Free Icons Using Adobe Market In InDesign CC
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI 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.
So, to get our free icons we need to use the Adobe Creative Cloud app. Now on a Mac, it's up the top here, you can see this little Creative Cloud icon. Click on that, if you're on a PC, it's in the bottom right of your desktop. And you'll find a similar looking icon. You can't find it either of those places you might have to go to your applications on your machine and try find the Creative Cloud app, then open it up. Inside of here, jump to 'Assets' and we're going to work in 'Market'.
Now Market is the place where we've got lots of commercial use, free to use in your designs icons, mainly icons. There's some graphics and texts, some UI design in here as well. This little thing goes on forever, so you'll have to use the Search icon. What we're looking for is like a tag, or a price tag. You can see, there's a lot of tags you can pick from. So go through, find the one that you want to use. I'm going to use this first one here. I click on it.
One thing you can do when you're clicking on the icons in here, the ones you want to use, if you find a SVG version, a Scalable Vector Graphic, they're probably the best to use. Why? It's that they're Vector and all it just means is that you get to easily change the shape and the colors. If it's a JPEG or a PNG, you've got to do stuff in Photoshop. It becomes a little harder to do.
So, it's a SVG, I'm going to click 'Download'. I'm going to create a library. You probably, depending on, if you're using libraries already, you might just have one called My Library, I'm going to create one. Create a library called-- this one's for a company called Maynooth Furniture. And that's one we'll do a lot of work with. I'm going to click 'Return'. Did it download it to it? Not sure, I'm going to click on it again. And close that back up. Now in my CC Libraries panel, if you can't find it, it's under 'Window', 'CC Libraries'. And I want to change it from 'My Library' to this new one that I've made called 'Maynooth Furniture'. And there's my tag. I can drag it out, and the only problem with dragging this particular one out, it's ginomous. Whoever made it and put it up to the Adobe Market, you can see, it's the giant tag. So, maybe it might be a little easier if you right click it over here, and say 'Place Linked'. And you get a little place gun where you can just drag it out and give it a size. It's way too big to start with. That's an okay size, I'm going to shrink it down, and rotate it around. So it's kind of—
I'm going to drag it over here, rotate it around. It's kind of there. Now what I want to do is, I want to put some text on it. I want to put back text on this. We might have to change the color. There's not an easy way of changing color in InDesign. It's not really a job for InDesign to kind of get in there and change the colors of it, or the shape. It's really a job for Illustrator. It's easy to do, all you got to do is double click it over here and it will open up in either Photoshop or Illustrator whatever it was made in, and this one was made in Illustrator. And the easy thing to do, is you grab the White Arrow, click on any color you want to change And in here you can use-- I'm going to go to 'Properties' and I'm going to go to 'Fill', and pick a random color for the moment. Hit 'Save'. You'll notice, in My Libraries here, it's updated. If I jump into InDesign, you'll see, it's updated. Over here, this one hasn’t updated.
You go to your 'Links' panel, and do nothing. Just found that it got updated. So you don't have to do anything, don't go to the Links panel. It's a nice easy connection. Now if I make a change in here, save it, it updates in InDesign. So that's the Creative Cloud Market option. There's just so much in here. You'll find loads of icons, I use it quite a bit for UI Web Design options. So if you're doing kind of more design for digital, some really nice stuff in here as well, and they're free, commercial use. And often, these things are editable. You'll be able to open them up in Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign, and be able to kind of change the text, and fonts, and colors. There's lots of good stuff in here. So that's the Assets Market in the Adobe Creative Cloud app.
Before we go I'm just going to kind of bring this to the front. Same shortcut as earlier, 'Command Shift', and use the second square bracket ']' next to the P key, it's kind of the second one across. It will bring it all the way to the front. Or right click, and go 'Arrange', and say 'Bring to front'. I'm just going to rotate him around. Get him to line up here.
This is where you can go off to the next video because I'm just going to put a few returns in, play around with this, and get it so it all kind of fits. I'm going to select all of this, and I want to lower the Leading as well. A nice little shortcut is hold down the 'Option' key on a Mac or the 'Alt' key on a PC, and use your down arrow. That will make it bigger, I want the opposite of that, use 'up'. Up would decrease the Leading automatically. Or you could do it obviously in your Character, and there it is there. That's your Leading. I've got them nicely together. That looks good to me.
Before we go as well, remember, we've got OpenType fonts. This one here, font that I even use, Type tool, this one's called 'Market OT'. Is it in Typekit? It is. Market OT, it's a Typekit font, you can download it as well. And because it's OpenType, click down here. You can say, 'Stylistic Sets', 'Set 8'. Can you see the ends? Change to be a bit more clear. I think I like that where it's a lot clearer. A little scribbly, but probably a little easier to understand. And we've got a little tag off there. I'll definitely go to the next video now. See you.