Mastering Your Fonts In Adobe InDesign CC

This lesson is exclusive to members

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

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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

Transcript

Okay, things you didn't know about your Font menu. I'm going to grab the Type tool, drag out a Type box, paste some stuff in. I can't see it because I've got my Preview on, switch it back to Normal. Hit the 'W' key. Then we'll make this a little bigger, so we can all see it using one of the shortcuts I use all the time. It's, select all the text, and hold down 'Command Shift' and then the greater than '>' key, or the full stop, period '.' key. The comma ',' key next to it goes down, and that goes up. If you're on a PC, that is 'Control Shift', and use those same two keys.

So I've got my text, actually I'm going to select that with the whole box. Now I go back to my Type tool and up the top here, I'm going to drop this down. There's been some additions to InDesign that people haven't noticed. And one of my favorites is, let's say I pick 'Lust' for this, and I go back in there, see this wavy line there? Somehow, magically, if I click on this, InDesign will cut down the fonts on your machine, the ones you have installed, and try and find ones that are very similar. You can see, pretty amazing. Like it's picked the other Lust ones, but it's also picked ones that you can see here, Carina Pro. Very similar. It's just really handy, if you're like "Oh I like this font, but I wish I had something similar, but different." You got to make sure you turn it off again otherwise your font list is pretty small.

Another thing to help speed up is that, let's say you're working in a company and you use these same fonts over and over again. Instead of having to scroll through your list to find them all you can hit this little star '*' system. Let's say that I use Roboto a lot, Roboto Slab, and I've been using Lust. Let's say I need Helvetica as well. So down here, somewhere, Helvetica. There it is there, into the star one. What's really nice about once you start them is that, say you're working on your document, let's say, now, I can go back into my Font menu and I can just turn on-- see this option here, and it just has my stars. So instead of having that ginomous list I can click on here, and just go to my Type tool, and say "Actually I just want one of these guys." You can pick from the drop down list as well, to pick my 'Thin' option. So super handy, but remember, you can turn it off otherwise your font list will go on forever. Be just these five.

Another option, I don't use it very much, you can show just the Typekit ones. These ones that are being downloaded from Typekit. Often this will kind of indicate the ones that are bit more special because you've spent some time downloading them, can be useful. But the super useful one is this filter. Now for me, I keep many-- every time I get a new MacBook Pro, I'm like "Okay, this time I'm going to go through and put all my fonts into some sort of groups." Hand writing, Display, Slab Serif, all that sort of stuff. It never happens. But now InDesign has added magic in this filter here. You can go through, and somehow, for the fonts in your machine it went through and went, "Let's look at these Script fonts," and it put them all in one big group. I don't know how it did it, but it's magic.

Same thing at the top here, I've got my Slab Serifs all together. All my hand written fonts. Just needs to be one for-- I feel like I got a lot of fonts that are like animal shaped like letters, cactuses, or Christmas decorations. It's decorative, but it has none of my characters fonts. Let's go back to hand written fonts, and I want this one to be-- I'm going to use 'Felt Marker', actually I really don't like Felt Marker, I'm going to use 'Market OT'. Just like the rest of them, you got to turn them on otherwise you'll be stuck with this list. So turn it off, go back to 'All Classes'. And we're back to our full list.

All right, I hope you found something awesome in that little font drop down list. I know, I use it a lot, especially 'Favorites'. Let's get on to the next bit of font greatness.

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