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Lesson Info

Working with Multi-State Objects

So, they cover of this document is all done. We're gonna move into the next spread here. Now, here's a trick. I'm on page one at the moment. I wanna go to page two, which is easy, right. I could just scroll down the screen or I could use the command to just move to the next spread. Let's pretend I wanted to go to page 87, but it's called two. Here's the trick, Command + J or Control + J on Windows. Type the number of the page you want to go to. Hit return. Now once you get that as a rhythm, you can do that really really fast. So I can do command + J, one, return like so and it'll just be there. So Command + J, one, return, like so. I can even get to the master pages. Command + J, A, return. I'm now on the A master page. Command + J, two, return. Back to there, see? Handy little trick to have. So, what I've got here is, I've got a slightly different master page. So there's a few elements on here that are actually on the master page. In fact, if I go back there just for a second so comma...

nd + J, A, 'cause that's the name of that particular master, return. So there's this background on here and then there are these icons on the side here and so that means, being on the master page, they appear everywhere. And if I was gonna apply interactions to those, then I'd do that there. I'm just gonna come back out to the spread. Okay, so now, whoops, I went back to the master page. In fact, now I'm going to page two. I'm all over the shop. Right, so what I've got on here is I've got some fake text just for the layout and in fact, do you know what? I'm gonna move that off the layout just for a minute, okay. And I've got this construct just here. So I've got rectangle here with rounded corners like so. And you can access the rounded corners by just clicking on the yellow icon that comes up on the frame there and then just, once you do that, you've got a little diamond where you can change the corner roundness, and in fact you can do a couple of other things to change its shape as well. I'm gonna zoom out a shade. Just using the keyboard to zoom there. 'Cause that doesn't look centered up to me and I can't deal with that. So, I'm gonna select all of those things. I can't see my alignment here because I don't have quite enough room on the screen. So I'll just go to the align panel, which is in the object and layout group. Okay and then just align those two the center. That's better. My world is restored. I've then got an image frame under that. So just a straight form with frame with no content and I have also changed its fitting options. So I've right clicked on it. I've gone to fitting and then to the frame fitting options here and I've told it to fill the frame proportionality from the center, okay. I've got another crop stuff going on underneath it but it will fill the frame proportionality. That means any content that goes in there will automatically fill that frame like so. Underneath it I've actually got an automatic caption, which is kind of outside of what we're doing today, but I will just show you very quickly, if I just right click on the frame, if I can get hold of the frame and right click on it, I've gone to the frame and I've actually gone to the caption options. It's actually being difficult because there's no image in there, although it should do that. There we go, that's better. No right click on this particular mouse, there you are. So I've gone to captions, I've gone to captions setup. And what I've done is, I've said, from the meta data of any content coming in, I want you to extract its title and then create me something using the paragraph style caption. Like I said, it's outside of what we're doing here, but I'm just showing you where this stuff is coming from. And then I've right clicked on it again, okay, and gone to captions, generate live caption and it's created me this box here which at the current time, says no intersecting link, okay. But that will change as we go on. And that box there is touching that box there and that's kind of important. And underneath that I've just got a default text box with just some fake text in there. What I'm going to do is I'm going to grab that construct like so. I'm gonna drag the whole thing over to the right hand side here just for the minute and then I'm gonna hold down the Alt or option key and drag a copy like so. Once I've done that Alt drag, I'm just gonna carry on. I've released the Alt key now, 'cause InDesign's showing me a ghost there. It knows that I actually want to make a copy. I'm then going to hit my right arrow one time and two times, and three times, I should have given myself a bit more room just there. In fact I'm gonna do that, 'cause you can see it's making copies like so. I'm gonna zoom right out. 'cause this is a big, big box here. So I've got that construct selected. Holding down the Alt key to start a copy. You can see the arrow changes. Dragging like so. Releasing the Alt key or Option key, okay. Moving across there and hitting my right arrow, one, two, three times just there. I think that's all I'm gonna fit on that area there and making sure that they're kind of aligned. So I've got that bunch of copies and I think actually, five will do just fine, okay. I'm gonna zoom in on those. And then I'm going to deselect them and I'm gonna call in for some images. So Command + D to place some content. And I'm gonna go to one of my folders here and I think I just need to come out to another element here, Publisher Online. There we go, that's one of the images there. Where is it? They are all there, they had sinked to that folder. So I'm just gonna pick up some of these things. I'm gonna pick up this image here from my mobile drawing class. I'll pick up another one of those. Just Command or Control clicking these and I'll get this Bilbo one here. This car one and how many boxes did I do? Did I have four I think, didn't I? Something like that, four, I've got five in total, so one, two, three, four, five, perfect. All good. So, I'll bring those in and they get loaded into my place cursor. And I'm just gonna click through some of these things. So I'll click in that one there. That one there, that one there, that one there and that one there, yey. There we go. So now I've got a bunch of things. You can see they're all fitting in there properly. If I zoom in, you can see they've actually got the name, or the title of that file and what they were made in. So you can see here, made in Illustrator Draw, Illustrator Draw, Illustrator Draw, and Photoshop Sketch and Photoshop Sketch, there you go. I'm gonna zoom out just a shade. Then I'm gonna select this first lot here. I'm gonna group it, just because it's easier for me to work with. I'm gonna select the second lot and I'm gonna group that. I'm gonna select the third lot there and group that. And the fourth lot here. Whoops, I wanna make sure I don't get those elements underneath. Being careful that I don't get the text box, group that. And then just finally, and I'll zoom in for this one so it's easier to see 'cause I've got a lot of elements around it. Gonna pick those up and group that. Awesome. I'm gonna zoom out again slightly and I'm gonna pick up all five of those groups. I'm then gonna go back to my align panel, which I think, because I'm using this different resolution I think I'm actually gonna park this over on the right hand side here. So I've got access to it whenever I need it. I'm gonna align those to the top. So they're all lined up on the top and I'm going to align them to the center. So they're all stacked on top of each other right now and I can zoom in to the whole layout so you can see everything. I'm sorry if that bit was difficult to view but I needed to get all of those things in one place and hopefully the description I've done has worked to resolve that with you, okay. So, I've got those groups. They're all there and ready to go. I'm now gonna come across to the object states panel. Now this is one of the panels that actually kind of helps you with what you're actually making here. It tells you to click the new button to make each object a separate state. And option click to keep them in the same state. That's fine, don't worry about that. So, I'm gonna come down to the bottom here and click on this icon to convert the selection to a multi-state object. I want to create a printed book as well as an interactive version. Should I do the layout first in the printed version and then go back and add the interactive elements or do the interactive elements first? Personally, I would do the print first. I'd get the print layout set first because that's the one that's more exact in terms of detail and then do the interactive layout based off of that. I might even create an alternate layout. In the pages panel, you've got this, I'm gonna zoom in on it just to make it easier for you to see. You've got this area here which allows you to create an alternate layout. So that just makes another copy of the layout inside the document. I might be tempted to separate those two things out. But personally, I always get people to, or my students generally to work on the print layout first, get that solid and then add the interactive layer on top. Because they can co-exist. So if I click on the objects states panel it does not look like that actually made an object state. I'm just gonna check. Right, okay, so I can actually drag those things around independently. So I'll realign those. If I bring that panel back and I'll re-dock that over here. And again, align them to the top and align them to the center, horizontally like so. Okay, ready to go. Back on the program I'm gonna click on Create New Multi-State Object. A new multi-state has been created. So technically, there is only one thing there now. The other things have all been hidden away. And you can see it here, it says state one, state two, state three, state four, state five. That may or may not be the best way to actually describe that and we'll be talking about naming and layers a little bit later on. But the most important thing here is this, okay, give the thing a name. You can't be sloppy with this kind of content and just drag stuff on there. If it's gonna have any purpose, give it a name, because if you've got a few MSO's that's the abbreviation for multi-state objects, on your layout, then it's just gonna waste your time actually trying to find which one you actually wanna work with. Was that MSO one or MSO two? Do you see what I mean? Couple of seconds to name something saves you from all of that grief. So what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna just call this art pads here, there like so, okay. Not art pads, art cards. I'm thinking of like bubblegum. Bubblegum cards for my oncoming series that is never happening. So, this has a name and once it's got a name it means I can address it interactively. And whichever of the states here, I'll just cycle through them, is highlighted, that is the one that you see by default. Said that very very loud just then. So that is the one you see by default there and it tells me that the state's selected here. If I just zoom in again on the bottom here. There we go, if I click on that and so on. So I'll go back up to the top here. Target that. There's a few different things you can do with these states. If you need to release it then you've got an option to do that in the panel at the top. And MSO's are fantastic because they kind of free you up from the notion of a page. So, catalogs for example, think of a catalog and one of the things when you're determining the content to go in a catalog, is how many you can fit to page. So, I did catalog production for about four years. It was one of the things that I got to work on. The most thrilling four years of my life. So, and the page had a system. So you had one item on the page that was a good seller and that carried the weight of the page and then you'd have a few other satellite items around that that maybe it didn't matter if they sold so much and so on and so on and so on. But the amount of content that you could have on the page was determined by the number of things on a page and then the number of actual pages you had because of course, we were talking about paper and print. This medium frees you up from the notion of that page. I could have 50 items on this page. I probably wouldn't because that's a very very heavy MSO there 'cause it all has to load into memory. But I could. I could have different categories of things and don't have to think about the notion of a page. It's a screen with several mini screens inside of it. So, we're going to make this thing work so you can actually see it. At the moment if we test it, it won't do a great deal for us. So we actually need to introduce a button or two here in order to activate it.