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Pages Panel

Lesson 2 from: Adobe InDesign Creative Cloud Starter Kit & Wedding Albums

Khara Plicanic

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Lesson Info

2. Pages Panel

Lesson Info

Pages Panel

And here we are on in design, so we're going to take a little look, a little tour around the work space, and I guess I should talk mainly just about the panels. First, we can kind of take a start over there, over here on the right side of the screen. This is where our panels live, and when you first launch in design, your panel arrangement is probably gonna look different than mine. And for some reason I've been rearranging my panel's a lot lately because I I don't know, I reinstalled things a few times them so this keeps going back to default but is really easy to change. So your panels are where a lot of your controls live. So the panels that you use all the time it's going to be really advantageous to kind of doc them over here on the side. So how does that work, for example, let's say, I'm going to close this out for right now? That's the pages panel, the panels when they're not here under your doc, they live all of them, almost all of them. They live up here under the way window m...

enu, so if I go toe window, I'll see all these different options, these air, all different panels, so the one I just closed was the pages panel that's a big one that you want on your screen pretty much all the time. It's it's pretty much akin to your layers panel and photoshopped in terms of value and importance. So you probably want your layers panel open all the time in photo shop and in design, you're really going to want your pages panel open all the time, so to open it back up, I'll just goto window and I'll click pages and it's going to pop it back up and you'll see that it's here floating in its own box, its own window and that's great, but ends up taking up a lot of screen real estate and so what I prefer to do and my methods have sort of morphed over time, so you know, you might start out doing one thing and you can change your mind, lear, but what I like to do is keep the stuff doctor over here, so I'm just going to grab this top bar top of my pages panel, and I'm gonna pull it over here, and when I notice all these these blue bars, that lets me know I'm in the right place and I'm just going to let go and it's going to pop into this doc, and now whenever I want to open it, I could just click right there. And it will pop open and I can use it and the great thing about having it in the dock is then if I need my swatches for for some reason I can just click and the swatches will actually close the pages panel and open swatches so I like it because it keeps the side of my screen really tidy and I don't have to worry about all my panel's being on top of each other and then I have to go digging for them that waste a lot of time and time is really important when we're working with all this stuff rate so I like having everything here and then it just pops open when I need it and it'll stay there until I go to something else if there's a panel that I don't use very often like this color panel I usually really work more with my swatches so if I don't want this panel open I could just click the little tab right here that says color and if I pull it out I could move it if I wanted teo but also I could just close it so this little x right here is going to just get it off my screen and if I decide that I want it back later of course I confined it under the window menu all right so let's talk a little bit about our pages panel this is like home base for our documents so as you can see, this is the little presentation that I was giving earlier my little indesign keynote and each of these is its own page here in the pages panel so I khun scroll up and down to see my whole presentation so you can see there's a few more slides we haven't gotten to yet but um I can jump to any page by just double clicking it so if I want to jump back up to the top I can do that and it will pb right here another thing that's great about it is it's really easy to rearrange pages? So if I decide oh, you know what? I really want to talk about the newspaper before I talk about the magazine. I could just click and drag and you'll notice let's see if I can if I can do this with all my my hands here. Ok, so if I click this and drag it up here you see how that little line appears to the left it's very subtle but when I get up there that tells me that I'm in the right place toe let go and it's going to rearrange those pages so rearranging pages is a zizi is dragging and dropping which is really nice if I wanted to re arrange multiple pages I could just hold down the shift key and click to get a siri's of pages and then I could drag them up and move them around too, so it makes it really easy to get around in your pages panel um another thing that's really neat about pages is something called a master page, so for that let's pop over to another example over here, this is one of my wedding albums that I have designed, and I'll just pop up to page one so we can see it. And if we look through this album, by the way, I'm scrolling by holding down the space bar, so if I hold down space bar and I drag like this just like him photoshopped you, khun, drag around within your document so I could do that or if I close this panel, I also have a scroll bar over here, but this realistically, this is pretty much covered by panels all the time. So that's, why it's handy to just navigate with your keyboard? So I'm just holding down space bar to get this little hand tool, and that lets me drag around like this. So you can see as I scroll through this document that I've got these images laid out on a white background and that's usually how I make my albums because I'm just kind of ah, fresh, clean in simple kind of gal, so I don't do a lot of colored backgrounds, but if I wanted teo look how easy it would be to put a black background behind all the pages in my document at once so to do that I'm going to come over to the top of my pages panel and there's something here called a master and if I double click in the pages panel that moves me it moves the focus over here to the master page so in other words if I try to scroll now there's nothing else because I'm no longer looking at the document I'm looking at the master page does that make sense um so anything I put on this master page is going to appear on all the pages within my documents by default okay so we'll talk about adding color and phil and all that stuff in a minute so for right now I'm just going to kind of do it real quick here so I put a black box on this page we'll talk about it in coming up shortly but now to get back to the actual document I'm they go back to this lower section of the pages panel and if I double click any one of these pages I'll be back to my actual document and we can see there is a black background there is a black background black background the whole document if we scroll through here you can see that all of these pages now have a black background behind all the images and the advantage, of course, is that I only had to add that black background in one place, so I don't have to be pacing it into every page because obviously wedding albums can get pretty big in terms of size. And of course, if you were designing or laying out a book, you want to be able to make that one change and have it update globally through your whole document. Yes, jim has a question question question. So did you have to do anything special to those pages as you create them? So they knew that they were part of the good question? The answer is no, because by default, any thing that you put on this master page is automatically going to show up on any page in your document. So let me zoom in here again with you. I don't know if that helps a lot, but you can come in to see that on these little thumbnails that represent each of the pages. There's a little a right here and the a could stand for awesome or amazing, but it actually stands for a master right here, so by default, any page and your document is going to have this little a, and that means that this a master is applied to that page, so let's say just for kicks let's say that this page here page three let's say we don't want the black background on this page now I can't grab it from page three to delete it you might think well just click it and delete it but I can't because it's not actually on page three right it's on the master document but if I remove it from the master document it's going to remove it from all of the pages in the book so if I on ly want it to be gone from this particular page then I'm going to come up above the master page in the pages panel there's something called none and that means it's just a blank nothing so if I want teo remove this a master from this spread I'm going to drag this nun master see that in my panel and get a drag drag drag and I'm going to drop it on this spread and now the little eh that was here so you like these have a cz this one does not have an a because ah we've applied no master to it so now it's sort of a free agent and it's just hanging out over here all by itself um so that's how you could selectively remove it if you wanted another knee thing that you can do with your master pages is you can create multiple masters so I don't do this ah holton in in the work that I do but if you were laying out like a book a textbook or ah, you know, software book or something you would probably have a lot more use for this I have used this in the past with some of my presentation's where I've made different headers for different sections so if I wanted maybe one let's just say we want one page has a black background if we want another master that maybe has a gray background or something, you can actually come up to the pages panel menu so all these different panels have a built in menu specifically for them just when you thought there weren't enough panels and menus and items and yeah, so there's always more just embrace it. So up here is the pages panel menu and if I click on that there's all kinds of more things we can do here including make a new master so if I click on that by default it's going to call it b it's the be master and we'll just leave all these settings the saying when I'm going to click okay? And we can adjust this panel hearing when it click and drag on this little division bar to just kind of give our master page section a little more room and now we see that we have no master called done we haven't a master and a beam master so let's say maybe on our be master we're going to get wild and we'll talk about color and stuff here in a minute, but let's see that I want to add o how wild will add pink oh that's kind of painful, but we got on screen, isn't it you on? So now we have this crazy hot pink master and if we go back to the pages panel let's, apply it somewhere let's drag the be master to this page here and now if we go back to that, we see that this one's pink andi let's drag that maybe like every other, I don't know this is the worst album design in the world. No, and the cool thing is, if we decide this pinks a little crazy let's, go back to the b master so again, I'm going to double click in the pages panel, and maybe we'll just kind of fade this in in design. One of the things that you can do to any of your objects is you can adjust the transparency similar to how you would do a layer and photoshopped you can adjust the transparency here in in design, so maybe we're looking at this hot pink and it's kind of a little much I can come up here in this area this is called the control panel, I can come up here, and this little icon right here represents capacity and I can click and lower the opacity so maybe it's not so intense and you'll see that because I did that on the master um it adjusted on all these pages so that's really handy for editing because it makes it really easy to update your documents when your client says hey, big shock I don't like hot pink in the background of my album I want to fix that then you can go back to that master page and maybe instead they're like, I'd really like hot yellow just kidding um uh well, make that nice and bright, so it'll update on all of those pages where that master has been applied, so I think that's really handy I use master pages more for my presentations, but if you are someone who puts a lot of backgrounds and your albums and such, that would really save you a ton of time, so the master pages are good when in doubt just know that you can click the panel menu and find all kinds of options there's also, if your pages panel gets really out of control and you really you know you might be working with a huge document, I mean you could have hundreds of pages, so sometimes dragging and dropping to rearrange the pages is not very feasible because you might be scrolling crazy amounts you can also at any time right, click on a page and choose move pages and then you can actually specify you know you want to take page four and move it to the end of the document or the beginning? Or maybe you want to put page for before page two or something like that, so you can do that as well. So don't be afraid to right click and look at some menus and come up into your panel menu for any of this stuff. Yeah, we have a question. Could you select multiple pages and apply a master? You select all of the good question? Yeah, so if I was like, oh, hey, I want to make this whole section right here yellow I could click and then shift click to select them all. So my little technique for remembering that little keyboard shortcut um, is you click the first one and then shift click for a siri's, right? So if I wanted a whole series of continuous pages, I would you shift if I wanted just individual like maybe I want this one and then I want this one and then this guy down here, so now they're not in a siri's then I'm holding commander control so I would hold commander control and just click on the ones I want and the way that I help you try to help people remember that is that shift is for a siri's right they both start with s and then control or commands gives you more control but also I like to think of it as you're selecting betty because if you threw confetti all over the place you'd have like bits of it laying all around right and it would be scattered so if you're trying to make a scattered selection like confetti then its controller command which also starts with c so you can choose your your persuasion there and then with those pages selected then you would just drag and drop um hope did I lie that I not have them selected what's going on hmm now you've made me a liar let's try this I think maybe we have to actually apply master two pages and then I guess you could type them in that's funny I feel like that's worked in the past so um who knows what I did today that was so special let's see if this is gonna work and we remember what I typed okay I did it they're just in the background so I can't see um so if dragging in trouble being doesn't work you can also write click and say apply master two pages and then type in the pages you want separated by a common um yeah but I'm pretty sure let's see if we can just put them all back to the master nine interesting maybe that's a funny thing that changed or maybe I'm imagining it. There we go, so now they're all back to just the master, so they'll have the master applied by default. So if I make a new page, I guess we haven't done that. If I make a new page at the bottom of the page is panel, I can click this little button right here to create a new page, you'll notice it's, the same little icon that you find at the bottom of the larrys panel and put a shot so that's kind of nice, hopefully in design doesn't look too scary because some of it should be recognisable if you are a photo shop user, so if I click this button right here that's going to add a new blank page and it's gonna add it by default after whatever page you had active, so I had twelve active, so it's gonna add it right here and you'll see it's already black, because by default, any new pages that you add always have the paymaster applied to them. And then just remember, if you don't want the paymaster applied to anything or if you I don't want this background on here anymore, you can't remove it from this page it's basically locked because it's not really on that page it's on the master which you can only get two by double clicking up here in the pages panel so I decided never mind I just want my my white pages I'll delete that and now everything's instantly updated another thing we should talk about in the pages panel is the ability to have pages of different sizes within the same document so um you may be used teo or I guess you may think that if you're building a document like in this case this is a wedding album that is ten by ten each pages ten by ten eh so we're looking at spreads here but the cover is just one half it's actually a scenic size it's not a ten by ten as you might think it's actually kind of a funky size so this is going to be the cover but the page size is not right so this feature was introduced into in design I think way back inversion cs five or something on dh up until then I would have had to make a separate document for the cover but now it's really easy to just have the same document with two different page sizes so what I would do is select this page and then come down here in the bottom of the page is panel there's a button called edit page size and if I click that then I can go over here and there some preset sizes or I can click custom and in this case the cover size which I forget what it is but it's kind of weird it's not ten by ten as you would think it's like nine and a half um oops yes we typed this down here it is like nine and a half by eleven or something weird it's kind of actually vertical instead of square so I may be I would give this a name metal cover I'm going to go click add so now I've added that is a pre set so I don't have to recreate it every time and then when I click okay it actually changes the paste size so then I'd have to adjust my image and we'll talk about this shortly um in the next segment but I can kind of make this image now fit in the space and there you go so if we look over and our pages panel all of the other pages than my documents are full spreads but this one is just a simple nine and a half by eleven or whatever it was on the neat thing is now that I've made that a preset if I make another album that requires the same size cover I can just come down to that edit page size button and it's going to show up here as a pre set so I can save myself a little work and I don't have to re type it all the time right? So that is kind of the basics of the pages panel. This is pretty much home. I feel life in our in design documents. And, you know, if you need to get rid of a page, there is a little trash can down here so you can drag it and drop it to the trash. Or you can just click on a page and then click the trash button. Um, and if your pages not blank than it's going to warn you that it actually contains something, are you sure you want to delete it? And we could say, ok? And the nice thing about in design is a lot of the keyboard shortcuts are the same. It's photoshopped. So if I want to undo that like a press commander control v and it'll bring the page back, so we have a question. You have a question. So speaking of photo shop and keyboard shortcuts, someone was maybe a page maker user or a cork user. Would there be a way, tio, use those keyboard shortcuts? Well, you can make your own keyboard shortcuts. Yeah, so let's actually, I don't know if I was jumping ahead let's do a few more things, and then we'll come back, yeah, which is really great. So I guess for now, just know that obviously, there's a lot of preset keyboard shortcuts, that ship within design. Ah, lot of the most commonly used ones are in the little bonus material that you get with. Of course, um, and I also have a link. Teo adobes fight where they list out, like all of them. So you can really go to town on it if you want to. But we'll also be creating some custom keyboard shortcuts and a little bit for some neat things that I want to show you is well.

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Practice Files
Resource Guide
Adobeland Wallpaper
Adobe® Creative Apps Starter Kit

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Khara is adorable and teaches with such a simple approach which makes learning fun. Her constant smile and infectious laugh makes learning fun. Thank you Khara and creativeLIVE for offering this awesome class on InDesign.

user 3b7cd3
 

I personally love the way she talks, and I am 57 years old, so it isn't because I'm a teen. I think she is fun, light, and funny, and makes listening and learning a pleasure. I have listened to some classes where I was about to fall asleep and it was hard to keep interested, not due to content but the presenter's demeanor. Having great information and learning is what I'm most concerned about. I guess to each his own, right?

kasmath
 

I love Khara's classes! She is fun and informative and packs so much information in every class! I have learned so much about InDesign and Photography and Wedding Albums from Khara and appreciate how hard she must work to bring these classes to us that give us so many more tools to work with! I would highly recommend all of her classes and look forward to owning more!

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