Book Design Made Simple

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You are here: Home / Archives for InDesign

InDesign


InDesign logoBelow you'll find links to all the information about InDesign that’s available on the Book Design Made Simple website, book, videos, and blog.

Get started with Part I of Book Design Made Simple, where you’ll learn how to lease and install Adobe InDesign, create a document, and import your manuscript from Word. Download Part I for free by subscribing to our blog—simply use the form below.

Excerpts from Book Design Made Simple

  • Word vs InDesign: good reasons to switch
  • Hyphenation and justification: make your text look fabulous
  • Baseline grid: align your text and images consistently
  • Stroke panel: creating lines, arrows, and more
  • Layers: how to use them with text and shapes
  • Object styles: how and why to use them
  • Color gradients: tips for best results

 

Video tutorials

  • New updates to CC2017
  • Basics: navigating, selecting, and layers
  • Layout and typesetting tricks
  • Styles and organization
  • Inserting images into shapes
  • Drawing shapes and using color
  • Effects: transparency, shadows, etc.

 

Blog posts

Below are all the blog posts in the InDesign category, starting with the most recent post.

InDesign footnotes: an alternate typesetting method

October 8, 2017 By Glenna Collett 14 Comments

asterisks for InDesign footnotesIf your book has footnotes, you’re probably using automatic InDesign footnotes in your layout. And that’s great! But what if you compiled your footnotes in a separate Word document or didn’t use the automatic footnote feature in Word or InDesign?

Before Word and InDesign added their automatic footnote features, and well before Fiona and I met each other, we both invented a way—interestingly, the same way—to lay out InDesign footnotes manually for print books. In this blog post, I’ll explain the layout method that we both used—it still works perfectly.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: InDesign Tagged With: footnotes/endnotes, paragraph styles, text frames, typesetting

It’s YouTube time!

March 13, 2017 By Glenna Collett Leave a Comment

author working on a YouTube videoMy chair creaks. Start over. I sneeze. Start over. The phone rings. Move it out of the room and start over. “Ummm.” Start over. Someone comes in the room and rustles around. Start over. If I had a dog it would definitely be barking about now. Start over, start over, start over!

Such are the interruptions when I sit down to make a five-minute video about using InDesign. [Read more…]

Filed Under: InDesign Tagged With: InDesign updates

Using the Book feature in InDesign

January 9, 2017 By Fiona Raven 54 Comments

Book feature for hardcover bookInDesign’s Book feature can be handy! Let’s say you’re working on a book with lots of images and/or chapters. And the file sizes are enormous. In fact, they are so big that you thought it would be smart to divide the book into separate documents for parts or chapters. That’s exactly what we did with Book Design Made Simple. It was more convenient for us to swap smaller sections back and forth than to send the entire book each time. All the parts or chapters were linked together at the end using InDesign’s Book feature. So this blog post explains how to create a Book file, or as we call it, “book” a book.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: InDesign Tagged With: Book feature, contents, InDesign updates, paragraph styles

Adobe Creative Cloud 2017

December 12, 2016 By Glenna Collett 2 Comments

cube with CC2017 spelled outIn early November, we all woke up to find Adobe Creative Cloud waiting to be updated. What—again? Well, it turns out that this update, CC 2017, does provide some InDesign enhancements that might help you work more effectively and improve your design. We’ll discuss the significant ones here. [Read more…]

Filed Under: InDesign Tagged With: footnotes/endnotes, InDesign updates, typesetting

Adding images and numbers to tables in InDesign

November 6, 2016 By Fiona Raven Leave a Comment

Table with imagesTried adding images to tables in InDesign? There are lots of features you can add to your tables in InDesign to make them more appealing and easier to follow for your readers. Three of the most useful features are explained below: (1) creating two header rows that repeat at the top of every page of a multi-page table; (2) adding images to your table; and (3) aligning columns of numbers.

We’ll use the basic table from our first blog post about tables as a starting point to explain step-by-step how you can set up all of these features in your table. [Read more…]

Filed Under: InDesign Tagged With: images, tables, typesetting

Making tables look good in InDesign

September 14, 2016 By Fiona Raven Leave a Comment

Add color to a table in InDesign.Want to improve your tables in InDesign? So far you’ve imported your table or spreadsheet from Word or Excel into InDesign, and made a few adjustments to the text and columns following our previous blog post, Want to import from Excel into InDesign? Your table probably looks okay (i.e., readable), but does it rock your world? Not so much.

There are lots of ways to make tables look good in InDesign. In this blog post, we’ll take you through the steps to create a simple yet attractive greyscale or color table. We’ll start by explaining InDesign’s cell and table styles, as they provide an easy way to make all the tables in your book consistent. [Read more…]

Filed Under: InDesign Tagged With: color, tables

Want to import from Excel into InDesign?

August 9, 2016 By Fiona Raven 4 Comments

Sample table imported from Excel into InDesign.Have you tried importing from Excel into InDesign? In Book Design Made Simple we walk you through importing tables from Word, but importing a spreadsheet from Excel is a bit different so we’ll walk you through it here. And, because spreadsheets and tables rarely import into InDesign looking like they did in Excel and Word, we’ll give you a few tips on the easiest way to get started. [Read more…]

Filed Under: InDesign Tagged With: tables, text frames, typesetting

Typesetting math in InDesign

March 7, 2016 By Glenna Collett 6 Comments

collage of colorful math typesettingHave you ever tried to typeset any kind of math and driven yourself almost mad? And have you ended up setting each part of the equation in a different type frame, then piecing it all together and grouping it? I confess that I have done both. But with a little perseverance I figured out a way to do it properly in InDesign, and I’m hoping that this article will prevent you from suffering as long and as hard as I did. [Read more…]

Filed Under: InDesign Tagged With: typesetting

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Categories

  • Book Design (25)
    • Book Cover Design (8)
    • Book Page Design (11)
  • InDesign (18)
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Recent Posts

  • Crop marks and other printer’s marks January 8, 2023
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  • Writing in InDesign: Why and how May 9, 2022
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