Master Class: Tips & Tricks on InDesign, Illustrator & Layout

[Adobe & Creativity Coming up next...Tips & Tricks on InDesign, Illustrator & Layout] More of me, Michael Stoddart. Now we're going to be talking about some design and layout tips and techniques for 2 of my favorite daily applications, that is Adobe InDesign, and we'll be talking about how to take your InDesign publications to tablet devices, but I'm going to start with Adobe Illustrator. Adobe Illustrator has been around for a very long time, and a lot of people believe that well it was never as good as it was in the past, and people have said, "Well you know Illustrator, it's slower these days," or "It just doesn't print like it used to," and I'm going to put it to you that that's because you're using Illustrator the old way, okay? I'm going to show you an example of this, and I'm going to use in Illustrator because right up here in Ilustrator is the Bridge icon so I am going to use Bridge for this. It's not just for Photoshop, it's great for Illustrator as well. I'm going to show you two files, two Illustrator files. This one here, let's open that up, and this one here, let's open that one as well, and we'll sit them side by side, and they look exactly the same, and you would imagine them to be exactly the same. Except in Bridge, this first image, if I come down here and show you the file size, it's seven and a half megabytes in size, not too bad you think? It's okay. What happens if it's 20 mgs, 30 mgs, 40 mgs, and we see these size Illustrator files these days. Huge Illustrator files. The same file for the same design done correctly is 760 k, 1/10 the size. Okay so your Illustrator files can be smaller, faster, and much more rapid to work with if you do the--work with them the new way, and I'm going to show you that new way because it all comes down to using symbols and the appearance panel. So let me show you how this old Illustrator file looks, okay? Hundreds and hundreds and thousands and thousands of points and lines and strokes, but here is a modern Illustrator file. Clean, easy to work with, and very rapid. So how do I go about that? Okay, so let's close this down, and I'll show you what I mean. I'm going to start here; so what I've done is I've got the individual pieces of art that I need, and this one...zoom in. It's just a little word color. Okay, so what I'm going to use is the symbol panel, and I drag the piece of art into the symbol panel because that way it gets referred to, even though it's on the page, hundreds of times. It's only referred to once. It's much easier to tell the computer, "Take this symbol and repeat it a hundred times," then to have a thousand pieces of art on the page, you with me? So now I've got that symbol there, I'm going to use the appearance panel, bring that out, okay, and in the appearance panel, I'm going to--I've got the symbol selected. I'm going to use down here the effect. Now I could use the effect menu up here. It doesn't matter, either way will work, and I'm going to use the distort and transform command, and I'm going to use transform okay. Of course one of the things that people like to use IIlustrator for is very complex patterns, but we find that the more and more complex the patterns become the harder it gets to work with Illustrator, and the whole thing bogs down. Let me show you how to do these really complex patterns and not fall into that trap. Okay, so just before I do that I'm going to zoom back out, and here in the appearance panel, so you can see the whole thing, use the effect, distort and transform, transform. I'm going to turn on preview, and I'm going to tell Illustrator, "I want 12 copies," and move each copy horizontally this number or this amount. Okay, now I'm just going to do this by eye for the sake of presentation, but you can see now very quickly I didn't do copy, paste, paste, paste, paste. Now how many copies I want I can increase or decrease that, but that's fine. I'm going to click okay. So now I need to do the whole thing vertically. I go back and I do exactly the same thing, distort and transform, transform. Okay, now you can do any other filter and effect you want if you want, okay? I'm just doing the distort and transform. Illustrator says, "Wait a minute Michael. Do you want to edit the effect you've got or do you want to apply a new effect?" And that's just what it's telling you there. Okay, so I'm going to apply a new effect. Same thing, turn on preview, and this time we're going to let's say, again, we'll start with 12, again, and I'm going to do vertically however many I want. Now I could--in the real world I would be more precise. I'd type in the millimeters down to a hundredth of a millimeter that I'd need for this pattern. Okay, so I'm going to bring that out and bring that out there. So you can see very quickly and actually less vertical and more numbers. So it looks like I'm making a very complex file with lots and lots of repeating elements. If I in fact click okay there, and simply go to the view menu, and go into outline view. They say it's in fact just one object, much more rapid to work with. Okay, so let's bring that back so I do the same thing with the other piece, and then I'd bring on my other art work. Now the other thing I want to show you is that ampersand, okay? So very quickly I had it drawn properly, and of course the original artist of that art work was the design company Vasava who you will be meeting very soon so I'll ask their forgiveness for completely destroying their ampersand that they designed for us, but I'm going to do this okay, and I'm going to fill that with nothing, and I have a black stroke on it. So, again, in the appearance panel that stroke I want to be very thick. Let's make it 80 points, just for argument's sake, but I also need it to be outlined as you can perhaps see in our artwork. So I'm going to add another stroke. I'm not going to copy and paste that on top of each other. I'm going to have one stroke or one line with two strokes on it, and this one here is going to be white, and I'm going to reduce that down. So ignoring the roughness of the line, you can see that I get the correct intersection here, and that's the only way to do this. I've had designers cut it into pieces, segment it, try and use pathfinder to get this to happen. It doesn't happen. This is the only way to have it happen, and that's some of the beautiful ways of using Illustrator CS5 to do really complex artwork, but without bogging yourself down okay, and so brand new ways to use Illustrator, and you can really now-- really now be comfortable to make complex artwork without having it bog down or become difficult to print. Okay, so that's a little bit of Illustrator. I'm now going to go to InDesign. Okay, so before we go to InDesign to tablets, I want to show you a couple of things that I think any professional InDesign user should know about, and some of my favorite tips and techniques, and perhaps some hidden gems in there as well. First of all, in InDesign, a tip you should all know if you're an InDesign user is here is a really old InDesign file okay, and you know what it's like in InDesign. You often end up with a file that is a little bit flaky, crashes a bit, doesn't quite print; you know it's a little bit strange. Here's my favorite tip and technique, okay? If you go to the InDesign menu on the Mac or you go on Windows to the help menu and select about InDesign, you're just going to get this dialogue box, but if you hold down shift option command on the Mac or shift alt control on the PC, and do exactly the same thing, you get a completely different dialogue box, and this is going to help you when it comes to InDesign because way down here in the bottom corner is the document history, and this particular InDesign file is seven years old almost. It was first created in December 2004, and every single save, save as, cut, copy, paste bits and pieces of artwork is still enmeshed in that file, and that's why this file is a little bit flaky. How do I clean up this file? Well how you clean up the file that most people would say is simply go to file, save as. Okay, no, not in this case, not going to work. What you're going to need to do is export this as an IDML file, okay? Export it as IDML which is simply InDesign Markup language, and all that crud that's in the file doesn't get saved, and so when you do that, and you've exported as IDML, you go back and here's the IDML file, and, again, you open it up, and it rebuilds the file nice, clean, neat, faster, smaller file size. Everything working really well. Now I don't have the links there, but it's not going to use the links, but there you go. So now I do the same thing: InDesign, about InDesign, and you'll see that that file size is now today's date. There, it was created today. So that's the #1 tip and technique I give to any InDesign user. How to clean up your files. So let's keep going, okay? So you often get documents from your customers. You've got your layout. They give you the word file so I drag and drop the Word file, and of course because they typed it in in Word, they've put double returns. They've put double dashes. They've put dashes instead of em dashes. They're not typesetters, they're typists, okay? That's fine, but your job as a typesetter in InDesign is to clean this up, and what a lot of people do is go manually through this process or do manual find changes, okay? What we've done in InDesign is we have this thing called the power of grip. Grip are search expressions that you code. Who wants to do that? No one, so InDesign CS5 and 5.5 have--we've built in some standard grip searches; here they are here, and you can look for these on the internet, okay? Just grip searches. So this is going enable you to very quickly clean up the text. So once you've cleaned up the file, you can then clean up the text. So I'm going to do a multiple return to single return and just change all, and it gets rid of all those double returns in there. I can do the same for white space after four stops. I can do the same for dash, dash to dash as you can see here. So step two when you're working with InDesign clean up the file, then clean up the text that you're placing into the file using find change, okay? And so we build some of that in in InDesign CS5.5. Then the next thing of course is you've got to format the text, and a lot of people spent a lot of time laboriously selecting the text in order to format it. You've got to embrace the power of styles, and not just any styles but nested styles, okay? So let me show you what I mean, here we have quite a complex layout here, and I am going to go to the window menu, select styles and paragraph styles, and formatting the text in your document should take no longer than this. Click. Click. Select this. Select this, okay? Have a look at this one over here. One click. One click, okay? Let's a have a look at just a few more examples. So what this will do is it will enable you to extremely rapidly format your text and do that, and it does that through the power of nested styles, okay? So if you're using character styles or you're using paragraph styles that's great but don't stop there. Down here in drop caps and nested styles, we want you to apply the styles in order as they appear in the text, and that way then you can simply just select the text frame, and instead of having to swipe that text and style it, and then swipe the next text and style it, you can have it apply one after the other. all the time, okay? So that's a way to speed up your text layout; let's keep going. So... Don't select, okay? A lot of times in InDesign you spend forever selecting objects, bringing them to the front, sending them to the back, grouping, ungrouping, getting massively confused using layers, okay? The best thing about Photoshop CS5 is that in one sentence the layers panel in-- sorry the best thing about InDesign CS5 is that the InDesign layers panel is now the same as the Illustrator layers panel. What do I mean by that? Over here in the layers panel we can now name all our objects. Here is an object in InDesign, okay? I'll zoom in here, and here is the layer in InDesign CS5. Now normally here's the object. It's called rectangle. I'm going to name that object, and I'm going to call it Masthead Strap. Okay, simple as that, and when I do that now I know what that object is. Here I have a group, but I want this object to be part of the group. So normally I would have to ungroup it, then ungroup it again, then send it to the back, and then click this and drag it, and then bring it to the front, and get confused, and just really get frustrated. With InDesign CS5, I can speed all that up. I have this object. Here is--here is the Masthead group. I'm going to drag that object down into the Masthead group, and without even having to worry about grouping or ungrouping, I'll do that again and do it properly this time. Drag it to the Masthead group. It's now part of that group so you never have to ungroup in InDesign ever again by using the layers panel. It's going to speed you up massively. So there's lots more of these tips and techniques, but I want to move on now to something that's really top of mind when it comes to InDesign, and that is I want to take my InDesign documents to my tablet devices. I want to publish InDesign files to Android tablets or go from InDesign to ipad. How do we do that? Well if you've upgraded to InDesign CS5 or CS5.5, go to the Adobe labs website and download these two new plugins, and they are called the folio builder and the folio creator. Now a folio is just a magazine, and you now can have as many folios as you like. We had some announcements with Mac's last week regarding the digital publishing solution, and you can have as many folios as you like plus there's whole new pricing around this as well. So what I'm going to do is open up a couple of the files I have here. This is a layer, a number of different images. I placed these images, and I made these images into--I'll just get rid of my last panel here. I made these images into a multi-state object, and as a multi-state object, there's it's three different states, okay? Beautiful Bundi there, okay, and because that's now a multistate object, I can use the overlay creator panel to select that multi-state object, and when I publish this to the tablet device, it'll allow me to have an interactive scrollable slideshow. No coding; I can just swipe. As it says here, I want to tap to play or pause. I want to swipe to change image so I enter that information. Now you can see there are lots of other types of overlays that we can create, and if you're already using the DPS tools in InDesign, take it a little bit further. Know that this here is a video file, and this here is a multi-state object that's a mask of the video file. So you can overlay different types of interactive objects, one on top of the other, to create richer effects, and in this case, I'm overlaying a multi-state object on top of a piece of video so I can mask the video, so rather just a square video. When I've done all that, what I'm going to do is use the folio builder panel to create this in the cloud. I'm going to push this folio as we call it to the cloud, and by doing that, here it is here. Let me go through there. This is the cover, the bridge. I've even put an advertisement in there. So that's all very well; I'm there in the cloud so where did it go? Well let's go to the cloud, and in this case, I'm going to use Safari, and I go to digitalpublishing.acrobat.com, and here is the folio producer tools, and, again, you can do this right now today at home; take your InDesign files, download the plugins, produce the folio, upload to the cloud. Use your Adobe ID to log in, and you'll be able to try this out. So what I'm going to do is show you those InDesign files in the cloud at acrobat.com. I'll wait for that to come up, and while we're waiting let's come over here to the unload because I've gone to the Android market, and I've downloaded the Adobe viewer here, and I've also gone to the Apple itunes store, and I've downloaded from itunes the Adobe viewer. Let me show you that one here as well. So on my IBM Think Pad tablet, under Android, there it is there, and under IOS from the Apple itunes store, here it is here, and what you'll see is that file that three minutes ago was on InDesign on my desktop has now been published here anywhere in the world, and it has interactivity. There's the update of what I just created so it's telling me that it's updated, and while sitting next door to each other I could be on the other side of the world. Don't tell him I'm going to view that one. Actually let's not view that one; let's use this one. So here we have here, thank you, viewer, and you'll be able to see that the file with all the richness, typography and capabilities of InDesign are now able to be viewed here on my tablet device. There is there, and I'll just--that's the ad I had and you'll be able to see it. Okay, so that' where we are today with InDesign. It's a great way to extend you capabilities from print to online and active tablet devices. Thank you very much. We've got more coming up, don't go away.