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My name is Riotta Scott and in this series of short videos, I'm going to show you how
to create a two-page newsletter from scratch using some of the basics in InDesign CS6.
If you're paying attention, you may have noticed that I have Photoshop open not InDesign. A
lot of people use paper and pencil for the mockup part of the design process but I've
always just used Photoshop so that I can be sure that the images are the right size and
resolution for my project. After I have everything where I want it, I separate the images from
the mockup and save them in my project folder. So this isn't a Photoshop lesson, but I'm
going to show you what I do. So first I'll place an item. File: Place: and I'll pick
up this Illustrator version of a giraffe. And we'll go ahead and crop it to the Bounding
Box, so I'll say OK. And I place it where I want it... resize it... and then when I'm
ready to separate these out from my mockup so that I can place them in my InDesign document,
I do it like this... I Ctrl Click the thumbnail to select the contents of whichever layer,
and then I hit Ctrl + C on my keyboard... that copies it to my clipboard. Then I hit
Ctrl + N on my keyboard and that opens the New dialog and it should be set to the correct
width and height and resolution, background contents... in this case I want transparent,
so that's good... And I'll click OK. And then Ctrl + V on my keyboard to past it. Then I
can save it. File: Save As... And in this case I want to save it as a PNG, so it's going
to be a 24-bit PNG. And of course I've done this before so I'm just going to save over
for that one giraffe.png and I'll click Save. And OK if I want to replace it. And then OK
again. I like to begin any design project by gathering my content in one folder... like
this. This is particularly important if you're using InDesign because when you place an image
in an InDesign document InDesign links to that image; it doesn't embed it the way that
you can embed an image in Word. So if you've linked to images that are in a different folder
and you later delete that image or even just rename it or move it to another folder, the
link will be broken and you'll be left with a low resolution representation of the image
in your document. That means it will look pixelated when it's printed. Nobody wants
that. So as you can see, I've put all of my content together in one folder, and now I'm
ready to begin creating my newsletter in InDesign. The first thing we'll do is open InDesign
and create a new document. We'll go to File: hover over New, and then click Document, and
that's going to open a New Document dialog window. Number of pages... let's make that
2. This is just a front and back newsletter. We can remove the checkmark from Facing Pages
because it's only a 2-page document, so it's not a book where we would need facing pages.
We'll leave the page size as Letter. The width and height are fine. Columns... I'm going
to change that to 3 because on the back side I want to create a 3-column span of text just
to show you how to do that. And the gutter -- we can leave the default for that. Margins
are currently at 3p0, and by the way, that means three pica zero points, and that margin
is fine for that. And by the way... 1 pica equals 12 points, which is 1/6 of an inch,
and that's the standard font size for paragraph text. So 3 picas is half an inch, and that's
what we've set our margins to. Alright, so now we can click OK. And now we've got our
two-page blank document ready for us to begin adding content. In our next video, we'll talk
a little bit about InDesign interface, and then in the third video we'll actually start
adding content. Before I end this video, I'd like to mention that IT Training offers free
beginning and advanced courses in InDesign as well as other software for all students
and staff. So if you're interested in learning more, log in to training.missouri.edu today
and register for a class.