From the course: InDesign Secrets

219 Customizing frames in Normal View - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

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219 Customizing frames in Normal View

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- A lot of designers think that there are only two ways to work in an InDesign document. You're either in normal view, where you're looking at all these bells and whistles and all your frames. Even in a simple document, there's a lot happening here. Or you go to preview view, which you can get to by tapping the W key or going to the View menu and going to Screen Mode, Preview. In other words, you have all or you have nothing. And I like to work with all, but customized a little bit so it's not so in-your-face. And that's what I want to show you in this tip. I really don't like working in preview view because you lose a lot of information, like you can't tell where frames are overlapping or why there's empty space, and so on, which you can if you go back to normal view. But this might be too obnoxious for a lot of people. And so let me show you some ways that you can customize what the frames are showing you in normal view to make it less obnoxious. First of all, probably the most obnoxious thing for many people, not everybody, there is a vocal minority that likes this, but this is this little icon in the middle of an image called the donut, which is actually a feature. It allows you to crop an image, to move an image within its frame without having to select and image or switch to a different tool, I can just drag, and you can see that I have cropped the image. I'm going to undo with command or control-Z. And the problem is, of course, that this donut remains, no matter how small the image is, and people are constantly accidentally moving images within the frames without meaning to. So to hide the donut, go to the View menu, go down to Extras, and choose "Hide Donut," or "Hide the Content Grabber." Now it doesn't appear there, but you can still of course move the picture within the frame by double-clicking and moving, or by switching to the direct selection tool right here. So that's, I think, customize the view 101 is hide the content grabber. Other things that you might want to hide because you don't use them a lot are, well, let's take a look at this frame here. When I select it, I see this yellow box. Why is that there? Should I be paying attention to it? Well, that is the live corner control box, and if I click it then it turns it into live corner editing mode, where I can drag these little diamonds and create a curved frame, and so on. I'll undo. Perhaps you don't work with live corners a lot. Perhaps you hardly ever work with live corners. Why are you looking at this little control, then, on your frames? Go to the View menu, go down to Extras, and choose "Hide Live Corners." Now, that does not change the actual corners, that actually should be named, "Hide Live Corner Control," something like that, because you can always get back to it, either by showing that control again or you can go to the Object menu and go down to Corner Options, and then change the corners on just the selection. So that's two things that we've hidden. Another thing, what about this guy? This little blue box up there, what's that for? Well, that's for anchoring this into another text frame. If I created another text frame and I filled it with some placeholder text, and I want this frame to be inside of this frame, I could just drag this, and it anchors it within there. If you hardly ever do that, if you hardly ever anchor frames, see what happens when I hit return and this frame is actually part of this? That's a topic for a whole other lesson. But what I want to tell you is that if you don't like that, then you can hide that. You can hide that control. I'm gonna undo. Or actually, take it out of being anchored by cutting and pasting it right back in here. And you can go to the View menu, go down to Extras, and choose "Hide Anchored Object Control." And now that's gone, too. I kind of like it, myself, because I do a lot of anchoring, but if you don't, why not hide it? Is there more to hide? Well, yeah, you can. Let's go here, over to this much more complex layout. And you can see that we are also, on this page, this page is also hiding the live corners and it's also hiding the donuts, because when you change those view controls, they change for all your documents. It's a sticky setting, so you don't have to keep doing it for document by document. Another thing that we might want to change are these little chain icons that started appearing a few versions ago in InDesign. This is the link badge, and it tells you if an item is out of date or not. If you don't want to see it, if you just want to use the good old Links panel to keep up to date with your links, then you can hide that, too. I'll go to View, Extras, and choose "Hide the Link Badge." One last thing that you can change to customize how your frames look without losing the frames themselves is to lighten up on the color of the frames. These colors, this light, bright green, and this blue, this light blue, and red and purple, are actually coming from the Layers panel. So, for example, that light blue color in the Layers panel is the default color for everything on Layer 1. And that might be a little too contrast-y, a little too distracting. To change that, double-click the layer and change it to a different color that's less distracting. Like, for example, down here we can choose light gray and see how that looks. Isn't that nice? That's a lot calmer. You could do the same thing for all your layers. So we still have a bright green happening here. I'm gonna double-click that and change this one to... Let's come all the way down and choose our own custom color. So you could spend a long time doing this kind of thing. Now that's a calmer kind of green. There we go. So it's a little less distracting, little less glaring. Now we can see the frame edges, we can see where the frames are in relation to the content, which you cannot see in preview mode, but they are much less distracting than they were when we first began. So go ahead and customize your frames to your liking.

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