Adjusting the interface: dark and light

- [Instructor] My copy of InDesign might not look exactly like yours, and that's okay, don't panic. It's just because Adobe lets people customize the user interface in various ways. That is all the panels, tools, and so on. In particular, you can adjust the lightness or darkness of the screen. A lot of designers like dark charcoal gray. It's soothing to the eye and, most importantly, it doesn't distract your eye from the more important stuff, the graphics and text on your page. Now, other designers are more used to a lighter interface.

Partly because that's the way Adobe software looked for many years. You can change InDesign's appearance in the preferences dialog box. To find that, you look at the top of the InDesign menu on the Mac, or the bottom of the Edit menu on Windows. The location of this menu item is one of the very few differences between the Mac and Windows versions of the program. Inside this sub-menu, choose Interface. There are a lot of things you can change in here, but I'm going to look at the Appearance section right here at the top.

Specifically, I'm going to look at the Color Theme popup menu. Right now it's set to Medium Dark, but you can come in here and change it to make it darker if you want. Some people like that. Or, you could come in here and make it much lighter. Now, the other feature that you'll notice here is Match Pasteboard to Theme Color, but I don't usually turn that on and off here. I use the View menu instead. I'll show you. I'll click OK, and then I'll come up to the View menu. You can see that the same feature is here. Match Pasteboard to Theme Color.

Right now it's turned on, which means the Pasteboard, which is the area around the page, is kind of a gray color. If I turn this off, now it goes to plain white. Sometimes I have the Pasteboard set to UI color. Sometimes I have it turned off. It really depends on what I'm doing and what kind of document I'm working on. Anyway, the important thing here is that if my screen sometimes looks different than yours, now you know why, and what you can do about it.