How to use a Master Page in Adobe InDesign.

Okay, good looking people, what we're going to do in this video is work on our Master Pages. So when we draw a rectangle, kind of a pretty little box that our page numbers are going to go into, we do it once, and it appears on all of our pages. Let's go and do that.

So, to work on the Master Page is when you just-- see this "pages' panel, go to 'Window', 'Pages' if you can't see it. Just have a little look at these pages here, I got page 1, 2, 3, 4 but you can see the A in the corner, it means they're attached to something called the A-Master. That's there by default. You give it 1, you can have as many Master Pages as you need. And you put things on the Master Page, that you want to appear on every page, like a page number, maybe it's a small title of a document, its version, or date, or who produced it. Anything you want to be consistent on every page. It might be some graphics, or logo, or watermark.

To get to the Master Page, you need to double click up here. You might not be able to see it so you might have to scroll down, or find it. See if you can see it hiding up in the top of the 'Pages' panel. To get to it, you just double click it. You got to make sure you're there, so to make sure-- it's not very obvious. I wish there was a flashing green light that said you're in here, but down the bottom here, it says A-Master, I'm not on page 1, 2, or 3. I'm on A-Master. I'll zoom it out a little bit so I can see it all. It's got the rectangle tool, and up the top here, let's give it a 'Fill'. Magenta is fine. And let's draw a big rectangle on this left hand side.

What you'll notice is, can you see here? That rectangle has appeared on all the left hand 'spreads'. Not in the right hand ones I'm drawing everything on the side because you'll have things like page numbering on different sides of the pages, or we only want the document name on the top right, we don't need it on the top right of this page. So you have left and right 'spread'. Do the same thing over here, do a different style of box, maybe a different color, just so that you can see.

You can see over here, when I draw stuff on the Master Page it appears on all of my pages. You'll notice, if I go to these pages, double click on page 1, grab my 'Black Arrow', I can't actually select it. So if I need to delete it, it needs to come off the Master Page. So we jump back to our Master Page, double click it and select you, and select you, and do it. What I'd like to do is grab the rectangle tool, and I'd like to draw a rectangle that sits down the bottom. We're going to be doing-- you saw it at the beginning there kind of a box that sits down the bottom. I want to make sure it over lapse the 'Bleed' so it gets chewed off in the bin. And it goes right up until the spine here. How far up? It's just a guess, we can change it later on.

You'll notice, on page 1, there it is there, double click. Page 2, I've got that nice color box. We'll duplicate it for the other side in a sec. So on page 1-- actually, make sure you go back to 'A-Master'. I promise you, you'd be like the world's best user of InDesign and you'll still forget you're not on the Master Page. Spend ages designing something on page 1, thinking it's on the Master Page, and have to copy and paste it afterwards, we always forget. Same happens when you think you're designing on page 1, and you're actually in the Master Page, and you realize everything you've designed is on every single page, you just have to do some copying and pasting afterwards.

Next thing I want to do is fill this with one of our colors. What you can do when you get started with a new document is, you'll see at the top here, there's actually none of those colors through yet, they're sitting over there, which is no big drama, but you can be all official, and bring the swatches through properly. So, with the 'Black Arrow', have nothing selected, right click this guy, and say, 'Add to Swatches'. And just do it for all of them, so you know you've got all of our colors as part of the swatches thing. There he is there. It's a bit weird, I know, they're there, it's because this is kind of new, and not a super select integration yet. That will change.

So if I have to select it at the top here, I'm going to pick 'Green at Heart Red'. You'll see, it appears on all the right hand spreads. Now, I'm going to select it, copy and paste it 'Edit', 'Copy', and 'Edit', 'Paste'. And we're going to have a left hand spread as well. Let's double check it's on all our pages, double click page A. Page 2, page 3 is all our footer color box.

The next thing we're going to do is do our automatic page numbering. We'll do that in the next video, skip to that. One of the things I want to explain before we move on though is, Master Pages control all of these pages so when it comes to things like adjusting the margins and columns it's best to do it in the A-Master, because it will adjust all the pages. Say I go to page 1, and I'm like, "I want to change the columns to 4." And I go up to 'Object', sorry, 'Layout', and go to 'Margins', and I pick-- 'Columns' are now going to be '4'. Click 'OK'. What happens is, page 1 changed, but you see, page 2 and page 3 are still the same. That's how to change individual pages, but probably, more often than not you just want to actually change them all. You've decided you want to change the margin on everything. You do that by going to A-Master, double click, and make the changes in here.

So now if I go to 'Object', click on object, go to 'Layout', Margins', and go to '4', you'll see, it does this page. Click over here to-- you have the doc here, double click this page, make it go blue. And do it for this side as well. Fiddly, I know, but that's the way it is, let's go to '4'. Now, what you'll notice, if I go to page 1, page 2, page 3, I've done those adjustments, so if you're finding it's a little bit weird it's probably because you're not doing it on your Master Page. I'm going to 'undo' that.

Okay, so let's go and do automatic page numbering in the next video.