InDesign 101: A Beginner's Guide

Picture it: you're all done designing and laying out a beautiful 500 page book and the client comes back to you and says, "We really need to make those blue subtitles red and delete the book's title at the bottom of all the right hand pages. Oh, and we need to send it to the printer today."

Ok, so maybe that's an extreme example, but can you just see it? Forget today! Changing all those elements on every page would take a century! If only you had set up your master pages and paragraph styles before you started%u2026

Want to learn how? Check out Making Changes Easier with Master Pages!

I've been recommending Lynda.com on Creative Curio for years. With prices starting at just $25/month for unlimited access to high quality online video tutorials, this service is a steal! And the $25/month plan is what most people buy, so it's not one of those plans that's cheap just to get you to sign up. I use Lynda.com myself and highly recommend their excellent collection of InDesign Tutorials.

Lynda.com is offering a free 24 hour pass to lynda.com, now too! Just follow that link.

The paragraph and character styles are lifesavers when it comes to making changes in InDesign. Don't be lazy when setting up your documents and skip this step! You will certainly regret it later when you have to manually change the font size on every page!

Paragraph styles are pretty easy to understand, but character styles can be a little more confusing. They are just as important, though!

Layers are treated differently in ever Adobe program. It can get confusing for sure, but it's still necessary to understand how they work and to actually use them. It will make your work flow faster and less complicated, with fewer needs to spend hours correcting problems.

Understanding InDesign Layers on Creative Curio was added to the Adobe LiveDocs documentation on November 8, 2007 by one of the Adobe writers, so you know it's a great resource!

Shortcuts will make using any program more intuitive and you will be glad you can work as fast as you can think. No more hunting around for the Move Tool or the Pen Tool, just learn the key command!

Shortcut Shindig - InDesign is a one-stop shop for the essential InDesign shortcuts!

The Help files provided with your Adobe software should be the first place you turn when you are trying to figure out how to do something. I used the help files to learn how to use style shortcuts and also how to create inline graphics (Adobe calls them Anchored Objects) and I give you a quick step by step in this article. Check it out!

I've talked about setting up a consistent baseline before, but I realized I've not explained exactly how to do it; I've only mentioned it briefly at best.

First, you should be familiar with the points and picas system, and also how to use them.

It will require a bit of planning, but your documents will turn out much more organized and consistent.

Learn how to set up a consistent baseline in InDesign.

If you're a Quark user looking to start learning InDesign, or an InDesign user needing to learn Quark, visit my Quark and InDesign Squidoo lens!