Getting to Know InDesign

INDESIGN BEST PRACTICES

While completing the postcard in this lesson, you experimented with the basic building blocks of a document and the best practices for creating a document. When you create a document following best practices, the document is easy to format, revise, and replicate consistently. Some of these techniques are listed here.

• Avoid stacking objects. Format one object rather than using multiple objects. For example, the two text frames containing the postcard’s body text have a text inset, stroke weight, stroke color, and drop shadow applied. A new user might be tempted to create this look by stacking multiple frames. Using multiple objects creates extra work when moving, aligning, and formatting objects.

• Thread text frames. New InDesign users are often tempted to place or paste text into separate, freestanding text frames. The text in these frames needs to be selected and formatted individually. If you flow the text through threaded frames, it remains as a single body of text called a “story.” Among other benefits of working with a story as opposed to disjointed frames of text, you can select all the text in a story for formatting and limit the use of Find/Change and Check Spelling to the text in a story. When you’re working on a longer document, such as a book, threading text frames is crucial to controlling the text placement.

• Use styles for all formatting. InDesign provides styles for formatting objects, paragraphs, lines within paragraphs, characters, tables, and table cells. With styles, you can quickly and consistently format everything in a document. In addition, if you decide to change a format, you can update the style to make a global change. For example, in the postcard, if you wanted to change the font used in the body copy, all you would need to do is edit the character formats of the Body Copy paragraph style. Styles can be updated to reflect new formatting, and styles can be shared among documents as well.

• Preflight early and often. As soon as you receive a document to work on, find out how it will be used (print and/or display) and use the Preflight feature to make sure the document will output correctly. For example, if the document is missing a font, you will need to acquire that font before you continue working on the document.

• Try to automate repetitive tasks. InDesign has many sophisticated features whose purpose you may not understand until you need them. For example, if you’re constantly having to change the format of phone numbers (from using parentheses to hyphens), you can do that automatically using Wildcards in Find/Change. If you need to build a table of contents or index, you’ll find features to help with both. Whenever you find yourself doing anything tedious, the InDesign Help file, or even a simple Google search, can help you find a better way.

You will learn more about all these features as you work through the lessons.