Lesson B: Placing the Images

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.

Place a Large, Full-Bleed Image

• Locate the Rectangle Frame tool about halfway down the Tools panel (see figure below). Use it to draw a box from the upper-left corner of your bleed to the lower-right corner of the bleed. The image we are about to place will be slightly larger than the page (the black outline). If you find that the box you have drawn is not exactly in the right position or is not the right size, switch to the Selection tool, which is found at the top of the Tools panel. With it you can drag a corner of the box or the box itself to fine-tune its dimensions or position.

• The frame is drawn; make sure that it is selected. Use the Selection tool to click in the middle of the box, and you will see that its control handles are visible. It’s time to get the image!
• From the File menu, choose the command Place. Notice that to the right of the command there is a keyboard shortcut you could use instead. Over time, we will place many images, and it is likely you’ll memorize that shortcut. For now, using the menu is perfectly fine.

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.

Layers: Stacking and Protecting Content

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.”

• Use the Layers panel menu and choose New Layer…. In the dialog box that appears, enter the name “content.” When you select a frame on that layer, the frame edge will have the color you choose below the name. I will choose red. To commit your choice, press the Enter key or click on the OK button (they do same thing).

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.

• To protect Layer 1, click to the right of its eye. To edit our new content layer, click near its name to highlight it. Now we’re ready to add more stuff.

Create an Empty, Elliptical Frame

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.

• Choose the Ellipse Frame tool and drag out a loosely shaped ellipse somewhere on the left side of the page. We’ll refine its size and position in a moment. If you make a mistake, you can undo it by choosing Edit > Undo (like in any software application) or using the universal shortcut ⌘-Z/Ctrl-Z. To fine-tune the size, we’ll make this ellipse a perfect 6.5 x 6.5-inch circle by entering those dimensions in the width and height fields in the Control panel.
• Switch to the Selection tool to fine-tune the position of the circle.
• As you drag the circle, you’ll see purple or pink lines appear now and then. These are called Smart Guides and they tell you when your object is aligned to some part of the page, margins, columns, or even some other objects! When a Smart Guide appears, its end points tell you what your object is aligned to. Move your circle slowly up and down, and you’ll see a pink line appear from the left edge of the page to the right when you’re centered vertically. A purple line appears when you’re aligned between the first and second column guides. This is where I’ll leave this frame, but its exact position is up to you. We’ll see how this frame looks with an image in it and when there’s text on the page.
• Save! Choose File > Save or use ⌘-S/Ctrl-S.

Place an Image into That Circle

• Part of this should sound familiar. With the circle selected (via the Selection tool), choose File > Place… and navigate to your Project 1 class folder (you might already be looking at it: InDesign usually brings you to the last folder from which you placed an image). Choose the image called airship.jpg.

You should find that the image fills the ellipse and that you can see only a small bit of it. No worries!

• Right-click within the circle (I’d recommend off-center). A rather long menu appears, filled with items that could be useful when editing an image frame. Choose Fitting > Fill Frame Proportionally. This sets the image to fill the circle, but crops as little of it as possible.

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.

Add a Colorful Stroke to the Frame

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.

• Click on the stroke box to bring it to the fore, and move your cursor over the small rainbow at the bottom of the Color panel.

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.

• Fine-tune your color choice with the sliders above the rainbow. Here, the sliders are showing colors as CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, blacK) and I will leave them that way for now. As you can see in this figure, I thought the following values worked well: 25, 100, 100, and 25, respectively.

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).

• Set Weight to 10 points.
• Save! File > Save or use ⌘-S/Ctrl-S.

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….