An Informal Indesign Training

Tuesday a friend and I had a little informal opportunity to teach some basics of the program Indesign. I've taught similar things before and hope to teach many more, both in informal and formal settings.

To give you a quick overview of what we covered, check out the slideshare presentation.

After sharing some basics about what Indesign is and what it does, we talked about some basic design principles and compared the program to features of Photoshop and Illustrator.

I then walked them through some basics of the program while recreating a project I had previously created. At the end of my little tutorial, I showed them my final projects and reviewed further aspects of the program. Some of the things we covered included the following.

1. How to create a text box
2. How to edit text
3. What tracking and leading are
4. How to place an image
5. How to wrap text around an image
6. How to connect text boxes
7. How to incorporate color
8. An overview of RGB, CMYK, and Pantone colors
9. How to fit or fill frames with images
10. How to create, edit, and use master pages
11. How to use paragraph styles
12. Working with both Photoshop and Illustrator elements in Indesign

I'd love to do more basic tutorials and continue outlining a course description. Any Indesign users out there? Let me know your suggestions or what you'd like to learn.

Here are a few examples of some of my own projects completed in Indesign: Ads & Publication Design, Flyers & Marketing, Invitations & Postcards.