Advanced Object Styles In Adobe InDesign CC

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Course contents
SECTION: 3
Creative Cloud APP 5:45
SECTION: 12
Workflow Speed Tips 20:41
SECTION: 17
Photoshop & Illustrator 13:32
SECTION: 22
Exporting & Printing Tricks 8:17

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Course info

74 lessons / 9 hours Certificate of achievement

Overview

Hi there, my name is Dan. I am an Adobe Certified Instructor and an Adobe Certified Expert for InDesign and I work as a professional graphic designer. This course is about advanced features, productivity & workflow speed tricks using Adobe InDesign. 

This course is not for people brand new to InDesign. It’s for people who already know and understand the fundamentals. 

If you are already happy adding text & images to InDesign documents then this course is for you. Even if you consider yourself a heavy user, I promise there will be things in here that will blow your InDesign mind. 

You’ll learn advanced font tricks using Typekit & Opentype fonts, font grouping & font pairing. Mastering colour features like the colour theme tool and colour modes as well as professional proofing for colours for print. We’ll set permanent defaults for fonts, colours & will learn how to turn hyphenation off for good, once and for all.  

What would an advanced InDesign course be without all the tactics to fully control paragraphs, auto expanding boxes, spanning & splitting columns. You’ll become a Styles master, using nested styles, grep styles, next styles & advanced object styles.  

We’ll make beautiful charts & graphs for your InDesign documents. You’ll learn the pros & cons of various digital distribution methods including Interactive PDF’s, EPUBs & the amazing Publish Online. 

You’ll become a master of long, text heavy documents, autoflowing, primary text frames & smart text reflow, cross referencing, indexes, text variables & the InDesign book feature. There is entire section dedicated to how to speed up your personal workflow & how to speed up InDesign and get it running super fast. 

We look at interactive forms & scripts. There is just so much we cover and I want to share everything here in the intro but I can’t. Have a look through the video list, there is an amazing amount we cover here in the course. 

If you’re one of those people using InDesign and you know there is probably a better way, a faster way to work then this is your course. 

Daniel Walter Scott

What are the requirements?

  • You will need a copy of Adobe InDesign 2018 or above. But you find that 95% of all the features in this course will work with earlier version of InDesign (e.g. CS6). A free trial can be downloaded from Adobe.

What am I going to get from this course?

  • 70 lectures 5+ hours of well structured content. 
  • Create PDF Forms
  • Master Long Documents.
  • Advanced Fonts
  • Master Styles
  • Shortcut Sheet
  • Create Charts & Infographics
  • Create Interactive Documents
  • Workflow Tactics
  • Shortcuts & Speed Tips
  • Advanced Creative Cloud Features
  • Tips for working with Photoshop & Illustrator
  • Using Scripts 
  • Exporting, Prepress & Printing tricks 
  • You will get the finished files so you never fall behind. 
  • Downloadable exercise files & cheat sheet. 
  • Forum support from me and the rest of the BYOL crew. 
  • Techniques used by professional graphic designers. 
  • Professional workflows and shortcuts. 
  • A wealth of other resources and websites to help your accelerate your career. 

What is the target audience?

  • This course is for people who already know InDesign and want to take their skills and speed to the maximum level. 
  • This is an advanced InDesign course, so you’ll need basic InDesign skills to find this course useful. 
  • This course is perfect for anyone that already knows how to insert images & add text. 
  • If you a completely new to InDesign try my InDesign Essentials course before starting this one.
  • This course is perfect for anyone that has completed my InDesign Essentials course.

Course duration 7 hours 45 mins + your study.
Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

Downloads & Exercise files

Download Exercise Files

Transcript

Hi there, in this tutorial we're going to take Object Styles to the next level. I'm excited, you should be excited, because we're going to do something like this. We're going to bring in a couple of images, dump them on a page, select them, and say, become the right size, even fit. Great if you need to have the exact same size images. Every single time you can create a great style. It gets even better, watch this. Now I have an image, I'm just going to dump it on a page anywhere. I wish it would go into the exact right spot. Ah, hang on, there we go. Perfect. Right position, right size, I can set a Style to make things go wherever I want, to be the right size, kind of, mostly. Let's go and learn how to do that now in InDesign.

So Object Styles are really basic. You've probably done one before, let's quickly recover those. So, 'Rectangle tool', I'm going to draw something but I'd like it to have a Fill of 'green'. Remember, our 'X' key brings the Fill to the front. Then Stroke to the front, and it's going to be 'white'. I'm going to make it nice and thick. I want to use that as a Style, so it happens over and over again. Let's go to 'Window', 'Styles', 'Object Styles'. With it selected, with my Black Arrow here I'm going to say, you my friend are a new 'Object Style'. This is going to be called my 'Green Box'. Cool thing about that is, later on when I grab my Rectangle tool, and it goes back to the default, I can click on 'Green Box', and it matches the Style. So that is basic Object Styles. Let's look at some of the more advanced usage.

We're going to bring in an image. We're going to go to '04 Interactive', and grab one of these ones. So grab any of these, except for the Chair because that's already in the background. I'm going to grab this one, 'Image 4'. Now, I'm going to just place it by clicking once. I hit my 'W' key, so I can see the whole thing. I'm going to resize it, and let's say we spend a bit of time going, “Okay, this is how big all the images are going to appear in this Catalog.” So what I'd like to do is be able to kind of set this as a size, as the default as well. It's kind of new for the new version of InDesign. I want it to have a Stroke around the outside, for no good reason, but with it selected, I'm going to create a new 'Object Style'. Double click it, and this is going to be my 'image'. What's not on by default is, down the bottom here, well actually, at the top here, it looks like it's on, it's called 'Size and Position', but it's set to 'None'. So let's look at 'Size', and let's adjust the 'Height & Width'. All right, let's click 'OK'.

It's going to kind of work. It's got a little, but it's actually worth learning because it's quite useful. So that's the exact size, I want all my images to be now. So I've got a new page, I want another image, I want to bring it in. 'File', 'Place', and I'm going to bring in the 'Kitchen' this time, click it. It becomes really very big. I want it to be that size, with the Stroke. Watch this, I click on 'Image' and it almost works. It makes the Frame the right size. It makes the line around the outside, so it made the size right. Just hasn’t fit the image in. So you can kind of fix it. You can go into 'Image', and say actually I would like the Style to also do down the bottom here, 'Frame Fitting Option'. Now I want to say, I want you to 'Fit Content to Frame', please. Can you see, it adjusts over here. So I've turned it on, turned on 'Auto-Fit'. 'Fit Content to Frame', awesome, so it's going to remember it. Not quite.

So I'm going to bring in my third option, 'Floating'. Same thing, nice and big. I click on this, and it still doesn't work, don't know why, it seems Auto-fit, and I told the Object Style to do it, so weird little thing is, you just turn it off, turn it back on, and it works. So it's not a deal breaker, it works, but you just got to turn this on and off. Feels like a bug, it's been in there for ages but I think it's totally worth it. So I've got these images here. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with him, I'm just going to actually undo. I'm going to move you over here, and you, over here, Ah! So stylish, Dan.

The other option you can do with Object Styles is moving the position and size. This is going to be really handy for a logo. I'm going to bring in a Logo, it's going to be in my 'Exercise Files'. There is 'Option 4'. I'm totally not using Option 4, I'm going to bring in Option 1. I'm going to click and drag it to get it to be the right size. I adjust it, and I get it perfect. And let's say that I want this in this particular spot all the time. I've got a Corporate Spec Menu, and they say it needs to be these many centimeters from the side and these many millimeters from the top and you get it all perfect, right? And you'd like to set that as a Style. You can, let's create a new Style, with it selected 'Object Style 1', this one's going to be my 'Logo' Style. And in here, where it says 'Size and Position' we're going to do 'Size'. 'Height & Width'. But we're also going to do Position, x and y. Turn the Fitting on as well, 'Frame Fitting', turn it on. Fit 'Content Proportionately' even though it doesn't work. Click 'OK'.

Now let's say we've got a new document, or in our case, just a new page. I can go, dump my logo in. It's 'Option 1'. Click once in the page, and then, magically, click on 'Logo'. Gets into the right position. The Frame that's inside kind of works. Remember, just turn this on and off, and it works. So, that can be super handy. Maybe 'Tease & Cease' down the bottom, or 'Logo Placement'. You might have something that kind of happens the same on every document, and you might find that useful. The only trouble is that it uses the Left Hand Edge as a reference. So if your viewed document became Landscape now, it ended up in the same place, and it will be all this white area over here. It's actually using the measurement from over here. So I can't figure out a way of fixing that. If you do, drop me a comment, I'd love to know, because it's been baffling me. You might also find, when you're doing it, in the future, that this Auto-fit thing just works, you don't have to turn it on and off.

One last thing to do with Object Frames is, this is a strange one, you might not use it, you might do. So I'm going to bring in an image, and let's bring in from my 'Interactive' again, let's grab any of these images. I bring it through, and yes, looks good that way. I'm going to do some stuff to it, I'm going to add my terrible Drop Shadow. I'm also going to go there, and do a 'Bevel and Emboss'. It's terrible, I know. Terrible. But say you've liked this, and you want to bring in images. Instead of bringing them in, and having to apply styles from them you can create this crazy style, called the Place Gun Frame. What you need to do is, with your Style selected, make a new Object Style, and with it, double click it to name it. And you just need to call it this, you got to call it 'Place Gun Frame'. It has to be spelt that way, it has to use Title case.

So I've pulled this style, our Bevel and Emboss, and Drop Shadow. We've made a Style called Place Gun Frame. Why this is good? It means that later on I can come into here, place something else, Chair, and I'm going to drag it out, and look, it's got those Styles applied to it. You might do something just more simple. Might be a Stroke around the outside that you always have to do. It's just a weird little feature that-- yes, you have to call it Place Gun Frame. What you'll also might do is close everything down and add your Place Gun Frame style. If I close this down now, save it, and I close it now, if I open up my 'Essentials' and go to my 'Object Styles', and create an Object Style, now it's going to be there forever. I agree, that one's probably a little random but cool kind of trick, I felt that was. Do I ever use it? No, if I'm honest. I don't have Bevel and Emboss drop shadows but you might be doing something long and repetitive, and it's worth remembering, and you'd be like, "Hey, I can use that trick." I hope you do, either way, let's move on to the next video.

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