Changing Preferences For Advanced InDesign Users

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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

Questions

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

Transcript

Okay, it's Advanced Preferences time. On a PC, it's under 'Edit'. 'Preferences'. On a Mac here, it's under 'InDesign', 'Preferences'. Let's start with 'General'.

First thing people don't like about the new version is this Start window, with all these recently used documents. What you can do is, just turn that off, click 'OK' and it will go back to kind of like when it opens, you can just get all your documents. So up to you. I'm going to go back.

Another interesting one is-- actually, first I'm going to turn back on my 'Start', and I'm going to go to 'Units & Increments'. So, this is the place where you change it from inches to millimetres, or if you're doing a lot of web work, or digital work you can switch it out to pixels, and it will change it by default.

The other useful thing down here is the 'Keyboard Increments'. At the moment, if I click 'OK', open up a new document, and if I'm tapping things around, often I like to use my keyboard just to move things around. Mainly because Smart Guides are so smart. So I'm going to give this a Fill of 'yellow'. So, it's snapping but I just want to use my keyboard, so I can just tap it along with my keyboard, but often it's working in two bigger increments. So I want do like really microscopic stuff.

So, in 'InDesign', 'Preferences', you can adjust that. Go to 'Units & Increments' again and just turn this down to something really small. So instead of 013, I'm just going to put in that. So I'm going to get rid of that, and it's now, watch this… my keyboard shortcuts, it's just teeny tiny. I'm going to zoom in. So it's just like little bit. So you can hold 'Shift' to get it to go a lot faster, but now it's just nice, tiny little increments.

Another interesting 'Preference' option is down here, it's 'Clipboard Handling'. So if you're copying and pasting from Word or other InDesign files, or any sort of document, what you might find is you want to bring through lots more information. So to adjust the text when you're pasting, bring in anything you can. It might be styles from Word, or InDesign it's not going to clear them all out. So you can decide which option you prefer here, so straight on text or going through all of the junk. Things like Styles, Paragraph Styles, decide what works for you.

Another useful thing is, especially for me, under 'Spelling' there's one called 'Dynamic Spelling'. And that means it's going to work just like Word. When I type in a word that I can't spell, like there, I always get it wrong. It gives me a little red line. So I know I can go back and type the right one. You can even right click it, and get spelling options, and I click there. Then it goes green, because there's a duplicate. If I right click it, it says there's a repeat word in here, be careful. So, quite useful, Dynamic Spelling. Especially for people like me who find it tough. Where does that 'i' go? I'm never sure. One little thing though, is you won't see Dynamic Spelling if you're in preview mode. So just tap the 'W' key, and you can't see it at all. 'W' on, 'W' off. So, just note that.

One of the other things is that making a PDF can take a long time and sometimes you're like, "I just made it, is it frozen?" You can turn on this window called 'Background Tasks'. It's under 'Utilities', and it's called 'Background Tasks'. It's a big window so you might need a bigger screen to actually be using this one here, but it just shows you what InDesign's trying to do. If you're working with big slow documents, let's say we export this one, I'm going to call mine 'Export Test'. Just going to make it a regular PDF, and I hit 'Save'. Keep an eye on this guy, watch… it was really fast, but if it's taking a really long time it will groan and moan, and you will see a little bar kind of eventually getting to the end here. It can be useful, especially if you're waiting for a PDF to get created and not sure how long it's going to take.

The other things that can happen, is alerts appear down here. If you're finding you're making PDFs, and they're just not being made, it's some sort of error, it will tell you down here, the alerts. It might have useful things, like you used the Pantone, or you've used the wrong color mode. So I'm going to close down the Background Task window. He's not really a Preference, I know.

Now on to my most favorite of all Preferences. It's this Control bar along the top here. Sometimes it's called the App bar. The Control bar here is what's included along with these little options. And you can customize them. I find this is super useful when I'm at my Type tool. Grab my 'Type' tool. Remember, we're toggling between these two here. Be nice, on some screens you might have noticed, if you got a really big iMac, you can see both the character, and then there's a little break here, it's kind of a dark line you can't really see. Now it's starting with the Character stuff but imagine if you can just see them all in one go. What you can do is just turn this stuff off, you don't use. Then you don't have to go and toggle between these two. To do it, pick anyone of them, and go to this little cog here and go through and say, actually in Character I want to see everything, but I want to see Character Style. That's this option here. Takes off a big huge chunk, we just don't need it.

Let's say you don't use Character Scaling, you shouldn't. It's like against the typography rules. I'm going to use Stroke, and I'll use all the rest of it and say 'Paragraph'. What else do I not need? Baseline Grid, say you don't use it. Text Grid is good. I don't use Paragraph Styles up there, I use a separate panel. Borders & Shading I don't use, and I click 'OK'. And now I've got lots of room up here, and I got kind of like everything I need. You can do it with any panel. Click on the 'Selection' tool and up here you can decide what to turn on, and what to turn off. Under 'Object' and just get it down, it's adjusted but it's that you just won't use if you want to make a nice clean Control bar or App bar along the top.

All right, that's going to be it for Advanced Preferences in InDesign. Let's get on to the next video.

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