Let me show you five super helpful layout tips every InDesign user should know about. Follow along in this video and learn how to apply column rules to a text frame, use the color theme tool to sample colors from an image, and create a drop cap nested style. I'll also go over a neat trick when using Photoshop files in an InDesign document and show you how to apply a select subject text wrap.
There's lots to cover in this video, so let's jump right in and start creating. The first tip I'd like to show you is how to apply column rules to a text frame within a layout. Let's take a closer look.
All right, here's the document we'll be working on. It's an A4 magazine size spread. And the first thing we want to do is add the main copy to this text frame here before we go over how to add the column rules.
So I'm going to go up to file and place and let's choose the text document that I've included here. It's called main copy dot text. Click open.
and that will import the text into that frame. Now I just want to cut the main title here and paste it in the main title frame, cut the secondary title, and let's add that in this second frame, and then just adjust your text accordingly. Now before we typeset and format this text, I want to add the column rules.
So let's click on our selection tool, and while holding Option, that would be Alt on Windows, double click, to bring up your text frame options. Now, before adding the column rules, I want to increase the gutter width. You could see by default it's 0.1667.
Let's increase that to 0.3125. Now, this may vary based on your text frame, but for this tutorial, let's go with that. Next, let's click on column rules and select the insert column rule option. And you can see if you have your preview box checked, the column rules have been applied however the weight is one point and that's far too thick for what we want here so i'm going to click on that and let's choose 0.25 i like the hairline here it looks much more cleaner the other thing i'd like to do is decrease the offset so let's decrease it to negative 0.0625 and then you can adjust the start and end points of the column rules And we can revisit this if we have to, but let's just keep it at zero for now.
And once you have those settings in place, go ahead and click OK. Now we can typeset and format the main text. So select all command A, that would be control A on Windows.
And I'm going to make my way up to the font selector here. And I'm going to choose Baskerville and I'll choose Baskerville regular. I'm going to make the point size here 11 and change the leading or line spacing to 13. I'm going to turn off the hyphenation in my properties panel and you can see if I click the selection tool, click off and press W on my keyboard, we have a nice clean look here with our column rules in our text frame. We'll add another setup top here but first let's typeset the titles.
So we'll start with the main title first. I'm going to select that and this will be a font called the seasons. And I've added a link in the description below if you'd like to install that.
It is an Adobe font. I'm going to make this bold and I'll change the point size to 75. And I'll change the line spacing here to 68. Good. I'm going to select the secondary title here.
And this once again will be the seasons. So we'll choose that. It'll be bold and 22 point.
with a 26 point line spacing so we have our main title our secondary title and our main copy i'll press w on my keyboard to turn my guides back on and let's focus our attention on top here because we'll add another set of column rules but first let's bring in this text this is a sidebar so i'm going to click file and place and choose the sidebar text file that i've included and click open the only difference with this text frame here is we're going to add little images within each column along with the column rule but first let's format this i'm going to select all and as a starting point i'm going to make this baskerville italic and i'll make it 11 point here with a 13 point letting and i'll zoom in for this because i want to change the font for the each header within this text frame. This will be the seasons and we'll do the seasons bold. And I'll apply that to all three of the Headers within this text frame the seasons and bold and then the seasons and bold and this will all make sense Once we've added all the content here the seasons and bold good. So we have all three and we can add Returns here if we want and we can adjust those back once we're done here So I'm on the paste board here on the left side. There's a frame that I've created I'm just gonna place it right here in the left hand side the first column and I'm gonna make my way to the text wrap and I'm gonna click on wrap around bounding box Now as a starting point I'm gonna set these all to zero all the way around because I only want to change the right-hand side of this So I'm going to unlink it and change the right side only So something like that is fine, and I'm also going to Center this text shift command C as a shortcut good and i'm just going to make another copy of this so option that's alt on windows and drag and then option and drag then you can bring up the text here now if we need to make this text frame a little bit bigger we can do that just expand it a little bit and we can do return and then bring this one up and we'll center this last one as well so we have all three of our text pieces as well as our image frames now we'll bring in the images i have them in my cc libraries here if i go to fashion magazine layout it's these three purses so i'll start with this orange one first here it is i'm going to hold option and click in there i'll do the same thing with the second this green one i have here it is in my loaded cursor hold option and click in there and i have one more this peach colored purse click in there while holding option or alt on windows then of course you can adjust accordingly like so now we want to add those column rules so double click while holding option or alt on windows to bring up your text frame options go to column rules insert column rules and let's change it again to 0.25.
And again, if you wanted to adjust the end, just break the link here. So we can only adjust one of the two. And in this case, I want to adjust the end or bring it up something like that, and then click OK.
The second tip we'll look at is how to use the color theme tool to sample colors from an image and add it as a swatch theme. Before we go over how to use the color theme tool, we'll need to place the image on the page to sample the colors from. I have the main image here in my CC libraries. I'm going to click on it once and then drag to pull it out. Here it is in my loaded cursor.
I'll hold option, that would be alt on windows, and click to place it in that frame. Now this is a good opportunity to adjust the content within this frame the way you want it. I'm going to click on the content grabber and maybe move it to the left a little bit. Hold option command and greater than to increase the size by one.
maybe move it down a bit and that looks pretty good for now i want to add some color to this layout and i want to sample the colors from this picture to add some color to the first page so i'm going to click on the selection tool and click off anywhere on the pasteboard and next let's click on the color theme tool it's the eyedropper with the swatches icon next to it if by chance you're on eyedropper just click and hold for the flyout and choose color theme tool and next hover over the image and you can see it highlights with the blue border around then click anywhere and you can see that indesign recognizes the colors within that image and gives you some swatch options colorful bright dark deep and muted for this example i'll go with bright so i'm going to click bright and then i'm going to click on this icon here to add this theme to the swatches Alternatively, you can click on this to add it to the CC library as a swatch group. I'll click the first option to add it to my regular swatch panel. So click that and if I open my swatch panel, you can see that the bright theme group has been added.
If I collapse that folder, there are the colors, the CMYK colors that we sampled from that image. So now we can add some of those colors to the layout. For example, I can click on the This spring text within the main headline and give it the orange color.
And we could do the same for the little sub headers in the sidebar up top. We could select those and make those orange as well. If I go onto my pasteboard, I have a did you know pullout here that I'm going to place right in the middle column, and I'll zoom in for this. And there are two here, there are two frames on top of one another. I'm going to click on this first one and give it this green color there, and I'll click the one in the back and give it the darker green color.
With this version selected, I'm going to go to my text wrap, and once again, Apply wrap around bounding box and we want to adjust that bottom wrap. You can see I have it set to 0.125. Now if I press command 0 and zoom out, the layout's looking a lot better using the colors sampled from the main image, giving us a theme.
Let's move on to the third tip, which focuses on adding a drop cap nested style within a paragraph style. Next, let's... add a drop cap to the main copy and apply a character style that's nested within a paragraph style. As a first step, we'll be creating two paragraph styles.
So I'm going to select all the text here, go to my properties panel, and under paragraph styles, let's click new paragraph style. And I'm going to call this body text. Now I'm going to place my cursor in the first paragraph, and I'll zoom in for this so you could see. I'm going to place it at the very beginning.
And again, in the paragraph window within the paragraph panel, I'm going to apply a three line drop cap here. One, two, three. Let's select that first paragraph and create another paragraph style.
Click the plus icon and we'll call this drop cap. Now let's create a character style. So I'm going to select just the A character and switch over to character styles.
And I'm going to create a new character style and call this drop orange. I'm going to select the selection tool, click off, and I'm going to open the character style window here. And I'll double click drop orange.
I'm going to go to the character color. and I want this to be orange. Once you've done that, go ahead and click OK.
Let's go back to Paragraph Styles, and you can see here I have Body Text and Drop Cap. Let's double click the Drop Cap Paragraph Style, and then choose Drop Caps and Nested Styles. So you can see the Paragraph Style is three lines with one character.
There is the drop cap that we applied. However, we can add that character style within this Paragraph Style by clicking New, nested style. Under the nested styles, we want to choose that character style drop orange.
And we want it applied through one, not word, one character. And you can see the only thing that's orange now is that first character and not the word as. Once you've done that, go ahead and click okay.
Now I want to select that first paragraph again, go to character styles and make sure that it's not applied. If I go to my paragraph styles now and just place my cursor in this first paragraph, we can toggle between body text and drop cap, body text and drop cap. So that's a cool way of adding a nested style within a paragraph style. The fourth tip we'll look at is how to use object layer options to control layers within a PSD document right in InDesign. Now this is a great image but you probably noticed that the subject's jacket is being cropped out of the image and if I press and hold my content grabber you can see there's much more jacket there that I'd like to have in this layout.
Now this is a PSD file, a PSD image that was imported into this layout. What this allows us to do is adjust those layers that you had from Photoshop in InDesign. Let me show you how this works. First, let's click on the image, command C to copy, and then shift option command V to paste in place. Of course, you can go to edit, copy, and then edit, paste into place.
Good, so if I go to my layers panel and collapse that layer one, you can see I have fashion main.psd, and then another version of it underneath. I have the top version selected, and I'm going to right click it and go to object layer options. Now this PSD has two layers, a cutout and the background. I'm going to turn off the background layer here and press ok. Now nothing has changed as of yet but what I'd like you to do is grab this middle handle on the left side of this frame and drag it to the left so we get more jacket.
spilling over to the first page in the layout. Now this is really cool and a great way of having things overlap using PSD documents. It gives you the flexibility to adjust those layers right in InDesign which is a great tip when you're working in the app.
The fifth and final tip is applying a select subject text wrap to the subject in the image. Let me show you how. Now of course having the jacket spill over to the first page looks great.
but it doesn't make sense if it's overlapping the text, the main body copy. Obviously, it's covering it, so you're not able to read the copy. So the fifth and final tip that I want to share with you is how to add a select subject text wrap.
I still have the top version selected here, the image, and I'm going to make my way back to the text wrap window in the text wrap window. We'll add the third option, the wrap of wrap around object shape. So go ahead and click that. now that still doesn't look very good that's because there's one more thing you have to do under contour options let's change it from same as clipping to select subject that detects the edges of the image and then you can apply the offset to something like 0.625 or until you get the wrap that you want so in this case let's increase it a little bit more something like that is fine If I press W on my keyboard, I now have a text wrap with the select subject wrap applied, and you can now read the copy again. Thanks for watching and I hope you can use these tips in your next Adobe InDesign layout project.
If you enjoyed this video and you want to watch more just like it, check out the playlist above. Until next time, take care and keep creating.