InDesign Training | The Complete Guide to Adobe InDesign

The course begins with a detailed explanation of Adobe InDesign's interface and the many tools it has to offer. We explore the workspace, panels, and toolbars that form the foundation of professional document design. You'll learn to customize your workspace for maximum efficiency and understand how different panels work together to streamline your architectural presentation workflow.

InDesign has a range of document types you can utilise to present your ideas. Here, we go through every relevant type and how to setup your documents for different outputs and an efficient, smart workflow. You'll master document presets, understand bleed and margin settings, and learn how to establish proper document foundations that support both digital and print outputs for architectural portfolios.

This lesson begins by creating a new portfolio and goes on to explore all the tools and objects at your disposal and how to make them work with your document. You'll discover how to work with frames, shapes, and drawing tools while understanding the relationship between containers and content. We cover object manipulation, transformation tools, and the fundamental building blocks of professional layout design.

Organising your pages and master pages is crucial in order to maximise your efficiency and workflow, leaving more time to be creative with your layouts. This lesson shows you to master pages, layout design and other clever tools within InDesign. You'll learn to create consistent headers, footers, and page numbering systems while understanding how to apply master page elements across your architectural portfolio for professional consistency.

The design of your layout is the most noticeable thing when designing portfolios. Here we explain every option you have at your disposal to create beautiful and varied layouts within your document, ahead of inserting your work and imagery. You'll master grid systems, alignment techniques, and visual hierarchy principles that transform your architectural work into compelling visual narratives that engage viewers and communicate design intent effectively.

Now that we've mastered the tools within InDesign and we've perfected the document layout, we're ready to insert our content. This lesson explains how best to insert your content, best practices for linking images and some design techniques to help you on your way! You'll understand file formats, resolution requirements, and linking strategies that maintain image quality while keeping file sizes manageable for architectural presentations.

InDesign has two modes of selection, if misunderstood can cause you a lot of headaches! It equally has several options for editing elements and pages in a similar manner. This lesson shows you how to effectively edit your document once it's drafted up. You'll master the Direct Selection and Selection tools, understand content versus container editing, and learn advanced manipulation techniques that give you complete control over every element in your architectural presentations.

When designing your portfolio, the positioning of text whether titles or body is crucial for presenting your ideas. If you over do it on the text side of things you'll bore your viewer, but you still need to maintain the explanation of your ideas. This lesson explains how best to marry the two. You'll learn typography principles specific to architectural communication, understanding how to balance text and imagery while maintaining readability and visual interest.

One powerful thing about InDesign is that can you set rules and principals to your document so that the design is consistent throughout. Setting text styles can apply rules to your headings, paragraphs and other forms of text including setting a global font. You'll master paragraph and character styles, learn to create style hierarchies, and understand how to maintain consistency across large architectural portfolios while allowing for easy global updates and modifications.

The course finishes by explaining a range of methods of exporting your document, depending on how you want your viewer to consume the portfolio. You'll learn export settings for high-quality PDFs suitable for client presentations, understand print specifications for professional portfolio printing, and master digital export formats that maintain your design integrity across different viewing platforms and devices.