From the course: InDesign 2023 Essential Training

New documents - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2023 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

New documents

“

- [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 the InDesign icon in the upper-left corner. That lets you see all the panels, and so on. Some people prefer that. Or you can click this little home icon in the upper-left, and it takes you back. From here, you can make a new InDesign document by clicking the blue new file button or just head up to the file menu, choose the new sub menu and then choose document. Up comes the new document dialogue box, and the very first thing you need to decide on is what kind of preset to use when creating your new document. From these buttons up at the top of the dialect box, you can choose print, web or mobile. Now, web is a bit of a misnomer. It does not mean a web page, you know like an HTML page. It just means a document that is going to be delivered on-screen, like an interactive file. They really should change that name. Also, two things happen when you choose the web preset. First, of course it shows you page sizes that are typical screen dimensions, and then also the measurement units over on the right get set to pixels. Oh, also, you can't see it here, but all your colors in your document will be set to RGB. Mobile is not really that different than web, so I usually just ignore it. Just to be clear, print does not mean that you're necessarily going to be printing this document. For example, maybe you're making a PDF that you're going to put up on your website for somebody to read, and maybe they'll print it out, like a product sheet for a business. You can still use print for that. Now, you can see down here that Adobe is offering a number of templates from their Adobe Stock Service. A lot of these are free, and some of them are pretty good. Some are, well, 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 these blank document presets up here. For example, if you know you're going to be printing on A4 paper, you know the final size will be A4, then I'll click view all presets, and then I'll click on the A4 button here. Now all of these presets are just starting points. You can always adjust the settings over here on the right. For example, the width and the height fields. You could just type a custom height or width in those fields. You can also change which measurement system you prefer. For example, I'll choose centimeters. If you want to, you can click these little orientation buttons over here on the right. All these do is literally just swap the width, and the height fields. The next thing you need to decide here is whether your document is set up for facing pages. Facing pages should only be used for documents that have a left hand and a right hand page, a verso and a recto, like a book or a magazine. If you're doing a one-page flyer or maybe a two-sided brochure or something, then you'll want to turn this off. Anything that does not truly have facing pages, turn it off. The next checkbox down is the 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, and I'm going to be covering that in a later chapter, but for now, I'm just going to tell you that unless you're making a book, you should probably leave this off. Down here, most documents, just have one column, but if you know that you're going to have two or more columns in your document, go ahead and change it. For example, I'll set this to two. The gutter amount over here is the amount of space between each column. So for example, I can change this to say 1.5 centimeters. Okay, there are two other important settings inside this dialogue box, but a lot of people don't see them because they can be hidden. For example, margins. See margins down here? There's a little triangle to the left of the word, and if that's closed, you won't see any of those settings so make sure that's open by clicking that triangle. Also, you can see that this whole side of the dialog box scrolls with a scroll bar, so make sure you're looking at all the options down here. Now, margins are just guidelines. There's nothing stopping you from putting objects outside of the margins, but margins are helpful reminders of where you should put your text frames, and pictures and so on. And see this little button over on the right, looks kind of like a chain? That tells InDesign to keep all the values in these fields the same, but if I click it, it unlink those fields. So if I change the top field to something else, like say four centimeters, and then I hit tab, you'll see that it changes independently of the others. I'll talk about this last feature, bleed and Slug in a later chapter. So great. I'm going to click the create button, and I'm good to go. There's the document. You can see the column guides, and the margin guides and so on, but after you create your document, you might realize that you need to make changes. Don't panic. In a later chapter, I'm going to show you how you can change all 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.

Contents