How to add a large first letter to my text aka Drop Cap

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Course contents
SECTION: 5
PROJECT 4: Long Business Document 1:46:26

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Course info

82 lessons / 7 hours 4 projects Certificate of achievement

Overview

Hi there, my name is  Dan. I am a graphic designer and Adobe Certified Instructor (ACI)  for InDesign.

Together we will work through real life projects starting with a simple company flyer, then a brochure & a company newsletter. We’ll make business cards & take control of a really long annual report.

We will work with colour, picking your own and also using corporate colours. You will explore how to choose & use fonts like a professional. We will find, resize & crop images for your documents.

There are projects for you to complete, so you can practise your skills & use these for your creative portfolio.

In this course I supply exercise files so you can play along. I will also save my files as I go through each video so that you can compare yours to mine - handy if something goes wrong.

Know that I will be around to help - if you get lost you can drop a post on the video 'Questions and Answers' below each video and I'll be sure to get back to you.

I will share every design trick I have learnt in the last 15 years of designing. My goal is for you to finish this course with all the necessary skills to start making beautiful documents using InDesign.


What are the requirements?

  • You will need a copy of Adobe InDesign CC 2018 or above. A free trial can be downloaded from Adobe.
  • No previous design skills are needed.
  • No previous InDesign skills are needed.

What am I going to get from this course?

  • 76 lectures 5+ hours of well structured content.
  • You'll learn to design a flyer, newsletter, brochure, annual report & business cards.
  • Learn how to create PDF files ready for printing.
  • 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 new career path.

What is the target audience?

  • No previous InDesign experience is necessary.
  • This course is for people completely new to InDesign. No previous design or publishing experienced is necessary.
  • This is a relaxed, well paced introduction that will enable you to produce most common publications. Only basic computing skills are necessary - If you can send emails and surf the internet then you will cope well with our course.

Course duration 6 hours 20 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.

Certificates

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Check out the How to earn your certificate video for instructions on how to earn yours and click the available certificate levels below for more information.

Downloads & Exercise files

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Transcript

Hi there, in this video we're going to look at what a Drop Cap is. It's the name for the giant first letter and a paragraph, used for story books, and in our case, this light little factoidy pull quote thing. Let's go and do that now.

First up, let's bring in our text. So, have nothing selected, go to 'File', 'Place'. In our '04 Long Document', there's one in there called 'Factoid 1'. Click, hold, and drag out, we got our text. Now I'm going to select all this text, I'm going to make it 'Roboto Slab Light'. I'm going to make the font size '20'. And I'm going to make the font color 'Paper', in our case, white. Drag it across, using the 'Black Arrow' just get it to roughly fit, we can fix this up afterwards.

Now to do the Drop Cap, grab your 'Type Tool', select the 'Text'. Actually, you can have your cursor flashing anywhere in the paragraph you want to work with. Doesn't really matter. And what you can do is switch it from 'Character' to 'Paragraph Formatting Options'. And the Drop Cap is this one here. If you hover above it, you can see it there. If you click once, nothing happens. It's a bit disappointing. '2' though, you can start to see what happens down the bottom, '3', you can see, where it's crossing over one line, it's already crossing one line. I'm not sure why it jumps to 1, but you can cross it across 2, or 3. And you probably not, in this instance but you can-- see the one next to it, this is how many across the Drop Cap goes. This can be really handy if you've got—

Say you want to do a Drop Cap, and it's like this, 1 maybe, you've got like a numbering system, and you want to go across, because you want that, or that, or-- they all look pretty horrible. But, if you've got more than one you need-- I'm going to get rid of all of that. The other thing you can do is - I'm going to put mine back to the I. - is I can select it, and you don't have to, but in my case, it's on 'Light', I'm going to move it to 'Bold'. Just to make it look a little nicer.

All right, that's it for Drop Caps. I'm just going to align mine up a little nicer within this box. How's it looking? I'm okay with that. All right, let's get on with the next video.

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