Adobe InDesign is a great program for typesetting, composition, and multi-page layouts. It was first introduced over 10 years ago and quickly became the industry standard. The program can be used designing the pages of books, various pieces of marketing collateral, and even packaging. With that being said, InDesign is no longer an optional skill, but a necessity to master. If you’re new to InDesign, here are a few tips to help you get the most out of it:
Master Pages
If you’re working on a multi-page layout project, master pages are a great way to apply repetitive design elements, such as page numbers, to designated pages. It can be helpful to have more than one master page when working on a project where the content varies, such as Master Page A for text-heavy layouts vs. Master Page B for image-heavy layouts. Master pages can be applied to all pages or select pages within a document, and if you need to, you can modify the master page elements on a specific page.
Paragraph Styles
Paragraph styles allow you to apply specific typographic styles to different sections of text in your document, which consequently make it easy to adjust styles should you want to make a change across the board. For example, if you set a paragraph style for all headers in your document to be red, and then decide to change them to blue, editing the paragraph style will apply this change to all of the headers in your document so you do not have to address each one manually.
Flowing Text
InDesign makes it very easy to flow text into a document, which is especially helpful when working on a multi-page project. When the amount of text in a text box exceeds the size of the box, a little red plus sign will appear in the bottom right corner of the box to indicate text overflow. Simply click on this plus sign, then click where you want the new text box to go, and your text will spill over into the new box.