How to make a dotted line, dashed line & borders in InDesign

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

Questions

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

We’re awarding certificates for this course!

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

Transcript

Hi there, in this video we're going to look at creating dotted lines, dashed lines, perforation lines, we're going to do wavy lines, strappy lines, and all sorts of lines. So let's go and do that now.

To put the border around the outside, we're going to start with the rectangle. The 'Rectangle Tool', not the 'Rectangle Frame Tool'. And what I'd like to do is, you saw earlier that I had it perfectly away from the edge. What I can do is I can draw it exactly the right size. Remember, that is actually edge of the page. This bit on the outside here is the 'Bleed'. I'm going to draw the actual size, my 'Half Letter'. It's a nice big rectangle. Now, we've got a 'Fill' of green, and a 'Stroke' of nothing. What I would like to do-- actually I'll leave it there for the moment while we're practicing.

If I grab my 'Selection Tool' and I try and 'Scale' it down proportionately-- what are the keys? That's right, 'Command', 'Shift' on a Mac, and 'Control', 'Shift' on a PC. If I hold them down, and make them proportionately smaller, you'll notice that if I put it here, in the middle, it's actually kind of-- it doesn't scale the way we want. We want equal distances around the outside, so if I 'Scale' it even more, you can see, it's a lot bigger on the sides than it is at the top and the bottom, just because it's scaling that way. So what I'd like to do is, I'm going to 'undo', so it actually fills the outside.

What we can do, you can see at the top here, it's got a width and height. It's perfect, I'm half way there. What I can do in here is some basic Math. These little boxes, any of these white boxes, you can do some math in, which is really handy. So in here, I can go minus, '-' and I'm going to turn half an inch, '0.5' You'll see, it dissected in half an inch. Do the same here, '-0.5' You can do times. If I did times 2, '*2' this will be times 2 inches, it's that little asterisk, '*'

It's a whole lot taller than it needs to be, I'm going to 'undo'. I'm going to go '-0.5' Minus, plus, all that sort of stuff works. To get it in the middle, you could use your line tools. There's mine at the top here, or there's a panel that we saw earlier, but actually it's just easier to grab your 'black arrow'. Click, hold, and you'll notice it just kind of snaps. You see those two purple, pinky lines? Just kind of saying, "Hey, there's the middle." And you'll see, visually it looks like it's in the middle. So it's actually '0.5', half an inch from all the sides, and that looks nice and perfect.

So, now to make the line dotted we're going to give it 'No Fill'. So, I've clicked on 'Fill', I'm going to go to 'None'. This one here, the 'Stroke' around the outside, I'm going to make it white, or 'Paper'. And this is the 'Stroke' here. How thick it is? At the moment it's '1 pt'. It's probably what I want but let's make it nice and big just as an example, so we can all see what we're doing. So bump it up to '4 pts'. And now we need to find our 'Stroke' panel. If you can't find it-- mine's there, if you can't find yours, go to 'Window', 'Stroke', and turn it on.

Now yours might look a little different as well, yours might be-- this little fire menu, that says 'Hide Options', and if yours look like mine, you got really basic control. Click on this option, and say 'Show Options'. You get the big ugly version, with all the details that we need. What we need at the moment is 'Type'. That's going to allow us to change it from the 'Solid' line like we know it, to all these other options. There's some weird ones. Ones I've never used, 'Thick', 'Thin', you might like them. 'White Diamond', I've never used. 'Dotted Lines' and 'Dashed Lines' are the ones we're going to look at the moment.

There's two kind of dotted, there's 'Dotted', and for some reason the Japanese like their dots a little bit closer together. Japanese thing, not sure. So there's my dots around the outside. If you want dashed, there's 'Dashed'. There's the ugly 'Squirly' line. You might like the squirly line. There's so many things in there, but we're going to go to 'Dotted. We're going to put the size down to something, I'm putting '2 pts'. You might use 'Dashed Lines' as a visual thing, like I'm doing here. There's nothing, just dotted lines, just for pretty sake.

What we're going to do is, maybe a snip here. The scissors, cut this bit off whatever you clip on. What you can do is, instead of doing it for this rectangle you can do the exact same tricks with just a straight line. This straight line here, I can draw. And what I might do actually is draw it straight up and down. If you want to draw a line straight up and down, it's the similar technique we did when we made a circle. Remember, we held down 'Shift', and it was a perfect circle. That same technique makes it a perfect line. So if I hold down 'Shift' before I start dragging it out, you can see, it really wants to go up, straight up and down.

So say, that's going to be my perforation line where I want people to snip it off. It's got a 'Fill', a line can't have a 'Fill'. And the line around the outside is going to be white. I'm going to make it '2 pts' just so you can see it. And then, you can see the exact same controls. Let's go to 'Dashed Lines'. I'm going to pause there, I'll be right back. So I'm back. This 'Dashed Line' here, I don't need it. So I've select it with my 'black arrow', and hit 'delete' on my keyboard. Just tap the key on your keyboard, and it's gone.

Dashed lines, dotted lines, wavy lines, curly lines all of that. Let's move on to our next video.

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