341 Find free InDesign templates on Adobe Stock

- [Anne-Marie] You know what question I hear a lot? How do I find free Adobe InDesign templates? What's the best place to go for them? Now, we have a number of free templates on InDesignSecrets.com and templates just for paid premium members, but where do you find them outside of InDesignSecrets.com? To me, one of the best places is using Adobe Stock because they just started adding InDesign templates to their library a couple years ago and they have hundreds of free templates, but a little difficult to find them and that's what this tip is about, how to find free InDesign templates on Adobe Stock.

Now, this is not just for Creative Cloud members, by the way. All you need is a free Adobe login. You need your email and name to be registered with them and then you can download them and use them and you could even convert them to pre-CC versions. If you don't have CC, you could still use them in CS6, so I'll show you how to do that as well. One of the best ways to find the free templates is, if you have InDesign CC, use the new New Document dialog box that shows you templates.

Now, here's ones that I've recently used, but if I go to one of the three intents, Prints, Web, or Mobile, you'll see the presets at the top and then the templates toward the bottom. Ones with the blue check marks are ones that I've already downloaded and there are quite a few. These are all the different Print ones, and you see the word Free, lower right. That is the word that we're looking for. You could even search for more templates right from here. Search for keywords and it's only going to search for InDesign templates and nothing else.

And there are templates for web and mobile devices as well. Fiction Book Layout for ePub, you know, for a mobile device. That's what those are. Alright, so I'm going to close this and we're going to go right to the source 'cause that's where I recommend that you search for the free templates and I'm going to use Safari instead of my default Chrome because if I use Chrome, it's going to log in with my CC account and I want to show you that all you need is just a regular Adobe sign-in, which I have.

This is Zoe, this is my dog's sign-in and it's not subscribed to Adobe Stock, it's not subscribed to Creative Cloud. You come here and then you just start searching for the perfect asset for your next creative project. What you need to do is choose Templates from down here and then leave this empty. Then when you hit Return or Enter, you'll see that there are, oh, my goodness, 12,000 templates. Not really, a lot of these are Photoshop or Illustrator templates, so then you have to choose View filters and choose InDesign.

We have 663, that's great. That's how many templates there are and not all of them are free. Do you see what's missing here, the word free? You can't search for free templates. If you want to get one that's not free, like one of these guys, you would actually have to subscribe to Adobe Stock. Let me show you what the pricing is and I do think it's worth it to have a subscription, I have a subscription. You can choose one of these guys, but you see, it's not cheap and you have a limit of how many you can download every month.

So, let's come back here and see what's available to us that's free, that you don't even need a subscription for. By the way, if you do have a subscription to Adobe Stock, downloading the free templates does not impact how many you have available in your account. So, it doesn't make a hit on your account, which is nice to know. Anyway, so we have 663, so Anne-Marie, how do we search for free? You don't see free here and you know, if you say, well, I think maybe I'm going to try and download it anyway and you click it and it says Buy License, you click this, you're going to get this dialog box because you're not logged in with a paid account, so that's not going to work.

Let's go back, we're going to, again, search for InDesign templates. What I have found is, just really through manual labor, is to come all the way down to the bottom and starting at about screen three or four, you're going to start seeing the free ones appear at the bottom right. So, I'm scrolling down, there we go. So, I'm on the third screen of hits and there's a free one, there's a free one. You can't sort, you can't search for, but what I found is that after about the fourth screen and on, they're all free.

There you go. Let's say that I want to download this resume template. I come over here and I hover over the cloud icon and it says License and Save to Computer and so, I click it and it saves it. So, just put it in the download file. And if I go to View, Show Downloads, there's the file. Now, from here, I can just jump to it and let's go ahead and open it. And it opens up in InDesign, it was created with an earlier version, but there you go.

Pretty nice, right? Now, what if you had CS6? I took a couple screenshots because I don't have CS6 installed on this computer, but here's the dialog box you're going to get when you try to open up that template. You'll see, it could not open the template because it was created in a newer version, but look, click Convert to convert and open this document. That's that service from Adobe Sensei, that's what they call it, a cloud-based service that, when you click Convert, will upload this newer version template to Adobe servers.

They will do the export to IDML that's required in order to open it up in an earlier version and then it will immediately open up, and here's the next screen that I get. The template opened up, as you can see, but it is missing fonts because most of these templates use Adobe Typekit fonts and if you're a subscriber to Creative Cloud, you automatically have a subscription to Typekit. But it's not a big deal, you could always create your own subscription to Typekit, it's only $50 a year, $60 a year, something like that.

You don't have to have CC to subscribe to Typekit or you could just use your own fonts. But anyway, it's kind of cool that you can go to stock.adobe.com, find free InDesign templates, download them to your computer and use them in any version of InDesign, from CS6 to the latest version, completely legally. It's a great place to find free InDesign templates.