Advanced InDesign: Productivity Techniques

Course details

Do you consider yourself a seasoned Adobe InDesign user, but sometimes feel that you’re stuck in your InDesign work habits or wasting precious time completing everyday tasks that you suspect could be handled faster or easier? Join Bart Van de Wiele in this course, where he shows you how to tackle common design problems using advanced InDesign functionality. Bart draws from real-life situations that he’s encountered as a professional print designer to show you how you can do more with InDesign. He details scenarios for the automation of common projects like catalogs, business cards, and brochures using style automation, shortcuts, and regular expressions. Bart also covers common sources of frustration like combining images and tables, creating multiple sizes of an ad, and sorting lists alphabetically.

Concepts

Introduction

Welcome to this course
Course prerequisites
Understanding the challenges

Building Better Long Documents

Long documents
Creating running headers
Adding a last page number
Adding page color labels
Challenge Create your own running header
Solution Create your own running header

Preflighting Your Document

Preflighting documents
Knowing what to look for
Building a preflight profile
Fixing errors
Exchanging profiles
Challenge Creating a custom preflight profile
Solution Creating a custom preflight profile

Laying Out an Interview

Laying out interviews
Building styles for the speakers
Changing the prefix
Challenge Changing the interviewee
Solution Changing the interviewee

Merging Data and Layout

Merging data
Preparing the data in Excel
Placing placeholders
Merging the document as a single-record layout
Merging a multi-record layout
Challenge Creating personalized mailing
Solution Creating personalized mailing

Creating Mixed Ink Swatches

Mixed ink swatches
Creating a mix ink swatch
Creating a mix ink group
Challenge Mixing your own colors
Solution Mixing your own colors

Linking Images to Text

Linking images to text
What is an anchored object
Using image frames as anchored objects
Setting options
Duplicating the frames across your document
Challenge Adding anchored objects on your own
Solution Adding anchored objects on your own

Content-Aware Text Formatting

Content-aware formatting
Preparing character styles
Using GREP to highlight negative numbers
Using GREP to highlight a specific range of numbers
Challenge Adding your own content-aware expression
Solution Adding your own content-aware expression

How to Link Text to the Same Source

Linking text to same source
Placing and linking text
Updating text
Preserving overrides
Challenge Defining your own text variables
Solution Defining your own text variables

Creating Cool Knock-Out Effects

Knock-out effects
Creating knock-out groups with shapes
Creating knock-out groups with placed artwork
Challenge Try and recreate artwork
Solution Try and recreate artwork

Creating a Duotone Postcard

Duotone postcards
Creating a monotone postcard
Creating a duotone postcard
Challenge Recreate a duotone postcard
Solution Recreate a duotone postcard

How to Combine Images with Tables

Combining images with tables
Converting to graphic cells
Setting padding and scaling
Challenge Placing your own images in a table
Solution Placing your own images in a table

Creating Multi-Sized Ads

Multi-sized ads
Duplicating and scaling ads
Updating content across all versions
Challenge Create additional sizes
Solution Create additional sizes

How to Alphabetically Sort Lists

Sorting lists
Sorting the text alphabetically
Challenge Sort an alphabetical list in a table
Solution Sort an alphabetical list in a table

Conclusion

Goodbye