On all the InDesign courses we look at colour in depth especially with regard to accuracy and one of the things often mentioned is how to replace one colour with another. As this pops up a lot we thought it might be a good idea to write an InDesign Locate Colour Tutorial on that very thing.
A couple of weeks ago we ran an online InDesign Training Newsletter Design Course for a lady who had a little experience with the software. Her objectives were quite clear she wanted to create and edit slim yet professional looking newsletters in InDesign. Having had a chat prior to the course she selected a few random samples she liked from the Web and we used them as training examples during the course.
We recently revived the Greta Powell Training Pinterest page.
The thought process behind that being that the examples we show sometimes on the site would actually be much better represented visually on Pinterest than here. So there we have it – a revival in progress.
Hopefully once everything is completely back to normal we will be back out there delivering loads of Onsite InDesign Training Courses and posting madly to Pinterest to show what we’ve been up to.
Some time ago, for the life of me cannot remember exactly when but definitely pre Covid we ran an Introduction to InDesign Training Course. It was onsite in Derbyshire and was probably the last one we ran before lockdown. The majority of our training courses are customised and this was for a company who wanted to design their three monthly brochure as a template on the InDesign Course.
The idea being that once the delegate (it was a one to one session) had learnt the software and designed the brochure on the course then she would be able to update it with images and text once quickly on a three monthly basis.
Having gathered all the assets prior to the course and making use of stock images from the Internet for the course itself we set up the brochure from scratch. Our client opted for an A4 landscape design with a minimal look which actually worked so well with their fonts which were all Sans Serif. As with the fonts the colours were also taken from the companies own design guidelines and everything was then worked into the layout over the course.
The image you see to the left (or on Pinterest for that matter) is the end result. Consisting of eight pages in total (front and back cover left out from this screen shot) this template will be so easy to work with in the future. All the client will need to do is drop new graphics into the graphics box and the same with text.
When the text is dropped in or rather placed in the text frames it will immediately adapt the type style in that particular frame. We set up paragraph and character styles and then mapped them to the text boxes so really apart from dropping in the text very little needs to be done in the future.
Any of our training courses can be tailored for you and being a small company we have the flexibility to adapt totally to your brief. Why not give us a call or drop us an email to find out how we can help with your training and projects.
All our courses are currently available online as well as onsite – you can find out more about them:
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During the Autumn there are a number of InDesign Courses in Nottingham being run by Vantage Training in conjunction with Greta Powell. These are being run as a series of workshops and there are currently a few spaces available. The training is being hosted at Vantage’s Nottingham based offices with Greta doing the training over three days. The workshops are being run at three levels from introduction through to advanced. If you’re not sure which InDesign Workshop would be best for you please don’t hesitate to get in touch with Dawn at Vantage who will be pleased to help you. Vantage Training’s contact details are further down the post.
These Adobe InDesign Training Courses are designed to give you the skills needed to do exactly what you need to do effectively and quickly. Because these are delivered in-house as onsite Adobe Courses the choice is huge and totally down to you and what you need to do. Most people are aware that you can create and design spreads and layouts in InDesign but what else can you do with the software.
Once the spread has been created for print or elsewhere you can then add elements from the InDesign Interactive Panel to create eBooks, presentations, slideshows and other online media. You can also use InDesign’s Interactive Panel to design and publish online forms to collect data and other information from perspective clients.
So this week saw a trip down to the South West to deliver an InDesign Training Course in Bristol. Most people dislike the M5 but personally I like it, it always reminds me of driving down to the South West for holidays with my son. (Enough of the personal stuff). This particular course was bespoke InDesign Training for an engineering company, a regular client of Greta Powell Training who were looking for specific InDesign skills for their bid writers.
Briggs & Forrester Group are a well known engineering company whose bid writers wanted to stream line and build on their current InDesign workflow. They were working from existing templates and had a good grasp of the software but felt there was more they could do using InDesign’s automated features.
Looking for the Control Bar in InDesign CC 2019? The control bar no longer appears automatically when you install or update Creative Cloud. It now needs to be manually turned on from the Window menu. Why? Because Adobe have introduced the the new InDesign CC 2019 Properties Panel and this opens on the InDesign load. Just like the Control Bar the Properties Panel is also context sensitive and changes according to what is currently selected.
Useful but oft ignored is the Split Windows feature in InDesign which gives two views of the same document. For example, one pain in the neck of working in InDesign is when highlighting the text to change the text colour it’s difficult to see the new shade without turning off the highly. That’s because all colours are inverted when selected as can be seen in the screen shot below, the text looks purple in the screenshot but in actual fact it’s green. Most people deselect to view the new colour which can be time consuming if you want to skim through a number of different shades to find the right one. There is an easy solution to this known as Split Window in InDesign.
So how can you preview your text colours without committing a number of selection acrobatics? One of the things shown on the InDesign Training Courses is a neat little feature known as Split Window which is ideal for previewing text colour amongst other things.
There are a number of ways to create columns in InDesign but in this InDesign tutorial it’s the Text Frame Object that will be covered. In this one box you have the ability to set the amount of columns, balance them evenly and to adjust the width between them.
There is a video at the end of the tutorial for those who prefer a more visual approach otherwise…………………..
Admittedly there are hundreds, if not millions of tips and tricks hidden inside InDesign many of which are well known and used on a daily basis. In this particular InDesign Tips & Tricks post I’ve tried to include the more obscure ones and decided to start off with a personal favourite – Live Distribute, which has been with us since InDesign CS5
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