From the course: InDesign 2025 Essential Training

Getting started - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2025 Essential Training

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Getting started

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- My goal in this first chapter is to get you acquainted enough with InDesign that you can create a new InDesign file or edit one that someone else has made. This is the basics of the basics. If your boss handed you a file and you need to open it and do something with it before lunch today, start here. Okay, let's dive in. When you first launch InDesign, you'll see this thing called the homepage, which gives you quick access to any recently open documents down here. To open one of these, you simply need to click on it. In this case, we want to create a new file, so you could click this blue New file button, or you can go to the File menu, choose from the New sub menu, and then choose Document. The New Document dialog box has a lot of options, but for right now, the first thing you need to think about is whether this document is going to be viewed primarily in print or on screen. I'll choose print. Next, you want to choose a page size from this area on the left, and note that you can click on View All Presets to see even more. Or if you want, you can just type in your own page size over here on the right. Note that if you work in inches or centimeters, you can choose those from the units menu. Okay, here's an important one. Do you want your document to have facing pages? That is, should it have a left hand page and a right hand page, like a book or a magazine? If not, then turn off the Facing Pages checkbox. Down here at the bottom of this panel, you can see we have margins. These are just guidelines. You can ignore them if you want, but I find them helpful, but for now, I'll just click Create and InDesign creates a nice, new clean document for us. By the way, I should point out the Tool panel on the left side of the screen. If your Tool panel looks a little different than this, that's okay. On some computers, this shows up as a two-column layout instead, but the features all work the same. Now, you could start with an empty InDesign document like this if you want, but I find it's usually easier to start with a template, something that's partially created, and then you can change the text and graphics as you work. So we have a template to work with in our Exercise Files folder. I'll head up to the File menu and choose Open. Let's look inside the Exercise Files in Chapter 1. There it is. That's the file we're going to be working with in this chapter. I'll go ahead and click Open. Now, in the next few movies, we'll be filling this out by adding text and graphics. I should point out that this template comes with the exercise files, but there are lots of other InDesign templates available on the web, including some free ones creativepro.com. This is a site that I run. I also used to run a site called InDesign Secrets, but we took all of those thousands of blog posts and downloads and merged them into CreativePro. I suggest you start by downloading the free Starter Kit, which you can find from the Resources menu. This includes a free InDesign template that you can download and use, plus cool art and sample eBooks with great tips. In this case though, let's just switch back to InDesign. Of course, getting your document open is just the first step on the adventure called InDesign. Next, we're going to learn how to get text and graphics in there and make it look just the way we want.

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