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One of the most widely used applications of Adobe Suite would be InDesign. Primarily, it is used to create a variety of publications, be it lifestyle magazines, technical brochures, or entire novels. It may not appear to be as fancy as Photoshop or CorelDraw, but it has a lot of potential. While playing around with the basic features of InDesign is easy, it takes an excellent professional to master the entire application. There are a lot of InDesign online tutorials which help you out in this task. The tutorials cover almost everything – starting from creating a document to the most advanced features. Over time, these tutorials have increased massively, and it becomes difficult to figure out which are good ones and which are bad ones. To help you, we are sharing a list of best, latest InDesign Tutorials for Designers.
1. Adobe InDesign Tutorial for Beginners – 2021
Are you new to InDesign and have the patience to learn it nicely, then this tutorial is for you. A long and comprehensive tutorial with a run time of almost two hours, this video starts from the basics of InDesign and teaches you all the essential functions like understanding the user interface, adding pages, inserting text and images, and much more. Coming from the house of Envato by Adobe certified Daniel Walter Scott, the tutorial is well divided into chapters that slowly enhance your InDesign knowledge. The good part is that it is the latest video on the market and covers all the new features. In terms of a tutorial, it will help you design an elegant 4-page brochure. While it teaches the basics, it allows you to play around and use your creativity to develop excellent designs for the brochure by the end of the tutorial.
2. Working on Images in InDesign
One of the biggest problems that designers face while working in InDesign is editing and setting the images quickly. Many use Photoshop extensively to play and edit with images. While this is a good option, then editing Photoshop images and then exporting them to InDesign can become an uphill task if one has to keep doing it repeatedly. The better choice is to deal with the images in InDesign itself. It also offers an array of features for this purpose. This InDesign Tutorial by Terry White is to the point in offering you tips for editing images in InDesign. It follows a very hands-on approach and provides a step-by-step guide to the needed edits. Starting from how best to layout the images to using clipping masks and inserting images inside the text to create stunning headers – it covers them all. The tone of the tutorial is amiable and light which makes the learning more fun. You can ignore the start and directly jump to the tutorial part.
3. Guide to Typography
Typography forms the heart of any design in InDesign. Without it, the designs would look monotonous and boring. While most designers deal only with Headers and Subheaders, they ignore the accurate potential good typography can make in the document. This short (seven minutes) tutorial by Ben Kaiser gives five prominent tips on how to create the best possible typography designs for your document. It starts with basics like layout designing and then goes into more profound text kerning and spacing concepts. It also showcases how you can use text inside different shapes to create a better visual effect. Shedding light on the significance of choosing the right font style and pairing it up with correct fonts provides a visual guide on the various possibilities of design that you can do with text. As it covers the essential parts, professional designers might find it trivial. Still, a close watch can help refresh their basics of typography and font selection as well.
4. Amazing Things you can do in InDesign
Many designers write off InDesign as a publication application and hardly use it for any designing purpose. This one-hour-long video tutorial by British graphic designer Dave Clayton will bust their myth. One by one, it explains in detail the types of stunning designs you can create with this application. Along with this, it provides so many hacks and tips that any professional designer would like to bookmark this video. It offers shortcodes of how to fit text in a box or how to auto-size the text box. Did you know InDesign allows you to search for a particular weight of font also? Or that you can change the by default font style for particular documents. The list is quite endless. But one thing is for sure that after watching and understanding this video, you will never use InDesign the same way you used to do before. It opens up your horizons and helps you achieve almost everything needed for your design projects.
5. Adobe InDesign CC 2021 New Features
The design world is rapidly changing, and with it, the applications are. All principal design software has new updates coming almost every year. The same is the case with Adobe suite and particularly InDesign. You must stay up to date with these features to make the most out of the application. This 22-minute long tutorial will help you understand all the new features of InDesign CC 2021. Starting from content-aware wrap to locating colors, it also talks about how to work with HSB colors. There is tons of new information available in this video. But as it is about InDesign 2021 new features, it assumes that you are aware of the basics of InDesign. Apart from learning about the new features, it also provides good details about the various tools in the application that can brush up professional designers’ knowledge. The essential requirement for this tutorial would be you possessing the latest edition of InDesign. Only then will you be able to have a more hands-on experience of the tutorial. Even if you do not have the application, it can serve as a good product review of InDesign.
6. Guide to Masking
Just like Illustrator and Photoshop, masking is one of the essential techniques in InDesign as well. If you get it right, you can create loads of stunning visuals in InDesign itself and not have to go back to Photoshop. This comprehensive tutorial by Martin Perhiniak provides a step-by-step guide on how to master the art of masking. It starts by providing the various possibilities of this effect and then explaining the tools required for the same. First, it gives a demo on a simple elliptical frame. Still, it then slowly raises the bar by using multiple images overlapping each other and then a single image in multiple frames. It also covers how to set up an image inside the text, along with the extensive use of pen tools. It is slow but quite detailed and thereby enables viewers to learn from the tutorial quickly.
7. Magazine Layout in InDesign
The most designed object in InDesign has to be magazines. Be it simple college-level ones or the iconic Time or Forbes magazine, all of them are best designed in InDesign. This short tutorial quickly runs you through the entire process of magazine design. It is simple to follow and takes you from one step to another, guiding you about the essential tips in between. The tutorial’s good part is that it takes up one particular project and revolves the entire tutorial around it. It also explains the difference between a print project and a web project and the different things you need to keep in mind while designing them. It flaws in making extensive use of Photoshop for detailed image editing, but that is pardonable. The focus here is on the layouts, text, and image placements. While it talks about a multi-page magazine, the tutorial process can be applied to any number of pages suitable to the design.
8. Keyboard Shortcuts
This tutorial is definitely for professional designers who want to save time while working on their designs on InDesign. It scores well because it just doesn’t dump all the shortcuts on the viewer but categorically explains each one of them by providing a demo. This makes it more convincing and also easy to remember. It talks about various other quick methods, starting from duplicating content by Alt + Shift to toggling from design mode to preview mode for a clearer view. These cover processes like zooming in and out of the document, tracking & kerning, resizing images, adding or removing color, etc. Bookmark this video till you know all the shortcuts by heart. Another good idea would be to note down the keyboard shortcuts and keep practicing them whenever using InDesign.
9. Architecture Presentation Boards
You have ever wondered how architects can impress you with stunningly designed portfolios and presentation boards. The answer to that question is InDesign. It is the strength of this application to allow good layout books or documents. This tutorial is a short guide on how you can go about the entire process of creating visually appealing architecture presentation boards. It starts with all the requisite requirements, and then from a blank canvas, it, step by step, creates the design. The tutorial is a bit fast and runs along a bit in the essential parts. It assumes that you have a certain amount of knowledge of InDesign. But what it does well is providing the right ideas and visuals for the artboards by throwing in memes in between keeps the learning process light and fun. While the tutorial focuses on architecture presentation boards, this tutorial’s learnings can be applied to many other applications. You can design a visually appealing mood board or a storyboard using the same methods.
10. Pro Level Secrets of InDesign
Saving the best for the last, this tutorial is a must-watch for all those who believe they know almost everything about InDesign. It will be pretty eye-opening to realize the potential they were yet to exploit of this application. David Blatner, an Adobe specialist, walks you through high-level tips, tricks, and various techniques. A word of caution that it is not for beginners. It is essential to have basic knowledge about the application coupled with hands-on experience. It talks about creating your own preset in terms of designing, identifying errors or even potential errors, and avoiding them. It also details out the precautions that all designers need to take for documents that are being designed for printing. It also one by one explains all the exporting options along with their pros and cons. The highlight of the video will be how it teaches to create animation in InDesign. All in all, a superb video that all professional designers using InDesign should watch and learn.
After watching the above videos, one can be sure of garnering more respect for InDesign. This application has a lot of potentials but is used mainly for publication purposes. In its 20 years of existence, it has evolved into the most used application for print purposes. Even in the digital world, it is beneficial to use this software for designing stunning magazines or brochures, or other materials. Hence for all designers, it makes sense to have good knowledge about InDesign. The tutorials that have been collated above are done strategically to provide you all levels of knowledge. It provides the basics of the user interface, usage of tools, and unwrapping of the potential for beginners. It covers advanced features like typography, masking, and not to forget keyboard shortcuts for professionals. It would be a good idea to bookmark these tutorials and refer to them when needed.
