InDesign Day 5

This screencast is currently outdated:

The purpose of Day 5 is to share additional skills and tools that your students can use to fine-tune their work in InDesign with the goal of creating projects that are professional and print-ready. There are a variety of skills discussed below that you can choose to cover, depending on the needs and interests of your class.

One thing to keep in mind is that Typesetting with H&J violations can be difficult to learn at first, especially in a short period of time. It’s definitely necessary for any professional project that is being printed, but if you think it will take too long to cover or be too overwhelming for your class then it might be smarter to just go over what leading, tracking, and kerning are, and let them know how to adjust them in paragraph settings.

Objectives:

  • Intro/hook
  • Design Principles within InDesign
  • Ruler guides
  • Importing styles from another document
  • Spell check
  • Find/change
  • Paragraph keep options and hyphenation
  • Leading, tracking, and kerning
  • H and J violations
  • Aligning text to baseline grid

Practice files here.

Outline:

Intro/Hook (whatever you want)

  • Goal for this lesson: have students create a magazine article layout using the practice files. Article should follow design principles and be fine-tuned to the point where it is ready to be printed

Design Principles within InDesign

  • Review design principles from Day 4
  • Go through Final Design Principles PowerPoint presentation
    • Covers ways that the design principles can be effectively applied to InDesign projects
    • If your class is interested in the visual/design side of InDesign, you can go over some of the points discussed in this article (yes I know it’s Canva. It’s an old article. I’ll find a new one later)
  • Make sure to refer to the design principles as you explain each of the following skills and tools

From here, you can choose any of the following skills to teach during Day 5. Try to plan accordingly and teach skills that would be useful to your students. 

Layers review

  • Review layers if you didn’t have time to cover them sufficiently on Day 4

Ruler guides

  • Click and drag from rulers on the edge of screen
  • Great for aligning text, images, and shapes

Importing styles from another document

  • InDesign can import styles from another document that has styles included (such as Microsoft Word files or another InDesign project)
  • Click on little paragraph icon under paragraph styles, then choose “paragraph styles”
    • In new window, click on the three lines in the upper right-hand corner
    • Choose “load paragraph styles” and select the document that you would like your styles loaded from
  • This can be a useful skill if you use certain styles regularly. Create a “master InDesign file” for your styles, then import them into any project you’d like to use them in

Final notes on Text

  • Really should be done in a word processor BUT the options are there just in case
  • Spell-check
    • Edit > spelling > check spelling
  • Find/change
    • Edit > find/change
    • Find/change can be used to make formatting adjustments too

Paragraph keep options and hyphenation (if you didn’t cover them during Day 3)

  • Paragraph keep options
    • Keep 2 lines together
    • Paragraph controls in contextual bar, paragraph drop down, style options, keep options
  • Setting hyphenation rules in InDesign
    • Paragraph controls in contextual bar, paragraph drop down, style options, hyphenation
    • Slider: fewer hyphens vs better spacing
    • Can specify when to hyphenate, when to not hyphenate
  • Both of these can be adjusted under paragraph style settings too

Leading, tracking, and kerning

  • Leading: the space between lines
  • Tracking: the space between words
  • Kerning: the space between letters
    • Helpful for manually making small adjustments to avoid hyphenated words or widows and orphans

Typesetting

Note: As stated earlier, typesetting can be complicated for beginners, but it is an extremely useful skill to have, especially when working on InDesign projects that will include a lot of text. Make sure that you’ve practiced typesetting beforehand so you can teach the following steps effectively.  

  • The process of arranging and formatting the text on a page so that it is print-ready
  • Setting up your document for typesetting
    • Make sure your text is justified. Otherwise H&J Violations won’t show up
    • InDesign > Preferences > Composition > Check the box that says H&J Violations
      • The highlighted areas show you where the tracking needs to be adjusted
    • InDesign > Preferences > Units & Increments > Change Kerning/Tracking to 1 and Size/Leading to 0.1
  • Now if you highlight your text, you can hold down cmd on your keyboard and use the arrow keys to adjust your leading and tracking
    • Left and right arrows adjust tracking
      • Tracking should always be between -20 and 20, otherwise your text will start to look unnatural
    • Up and down arrows adjust leading
      • Leading should always be within 0.6 of the original font value, otherwise your text will start to look unnatural
  • Adjust tracking to try to get rid of as many H&J violations as possible
    • This should always be done on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis (highlight the entire paragraph and adjust the tracking)
    • You won’t always be able to get rid of all the highlights on your page. Just try your best to get rid of the bright yellow sections
    • Sometimes adjusting the positions of your images is required for better typesetting
  • Adjust your leading so the bottom lines of each column on a page match up with each other
    • This should always be done on a column-by-column basis (highlight the entire column and adjust the leading)

Aligning text to baseline grid

  • An easier way to typeset your columns
  • Edit the style of your body text
    • Paragraph Style Options > Indents and Spacing > Align to Grid: All Lines
  • To see your baseline grid
    • View > Grids and Guides > Show Baseline Grid
      • If it still isn’t showing, you might just have to zoom in on your document
  • To adjust the distance between grid lines
    • InDesign > Preferences > Grids > adjust “Increment Every” under Baseline Grid settings

Review adding images, text wrapping, and exporting

  • With remaining class time, let students add some images to their article and export it as a PDF

Remember to save some time at the end to go over applying for badges!

Sample Lesson Plan:

Coming soon. For now, just follow the outline above and cover the skills that you feel your class will benefit from most.