From the course: InDesign 2025 Essential Training

Drawing path and frame shapes - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2025 Essential Training

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Drawing path and frame shapes

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- [Instructor] InDesign has a wide variety of drawing tools, including a fully featured Bezier Pen tool, just like Illustrator. Now, I probably would not use InDesign to do a detailed technical illustration, but it is perfect for basic drawing, like logos and relatively simple shapes. Let me show you how it's done. I have my magazine document open from the Exercise Files folder, and I need a little space to work in, so I'm going to use a keyboard shortcut, Command + Space Bar or Control + Space Bar on Windows, and then zoom in on this empty space at the top of this page. Now, over here in the Tool panel, there are several tools that let you draw shapes, for example, the Rectangle, Ellipse, and Polygon tool. The Polygon tool draws hexagons by default, which I guess is okay, but you can get other shapes if you double-click on the tool. How about, say, 20 sides and a 20% star inset? Click OK, and then I'll drag out this shape, and you'll see it makes a starburst. Of course, this path currently has no stroke or fill, so it's basically invisible. That's not helpful. So here's a quick trick. Press the D key on your keyboard, and it assigns the default coloring, which is no fill and a one-point black stroke. Then if you choose the Selection tool and click out here where there's no objects, now you press D again, and it changes your default for your whole document. Let's look at the Line tool next. I'll click on the Line tool and simply click and drag. Obviously, this just draws simple lines, but see how that default black stroke is applied automatically now? Now, if you hold on the Shift key when you drag, it'll constrain it to either vertical, horizontal, or a 45-degree angle. The next tool down in the Tool panel is a little bit more interesting. That's the Pen tool. To draw with this, you simply click and drag, click and drag. You might use a line like this for putting text on a path. To edit this path, you want to use the Direct Selection tool. That's also called the White Arrow tool. It's the second tool in the Tool panel. When you choose the Direct Selection tool and place your cursor over the path, it highlights, and now you can click and drag points or their handles. You can even drag the segments between the paths. Now, here's another way to change the path. I'm going to switch back to the Pen tool, and now whenever you place your cursor on top of a place that has no point, it changes into a little plus cursor. That indicates it's going to add a point, so I can click and drag. There you go. I've added a point to that curve. On the other hand, if you put the cursor on top of a point that's already there, the cursor gets a little minus symbol. Then if I simply click, it removes that point. Oh, another little trick, whenever you're editing paths with the Pen tool, you can always hold down the Command key on a Mac or the Control key on Windows, and that temporarily switches you back to the last Selection tool you used. In this case, it was the Direct Selection tool. That way, you can still move those points around, and then when you let go of the Command or Control key, it switches back to the Pen tool. Okay, let's draw some more paths. I'm simply going to click out here and just click a few times, and you can see that you can very easily make a path with sharp corners. When you're done, you can either switch to a different tool or Command or Control + click on a different area. to finish the path. I'll choose the Selection tool, and now I want to show you something. We'll go to the Object menu, and look down here at the bottom. There are several features that you might like, including the Paths sub-menu. In here, you could join two different paths. You could open a path or close a path, like that. It changes it into a closed frame. There are other great tools down here too. For example, the Convert Shape sub-menu. I find these really useful. For example, it's really hard to draw a perfect triangle in InDesign, but if you choose it from this menu, boom, there you go. Now, as you can tell, I'm not the greatest artist, but I do find these Pen tools useful inside of InDesign, especially when I have a frame that I want to tweak a little bit, you know, something I want to make more interesting. For example, I'm going to scroll down here to the bottom of this page, and I can see I have a text frame. This is just a regular text frame, and it's fine, but it might be nice to give it a little flare. So let's select it and then head over here and choose the Pen tool. Now, I'm going to place that Pen tool over the left edge of this frame until I see that little plus icon. Then if I click and drag, you can see it's adding a point and letting me apply a curve to it. When I let go of the mouse button, the text reflows into that shape. It's much more interesting now. Now, of course, if you really need heavy-duty illustration tools, I would switch to Adobe Illustrator. But in most cases, when you're just trying to make your design look interesting, InDesign gives you everything you need. In fact, in the next movie, I'll show you how you can take your paths to the next level with corner options.

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