on our first project. See you there!