 Hi everyone, this is Susan Hope Bard. I am with TechSoup. I'm going to be facilitating our hangout today with Wes Hohling and Jim Lynch, two of our TechSoup experts. I just want to double-check before we formally get started at on the 30 for the TechSoup 30 that you can see and hear. So you can feel free to chat in the chat box to let me know if you can see or hear. I see a lot of you are are in the hangout online. We're thrilled that you're here today and that you're in the platform. So shoot me a quick chat that you can see and hear me. Okay, all good seeing and hearing. Thanks Allison, Patricia and Jim. Super. All right, great. Great, then I am going to wait 30 seconds and get started to make sure everybody has the opportunity to get online. Hi, again, this is Susan Hope Bard. I'm here with TechSoup. I'm going to just host this event today where we're going to be talking about Adobe InDesign and I'm going to be introducing two of our experts today, Wes Hohling and Jim Lynch. Before I turn it over to the two of them, I do want to point a few things out to you. I'm going to share my screen and I do want you should be seeing my screen and you should see today's module or today's date, which is April 18th Adobe InDesign tips. Our learning platform is built so that we can host all of the materials and content on the platform for you to navigate it any time you want. So we hope you do that after the course today or after today's TechSoup 30. On the left-hand side, there are some downloads for you that you can practice with. Don't worry about keeping up with Wes today. You can practice in your own time by downloading the postcard template and the logo. We also have a survey that if you have the opportunity to complete, I would really appreciate because this is a new something new that we're doing, these 30-minute tips and tricks, and there are also links here to other courses. So I wanted to make sure that you had those available to you and I am going to now turn it over to Wes who's going to be giving you some tips and tricks all about Adobe InDesign. Wes, take it away. Great. Thanks so much Susan. Yeah, this is Wes Holing. I'm a senior web content developer here at TechSoup. I tend to do a lot of things as I'm sure you do at your nonprofit, wearing a lot of hats as they say. One of them is helping out with our design team and part of the ability is TechSoup and hopefully your organization as well are creating print documents or interactive PDFs, which is something that InDesign handles really well. Now you may not have any experience within design. You may have used it a few times. You may be a pretty regular user of it. I think I'm going to be covering things here today that will be useful no matter what your skill level with InDesign. But before we get into any of that, I want to maybe make sure that you are familiar with what InDesign is good for. A lot of people tend to rely on things like Photoshop, maybe Illustrator for creating more visual assets for your organization's needs. Photoshop, of course, great for editing photos and maybe making mock-ups and layouts for web design. Illustrator handles that as well along with creating logos, vector graphics, illustrations, of course, that's built into the name. InDesign, though, perfect for any kind of desktop publishing as they used to say and now more like print creation, print collateral creation. So if you've got your annual report, if you've got postcards, if you've got posters, InDesign handles all that really well because it gives you a very granular level of control. If you're using Word or Publisher or things like that, they're great for making quick documents, you know, giving you some level of control. But if you really want to be obsessive about it like I am, that's where InDesign takes control and helps you get the work done that you need. So enough log rolling about the greatness of InDesign. Let's go ahead and open it up. I'll share my screen here and give you a tunnel vision until I switch over to InDesign. There we go. So this, of course, is the interface. If you're not familiar with it, you can create canvases of any dimension that you need. So if it's eight and a half by 11 for a regular standard sheet of paper, or if it's a ledger legal size, something super tall, if you need like a poster, or multi-page documents, you can create entire spreads. If you are basically creating a book, InDesign can handle that too. There's a lot of really great features that I won't have time to cover even like 90% of. So I'm going to stick to some of the more basic stuff, but also some of the more useful stuff, I hope. And what I'll be creating today is, I'll scroll down here, give you a chance to look at it, is this postcard, or rather the front of this postcard. As Susan mentioned, there are some great assets on our learning management system called TechSoupCourses that will help guide you through creating this entire postcard as well as the back. What we'll be doing today is just covering creating the front just to give you a sense of the level of control that InDesign can give you, and maybe give you some ideas as to what you could be doing with it if you're not doing it already. So this postcard, the template and the finished product and the entire step-by-step guide is all available on TechSoupCourses. So don't worry, you don't have to keep up with what I'm doing today. This is just more of a sort of dry run to give you a sense of its capabilities. So let's go ahead and start with a blank template up here that I've got. I've already gone through the steps of adding guides, or these are like guidelines to the document. I'll go ahead and turn those on by pressing Ctrl-SemiColon or Command-SemiColon on the Mac. If you can see those thin blue lines going vertically and horizontally, not the box one, but all the other ones, those are guides that you can create by just dragging from the ruler inward and then setting it exactly where you need it. And you can do that vertically, horizontally, as many as you need and as many places as you need. These are really handy for creating columns. If you're familiar with old print publishing, the old 12-column grid that newspapers use, you can create those with your guides and stick exactly to what you need. They're sort of the invisible, I'm trying to say, they're the invisible components of your print document that really give it some structure. You won't always see guides when the finished product, but if you're using them, then it makes everything kind of hang together a little more cleanly. There aren't columns here, of course. These are the guides that I've added just for the in place of the elements that I'll be making. But just know that guides are your friend and as much as you can use them from the beginning, you'll be a lot better off. So what I'm going to do first is the white background is nice, but it doesn't really pop. It doesn't give this postcard a sense of brand if I've got it or a contrast if I need it. So I'll first add a square just by creating this over here on the rectangle tool. I'll click that and then drag from the upper left corner to the bottom right, just like you would in any other drawing program. And if you see before I let go, or my cursor is on the bottom right, it gives me the dimensions that I'm working with, which is six by four. It's exactly what I want. No more, no less, so I can let go. You can still see the guides that are present. They're overlaid on the rectangle. But of course, these won't print. This is just for me while I'm designing the postcard. And this color is good, but it's a little too dark for what I'll be making. So over here on the left, there is the fill box. There's fill and then right next to it is stroke. Fill, of course, is the color within the box. Stroke is the border around the box. So if I want to create an object that has a border around it, then I can add the stroke with that right now. If you can see it, it's real tiny, but there's a slash through it. That means there's no stroke. That's exactly what I want, but I want to change the fill. So if I double click that, I get a lot of options here. I can punch in red, green, blue values, CMYK for print. I can get really granular with the luminance and all that. I already know exactly what I want, just like any good cooking show. I've already prepared everything that I need off stage and I can just bring it in. So we'll be doing a bit of that as I go. So let me add this one value here for particular color. BC, there we go. Sort of a light pan, let's say OK to that. And again, it can be whatever you want, so long as it sticks to your aesthetic or your brand, if you have one. So I've set that. Let's go ahead and draw another box again using the rectangle tool. And I'll create one right here. It's great. And I'll change to make sure the color is exactly what I want. Let's see, one, eight, three, four, one. Bingo, perfect. Now, one thing that InDesign does that is a great feature, but it's not intuitive, if that makes sense, is that you can draw objects like this square and place in it. So I can place an image within this. I can add text within it. It still functions like any other box. I can add a fill color and I can have stroke and all these other things, move around, change the shape. But the content lives within it. And that's something that will, it takes a little bit of adjusting to when you first start with InDesign. So I'll show you that right now. I made up a dummy logo. It doesn't, it's not meant to look like anything, but it does look kind of like a standard logo. If I, if I choose the rectangle tool, which it's already selected because you can see the box around it, and I come up to the file menu and choose place, I selected my logo file here in the window. And that's the file that I'm going to place within that box. So if I choose open, there's the logo. Now it looks really jagged and pixelated and that's by default. InDesign, by default, sets its performance to a sort of mid-level, which means any images that you add, either logos or photos or anything like that, kind of look low quality. Now you can change this very easily. This doesn't mean it'll print this way, of course. It just means it's how it looks just to save on some of the processing that InDesign demands from your computer. But if you're not worried about that, in this case we're not doing anything that's too intense. I can show you where to change that up here in the view menu, display performance, high quality display. You can see right now it's on typical. You can also choose fast, which won't fill in any of the boxes with images or anything else, it's just bare bone structure. If you want to skim through a long document, that's really handy. In this case, we have one page, we have just a couple of graphics, really lightweight, high quality is just fine for this computer. I'll turn that on. And you can see it goes from pixelated to nice round shapes. Looks a lot cleaner and I get a better sense of what I'm going to be finishing with. So from that, let's go ahead and add a text box. We're adding a lot of text to this, but hopefully not too much. You don't want to overwhelm the reader. Over here on the left where they've got the T, that's your type tool. If you used anything like InDesign, excuse me, Illustrator or Photoshop, this should be pretty familiar. So we'll go ahead and click and drag a text box, right in the area that I selected with the guides. Now if you'll notice, before I let go, if I get near the edge of these, it snaps, which is really handy. And that's another beauty of the guides. Once you've gotten your guides in place, you don't have to do it as much thinking about exactly. I want to get it 1.25 inches or 1.24 inches. It'll snap right to whatever you specified. So that's the beauty of the guides. And I'll add, start adding some text. Night two, what I'm eventually going to spell it is a night to eat, drink and give. So I'm going to start adding these text elements in separate lines. So I've got a night two. This might seem counterintuitive, but after you've typed something, if you press escape, that will accept your changes. Almost every other program escape will undo it or cancel it, in this case, it accepts it. Go figure, but that's what you want to do because of course enter will just give you a new line. So I guess we have to pick something. Now, we've added some text to it. Of course, there's a type face already chosen. There's a size and a color and all these other things are already applied. I'm going to add a few extra components to it on this box and choose text frame options. I get a lot of options about how I want this text to appear within the box. And what I'll be doing is changing the vertical alignment. Actually, I don't need to change that, that's top. That's what I want, that's the default. You can specify the default to be whatever you want, but that just means that the text will either align at the top, the middle of the box or at the bottom. And I'll be using both of those later on. But for right now top is good and baseline options, I'll click that and change offset from ascent to cap height. If you're a typography nerd, you know exactly what this is. If you're a normal person, you don't know what this is and that's totally fine. What I'm doing here is changing from one way of rendering the text to another. Cap height just means that it's measuring the height of the text by the capital letters. And in the case of this, A and N are my capital letters. You can see they're equal height. So that's exactly what I want. And if I choose preview, you can see exactly what'll happen when I change from ascent to cap height. Click that, now it shoots straight to the top. That's what I want. I don't want any kind of padding in between anything like that, ignore the information within that font, just shoot it straight to the top. That's what I want. So I'll say okay to that and make sure my text is correct. Now, if I click the T again while I've got the box chosen, I got a lot of options up here. These are the ones that I want to change. I've got a Vesper Libra regular, that's the font that I want. And of course, real quick note, Vesper Libra and OpenSands, which are the two fonts I'll be using today, both free from Google. If you just go to Google Fonts, Google the phrase Google Fonts, you can find these, you can download and you can use them on your website and your print documents are so many fonts to choose from and they're all free and most of them are great. So definitely have a look for that if you need a certain font that you may not have and you don't want to spend any money on it, check out Google Fonts. So back to this, the font information looks good there, right size, right weight. I want to change the color though. Now, down here, of course, you remember on the left, there's the fill and stroke. It's tempting to change those settings right now because I want to change the text color and I make this mistake every time I use a design. But what I need to do first is check this down here. On the bottom left, there's this box, formatting effects container and formatting effects text right there. So if I click that little T, now the settings I choose for color, for fill and for stroke will affect the text, not the box that contains it. It's the one extra step that I always forget to do so rather than do it in waste time, I've spent a lot more time explaining it to you but hopefully you won't do it yourself. So now that I've chosen that T, I can double click the fill color and punch in the color that I want the text to be. So let's go with 3D, 606B. And again, these are just values that I've pre-determined. It's not like you're gonna intuitively know what these are going to be. So I'll click okay on that. Now I've got a lighter shade that sort of cooperates with the logo color here and I'll create another text box. Now the first time I created it, I dragged it exactly in the spot that I wanted. You don't have to do that. If I just drag an arbitrary size here and then type eat drink, press escape. Now it's in the middle, but that's not where I want it. I can click and drag and it'll snap right to that corner that I want if I can get it in there, maybe not. Maybe I'll resize it a little first and then drag it in there. There we go. And resize the bottom here, eventually there we go. So that looks okay, but it's the same size. It doesn't really have a lot of, I don't know, weight. It doesn't really call out. In fact, I think I'm going, yeah. Let me check my other one to make sure I'm dragging it to the right spot. I think I need it. I think that's about right. So I'll tweak it if it's not. So I'll change my font settings again here, changing the color to 3D, 6 of 6E, just like the one above it. Great. And go back to my text properties. Now before I change these, I'm going to change that those text frame options again, just like I did for a night too, but slightly different. So I'll change this. Let's see. I think I want this one to be in the center and you can see it hopped into the center, but it's not quite centered, is it? It's a little below. That's because I need to change the offset to cap height again. And again, a lot of this is kind of granular, but it's more of a demonstration of how much control you can have over your copy in InDesign as opposed to something else like publisher word. So I'll change that. Now it's stuck right in the center. There's no extra padding around the text or anything like that. I want to give it some extra weight. So I'm going to go from regular to medium and change the size. Let's triple that. Let's go up to 36. That's pretty heavy, but that's good. A night too is nice, but eat, drink is going to be more important and the give part is going to be the most important. So I'm going to add that next. So I'll draw another text box and I'll type and give. Drag that under here and under there. Now, one nice thing is I've got certain properties applied to those first two text boxes. Those properties apply to all the letters within those boxes and that's what I wanted. You can also apply properties to certain letters within a box that aren't the same as the others. And I'll demonstrate what I'm talking about here. I select just the word and. I've got my text properties up here. Let's see. So I want that to be, let's set that to regular. That is regular, okay. I'm just consulting my notes. Sorry for the delay there and change the color to be the same as the other ones. 3D 606E. And again, consistency among your colors is really going to help just make your design look that much better. So keeping these colors all the same is a real plus. And if I select the word give and change that to, let's make it heavy. I wanted to really give it some weight, some literal weight. And I'll change that to 72. I'm gonna go from 12 to 72. And it looks like it's disappeared. It hasn't disappeared, but it's because of the properties that I've applied, it's gone beyond the size of the text box. And that's okay. It's not gone. If I hit escape to accept my changes, you can see that I've selected the text box now by default. If I right click on it, go back to my text frame options, I can fix the problem that I just created. If I change the alignment to the bottom, still hasn't shown up. But of course you can see where I'm going with this, I need to change my offset. Change that from ascent to cap height and voila, there's what I was looking for. It's what I'm doing by changing that offset is getting rid of some of the extra padding information that that font has built in. I say just give me the bare spacing that's visible and that's what I've got. So I'll change that and I'll make this align to the right. And what I can do is select this copy, come down my character palette, there's a little fly out here. Choose all caps. That's a little more weight. I like that. And I could even do it for the eat and drink up here as well. Selecting that and saying all caps, I think that looks kind of good. Now the next thing, I will, because I'm getting a little crunched on time so I might have to speed up just a little bit. Let's create another box here. This one extends beyond just the margins, which is nice because it kind of violates the rules even though that's usually not okay in this case, I kind of like it. Design is always good until it's not. What I can do though, just like with placing the logo within this box, I can place text within this box by choosing the type tool. While I've still got it selected, my cursor turns into the text cursor with a circle around it and the arrow. That's what I want. That means I'm gonna start typing in that box. And what I'm going to type is a fund raising, if I can spell it correctly, a fundraising event to support our mission. Of course, this is very generic text. I don't expect this to convince anyone to give, but it kind of has to be generic for the purposes here. So click the formatting text again, change my color. I'm going to change that to, let's say, sorry, and scroll down to my notes here, change that to FBFFF4. That's a nice light color to give it some contrast against that dark color. And again, changing my text frame options on that box. Change that to the center, which is what I want, and change the ascent to cap height. You'll notice I keep changing this. You can set this as a default. I don't have the time to show you exactly where right now, but if you change your object styles, it's all in there. Maybe Google that if you have the time. I don't have it today, but that's where to go. Now, you can see that the text butts up right against the left edge of the postcard. That's too close. I want to keep the text within the margins and just let the color expand all the way to the edge. And I can do that by revisiting my text frame options and setting an inset spacing here. Inset spacing is a nice way of saying margin for the box. I'm going to set a quarter inch on each side. That's okay. Now you can see that text lined right flush with margin because the margin is a quarter inch in. And I can tell that's the case by the ruler up at the top. So that's great. Next, and actually the last thing I'll do is add some details. Where do people need to go? I'll create a text box in, oops, try that again. Ah, if I don't have anything selected, I can draw wherever I want. Oh boy, all right, let's try it out here. Okay. So I press escape and I'll drag this new text box down to the bottom. And let's make it about five and a half inches wide. Let's bring it down a little bit to about, oh, tomorrow my guide is perfect. And here's where I'm going to fill in some of the contact information, the night of the event, the location and all that. And I'll hop over to some pre-made text. So I can just paste that in. Now, what I've got is date and location, but I've also got time and that's not gonna fit into just one column of this text. Great news is you can set columns within a text box. Where do you think? Of course, text frame options. So if I change the number of columns here from one to two, bingo, there's the extra information that was cut off from the bottom. I'll align it to the bottom and say okay to that. Now, if I just do a couple of small tweaks to the font here just so that things kind of pop a little more, I want a entirely different font. I'm gonna go open the sand, let's say bold and specify 16 point. And let's turn that into a specific color. Let's say 183, 441, go. And if I hit escape, I can see my changes. That's good, it's a nice dark color that'll give it some contrast against everything else. But this text down here is now a little too dark. It kind of competes. So let's make that a little lighter. And I'll change that to the same as the font above 6060. Oh, I've created a stroke. Let's undo that. Let's try it one more time. Click the wrong thing. You gotta click the fill. So 3D606E, great. Now that's not so pronounced. The date is still the most important thing. People can still reference that information but right now I want the date to really shine through and let's go ahead and align this information here to the right. Press escape and check quick time check. All with almost five minutes remaining there is the front of your postcard and I'll turn off those guides again with control semi colon or command semi colon on the Mac. I should change this give color to match this color here but I'm unfortunately out of time. So there's your postcard and again if that's something that you think you could benefit from using be sure to check out the information in our in TechSoup courses. It's got this in a much longer, more time considerate format that it'll help walk you through exactly how to create it plus create the back too. So if you wanna actually use it to mail something out you'll need the spot for your address and the information and all that. That's where you can put all that extra info. So thanks so much for sticking around. Hopefully that wasn't too fast and again all the extra information on TechSoup courses but for right now I'm going to go ahead and throw it over back to Jim Lynch to tell us the latest and greatest about what's going on around TechSoup these days. Go ahead and take it away Jim. Hi everybody, can you see me? Jim Lynch, I'm a senior writer at TechSoup and I am going to show you a few cool things and I'm hoping you'll like. I'm gonna switch to my screen in a second but just wanted to tell you that everything that I'm showing you is we're gonna send you the, we're gonna send you the URLs for these things. So very quickly, very, very quickly if you liked hearing about InDesign and how to use it and things like that we've got a campaign going now. It's a content campaign. Everything on this page that we're gonna list is free for you to check out. We're adding new content every Tuesday and every Thursday on how to use a whole bunch of things in Adobe Creative Cloud. And so I'm just scrolling down here so you can see what's coming up. That's us today. And then there's a beginner's thing on Photoshop and then more on Photoshop and choosing the right Adobe app. So that's a pretty great thing. So we hope you go and check that thing out. We're on day four by the way. This is 20 days of Adobe content for you. Once again, all of free. Another thing we just came out with was a post on how to protect yourself from the new ISP law. We love that because the Congress just came out with a new law that basically essentially has our ISP or our internet providers being able to sell our information. And so there are ways to combat that. And let me just move down to the bottom of the thing. There's the part about how to protect yourself. There happens to be a class of software, both free and paid, called VPNs that you can get. They cost in the range of $5 per month. They're pretty inexpensive. This article is recommending that you get a paid one and most importantly, that you find one that very clearly states that it has a no logging policy. Some of these VPNs that you can use to hide what you're doing from your ISP will go ahead and turn around and sell your information anyways and some of them won't. And the ones that won't have a no logging policy. What else do we have? Internet safety for children. So this is the first piece we've done on this I think ever. And so here is just a quick hit piece on some really common sense things. It's a pointer post to a thing on money saving pro on things that you can do to save very small children and teenagers from intrusion that is very unwelcome. I invite everybody to sign in and give us your best resource for this as well. We have one already down there. There we go. One of the cool things we do at TechSoup and have done for quite a while is our NetSquared program. We provide throughout the country free in-person get-togethers where everybody can go and talk shop whether you're from a library or whether you're from a nonprofit or just an interested technical person. You can click here to find your closest NetSquared group so that you can take advantage of these free events. So there it is. Back to you, Ms. Susan. Great, thanks so much, Jim. And Wes, thanks for navigating that postcard creation. A quick reminder to everyone that content is posted in the platform. If you do wind up missing half of the event, when you log into this course, you can simply go and click on the module that has the date that you missed and view the live event recording. And you can also access all of the resources that we've uploaded into the platform for you to play with or to practice with. We do wish these to be usable for you. They are shorter, they're half the time we usually run our regular webinars. So we do want your feedback on these if they're helpful, if they're useful. We want both the positive and the corrective feedback. So please do take a moment when you log off today to go back to the module that we're in and in the middle it says you can complete the survey. It's about eight questions. If you wouldn't mind taking that survey, that can help us get better at helping you. So that's it for today, but join us next week where Wes is gonna be talking about Illustrator, one of my favorite Adobe Creative Cloud tools. So look forward to seeing you then. Hope you have a great week. Another huge thank you to Jim, who is an amazing writer and he's done a great job at curating all these resources for you to have. And you can go back to our TechSuit website to look at them. So thanks a lot, have a great day. Bye bye.