InDesign

Part of our brief this semester is to practice with Adobe InDesign in preparation for using InDesign to compile our major projects for printing at the end of Semester 3.

Being already familiar with adobe Photoshop and Illustrator and other Adobe apps, I found that InDesign was quite easy to pick up and get started with. Much of the functions and tools operate similarly and are located in similar places in the menus and tool bars.

I've worked through the tutorial we had from class to create pages to the anthology print specifications and dropped in placeholder text and images.

I decided to use this as an opportunity to prepare the final print file for my major project so have set the InDesign file up to have master pages and a relevant page count. For now I have dropped in some place holder artwork from 'The Lost Legionnaire' .

Previously I would have used Clip Studio for the whole process (As I did with The Lost Legionnaire) however, InDesign seems to have far more functionality and generally seems better suited for the task. The ability to export directly to PDF for printing is a plus and optionally can include the printing guides.

For the major project I will create the artwork digitally in Clip Studio, letter the project in Adobe Illustrator and prepare for print in InDesign.

One thing I realised is that I will have to match the page specifications and bleed settings with InDesign and Clip Studio. The pages presented above here were taken from Clip Studio trimmed with the bleed cut off and so don't exactly appear in InDesign as they should. When exporting from InDesign it looks like it adds the bleed to the PDF file back on again. I will bear this in mind when transferring the files between Apps.

I've exported out the pages I put together to test the exporting functions. The pdf can be viewed at the following link.

InDesignTest