From the course: InDesign 2025 Essential Training

New documents - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2025 Essential Training

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New documents

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- [Instructor] Now that you know your way around InDesign a little bit, it's time to make a new InDesign document. As I mentioned in the last chapter, this is called the homepage. You can jump to the normal InDesign user interface by clicking in the little InDesign icon in the upper left corner. That lets you see all of the panels and so on. Some people prefer that, or you can click the home icon, and it takes you back. From here you can make a new InDesign document by clicking the New File button over on the left or head up to the File menu and then choose Document from the new sub-menu. Up comes the New Document dialogue box. Now the very first thing you need to decide here is what kind of preset to use when creating your new document. Up here at the top of the dialogue box, you'll see Print, Web, or Mobile. I should say that Web is kind of a misnomer. It does not mean web like a webpage. It just means a document that's going to be delivered on screen, like an interactive file. They really should change that name. Now two things happen when you choose the Web preset. First, of course, it shows you page sizes that are typical screen dimensions and the measurement system over here on the right is set to pixels. Also, all of your colors in your document will be set to RGB by default. Now, Mobile is not really that different than Web, so I usually just ignore it. In most cases, I use Print, but just to be clear, Print does not mean that you're necessarily going to be printing this file. For example, maybe you're making a PDF that you're putting up on your website for someone to read, and maybe they'll print it out, like a product sheet for some business. You can still use Print for that. Now, down at the bottom of the dialog box, you'll see that Adobe is offering you a number of templates from their Adobe Stock Service. A lot of these are free and some of them are pretty good. Some are maybe not the best quality, but in this case, I'm just going to start with creating a new file from scratch by clicking one of the blank document presets up here. Like if you know you're printing on A4 paper, which is the European letter standard, then go ahead and click View All Presets and then choose A4. Now, these presets are just starting points. You can always adjust the settings over here on the right side of the dialog box. For example, the width and height of the page. You can just type a custom width and height in these fields here and you can change what measurement system you prefer in this menu over here. For example, I'll choose centimeters. If you want to, you can also click these orientation buttons over on the right. All these do is literally swap the values in the width and the height fields. The next thing you need to decide here is whether your document should be set up for facing pages. Facing pages should only be used for documents that have a left hand and a right hand page, called verso and recto, like a book or a magazine. If you are doing a one-page flyer or maybe a two-sided brochure or something, then you want to turn that off. Anything that does not truly have facing pages, turn it off. Now the next checkbox is Primary Text Frame. This is also used for things like books, where you have a story that goes from one page to the next over a lot of pages. Primary Text Frame will automatically add a text frame to your parent pages. Now, I'm going to be covering this in a later chapter, but for now I'm just going to tell you that unless you're making a book, just go ahead and leave that off. Next down here, most documents just have one column, but if you know that you're going to have two or more columns in your file, go ahead and change it. The gutter amount is the amount of space between each column. So for example, I'll change this to two columns and I'll set my gutter to say one centimeter. Alright, there are two more important settings in here, but a lot of people don't see them because they're kind of hidden. Here's the trick. This whole side of the dialog box scrolls, so make sure you check out all the options here. So here we find margins. These are just guidelines. There's nothing stopping you from putting objects outside the margins on your pages, but margins are helpful reminders of where you should put your text frames and pictures and so on. Also, see this little button on the side that looks like a chain? That tells InDesign to keep the values in all of the fields the same. If I click it, it un-links those fields. So here I could change the top setting to say six picas, so now when I hit the tab key, you'll see that it changes back to centimeters and it changes independently of the other fields. I'll talk about this last field, Bleed and Slug, in a later chapter. For now, I'm just going to go ahead and click Create and I'm good to go. There's the document. You can see the column guides and the margin guides, but then after you create your document, you might realize that you need to make changes to the margins or the page size. That's fine. Don't panic. In a later chapter, I'll show you how you can always go back and change any of those settings. Making a new document with the proper settings is the first step in creating a strong foundation for your publication, but it's just the first step.

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