From the course: InDesign 2021 Essential Training

New documents - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2021 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. If you want you can jump to the normal InDesign user interface by clicking on this InDesign logo in the upper left corner. That way you can see the panels and so on, some people prefer that, or you can click this home icon and it takes you back. Now from here, you can make a new InDesign document by clicking the create new button, or you can go to the file menu, choose new, and then click document. Up comes the new document dialogue box. If your new document dialogue box looks really different from this one, you're probably using what's called the legacy style. That's just an option in InDesign preferences dialog box that you can change if you want. The first thing you need to decide on is what kind of preset to use when creating your new document. In the old legacy dialogue box, this is called the intent but here you can choose print web or mobile across the top. Web is a bit of a misnomer, it does not mean web like a web page or 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. Now two things happen when you choose one of these web presets. First of course it shows you page sizes that are typical screen dimensions. Also, the measurements are set to pixels and all of your colors are set to RGB. Mobile is not really that different than web so I usually just ignore it. In this case, I'm going to choose print. And just to be clear, print does not mean that you're necessarily going to be printing your document. For example, maybe you're making a PDF that you're putting up on a website for someone to read, and then maybe they'll print it out like a product sheet for some business. You can still use print for that. Now you can see down here at the bottom that Adobe is offering you a number of templates from their Adobe stock service. Some of these are pretty good and some are well, maybe not the best quality, but I'm just going to start with creating a new file from scratch by clicking one of the blank documents sizes up here. Like if you know you're printing on A4 paper the final size will be A4. Then go ahead and click view all presets, then click A4 and you're good to go. Now, these presets are just starting points. You can always adjust the settings over here on the right, for example, you could change the width and the height field. You can also choose what units you want to use. For example, I'll change this to centimeters. You can also click on these orientation buttons 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 down here is whether or not 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 here is primary text frame. This is used for things like books, where you have a story that goes from one page to the next, over a lot of pages. The primary text frame will automatically add a text frame to your master pages. 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 or a long document, you should probably leave that off. Now in this next section, you can change the columns. Most documents just have one column, but if you know that you're going to have two or more columns in your document, you can change this to something else. For example, I'll change this to two columns. The column gutter is the amount of space between each column. So I could change this to something like 1.5 centimeters. Now there are some more features in this dialog box but they sometimes get hidden because people don't realize that you can scroll this pain on the right. See how that just scrolls down. Also these features sometimes get hidden. If you click on this little triangle so make sure you can see all the features margins here are just guidelines. There's nothing stopping you from putting objects outside your margins, but margins are a helpful reminder of where you should put your text frames and pictures and so on. and see this little button over here on the right, that looks like a chain, that tells InDesign to keep all the values and all the fields the same. If I click it, it unlinks those fields. So if I change say the top margin to let's say three centimeters, it won't change all the other ones. I'll talk about this last feature down here bleeding slug in a later chapter. So this all looks good, so I'm going to click the create button in the lower right corner, and I'm good to go. There's the document. You can see the column guides, the margin guides, the page size, but after you create your document you might realize that you need to make changes. Don't panic. In a later chapter I'll show you how you can change all of these 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