In InDesign, everything—every letter, every image—has to be in a frame. For images, sometimes it’s easy to have InDesign make a frame for you as you place an image. Often, we create frames first, and then insert images into them. That’s the way we’ll do it in this first exercise.
Do you remember where you put the downloaded course files? InDesign is asking you to locate the image you want to place. Navigate to your downloaded course files, and locate the “Project 1” folder. In it, you will find an image called sky.jpg. Double-click the filename, and the image will fill the frame you drew a few moments ago. Fortunately, the image was created at precisely the correct size to fill that frame. We will not be quite so lucky with the second image. Choose File > Save or use ⌘-S/Ctrl-S to save your file.
The image you just placed will serve as a backdrop to the other content we are adding next. InDesign offers several ways to prevent a user from accidentally moving or deleting content. The method I use most frequently is Layers.
On the right side of your screen, locate the Layers panel. If it’s missing, use the Window menu and choose Layers. Every panel in InDesign has a small menu in its upper-right corner. Unsurprisingly, these are called panel menus! The first item in a panel menu is the creation of a new… whatever that panel controls. So if you click on the Layers panel menu, the first item is New Layer…. This poster’s text and a second image will be on a new layer that we’ll name “content.”
To prevent us from accidentally editing the sky image, we should lock the layer that it’s on. In the Layers panel, you should see two eyes: one for each layer. Clicking on an eye hides a layer, and clicking there again reveals it. The space to the right of an eye holds a padlock that prevents the editing of that layer.
See all those tools on the left side of the InDesign workspace? Almost every one of them is actually the first of several in a group. If you right-click on the Rectangle Frame tool, two other tools are revealed. Mac users: either use a two-button mouse or use your mouse system preferences to add a “secondary click” function to your Apple Magic Mouse—it’s worth it.
You should find that the image fills the ellipse and that you can see only a small bit of it. No worries!
Frames can be decorated, even if they have images or text in them. In this case, we’ll add a border, or, as we call them in InDesign, a stroke.
With the circle still selected (select it with the Selection tool if you need to), expand the Color panel on the right side of the screen. In that panel’s upper-left corner are two small boxes, one overlapping the other. The one that is slightly higher and to the left of the other is for filling a frame with color. The other one with a gap in the center is for designating a stroke color.
Your cursor will turn into a small eyedropper with which you can choose a color. A red, like the undercarriage of the airship in the picture, should make a nice accent.
The color you choose from the rainbow is, at best, approximate, so it’s likely not exactly what you want.
In a few moments, we will be adding text—perhaps the title can also be in this same color, so let’s save it. Note that the Color panel, like the Layers panel earlier, has a panel menu in its upper-right corner. From this menu, we can choose different ways of designating color (Lab, RGB), and we can add this particular color to our swatches panel so we can easily select it later.
Just above the Color panel is the Stroke panel. From its many options we need only to choose the weight of the stroke (the current weight, or thickness, of the stroke is only one point—almost too small to see).
So far, our poster is looking pretty good, but it is missing one rather conspicuous element: words! Just a little word of warning before we move on: when using your Selection tool, beware of the those concentric circles in the center of an image over which your cursor hovers. That’s called the Content Grabber (also known as the “Donut,” a nickname preferred by many). If you unintentionally (or, of course, intentionally) drag it, you will dislodge the image from its frame! That is its intent: to allow you to recompose images within their frames. Later, we’ll see how we can crop an image by resizing its frame, and then recompose it using the Donut. But now, a word about words….