How To Make Arrows 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

Hey there, in this video we're going to look at Arrow Heads and some more advanced Stroke things. It's not super exciting but we only didn't know how to make arrows, and there's some little tricks you can use to help your work flow.

All right, I'm on page 3, and let's look at Arrow Heads first, so I've got the Line tool. I'll drag out a line, I'm going to make it a bit thicker. I'll make sure my Stroke is at black. And I've got a thickness of '5 pt'. Now the Stroke panel might look like this where it's quite small, you can only change the weight. You can double click this little tab here, and it gets joiners and get a lot more options, and this is what we're looking for.

So the first one is this 'Start/End'. Basically, this is easy, where you get your Arrow Heads. So depending on how you've drawn your line, so Start is where I first started drawing, so I want the opposite way. So I want you to be there, the barbed end one. It's not the one I like. I'm just going to have the-- I just want the triangle. And the start, I might do-- It's like an Austin Powers male symbol thing. One of those.

Now one of the things, and the new things in 2018 is that when you scaled it up you end up getting kind of disproportionately sized ends and beginnings. You can see, like that, it's joined and almost completed that. This Stroke is the same around the outside, but now what you can do is, see this Scale, it's kind of a new thing. So I am going to scale this end bit up. You can see here, I can kind of raise it up and I can make it nice and big there to kind of match everything else there. So that's a new feature. It's not really a feature, but it's something we've all been missing.

One of the little tricks I did there was, can you see, I'm making it smaller by clicking it, and it's just going down 1% at a time, slowly. If I hold 'Shift' and click that exact same option, can you see, it does it in multiples of 10. So I find this, just really handy thing for anything. If you want to raise the weight of this, if you want to do it in big chunks, hold 'Shift'. Any sort of option here, with a number, if I want to make this go up by 1% I just click it, but if I hold 'Shift' and click it, it goes up by multiples of 10. It's looking kind of cool there. I think I like it.

One of the other things for Strokes that's useful is, I'm going to zoom in on this thing here, like this one. What I want to show you is, it's a little hard to see, maybe I'll change the Stroke to black, so it's easier. Maybe a bit of contrast, here it is. You can see, my line here, it's actually this rectangle I drew, it's actually the center of it, so if I draw a rectangle, when I let go, watch the black line, it straddles it either side. It's a little hard to see, but, can you see? It's actually going left and right of this. That can be a bit of a pain because you're trying to get things to line up but they're lining up to the center bit here.

So what you can do, with it selected, you've got options over here to align Stroke. By default it's left and right, but here, I can go actually on the inside, or all the way round to the outside, or just straddling this center. Another thing you might look at is the unfortunately named Butt cap. So if I draw a line here, and I make it nice and thick, it's got what's called a Butt cap, which means, it's just-- if I grab the line again, can you see, it just gets the end and then completely butts up at the end of the end point. So that's what these one's here for.

You probably won't use this third one, but the second one here, the Round Cap kind of adds-- it's just a different style of line. And this end one here is kind of a Block Cap. It goes all the way around that side here, and then there's the Butt Cap.

One last thing you can do is, if I put an Arrow Head on this one, I'm going to go, you, Arrow Head can you see, it used the end of the line as the tip of the Arrow Head. That might not be what you need. You might want to go through, and say, see you here. It's using the edge of the line, watch this, it kind of uses the end of the line to start the Arrow Head. So it depends on what you need. Just know that you got a few little options.

Getting a bit nerdy, and a bit boring. Let's get on to the next video. I love the next one. It's fun, let's make that flowery thing in the next video.

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