What we have done here is introduce a couple of tools and it is really up to you how you use them to create standard graphic elements and text elements. What we are going to do is just delete that text frame, just come back down to the standard Rectangle tool. This is the one I will suggest we use most of the time. If you come down here to the bottom part of the Tools palette, you will see that the fill color of this is set to none and the stroke color is set to black. Now this should hopefully be the same on your machine. It may be that you played around with InDesign as somebody’s settings have changed. If you want to set it back to the defaults you can just hit the D key on the keyboard. Let us say I just hit this arrow here to switch the foreground and background the other way, If I hit the D key, you will revert back to fill none and stroke black.

What I want you to do at this point are to hit that arrow so our fill color changes to black and there is no stroke and then what we are going to do is draw a frame that starts up here on the right hand side of the first column and also lines up on the top margin. Let us click and drag across to the left hand side of the right column. So we see these two sections here in the middle available. I have simply let go there, going to hit the V key to go back to the main selection tool because now we can reshape this as much as we want to simply by using these points around the outside. We could grab at this point the lower right hand side which would allow us to change the height and in this case the width of the frame which in this point we do not actually want to do because I was happy with the width as it was. So what we can do is simply undo that, command Z or Ctrl Z on the PC. We can this time just select the bottom point of this frame, drag it down and if we go all the way down to the bottom of the page, I would just scroll up there for you, we can drop that into the bottom margin there. Now you will notice it snaps into place as well. That is because there is a command that is turned on by default and InDesign called Snap to Guides. So any guide you see on the page as soon as you move an item or scale an item towards that you see it does snap it into position. Again, this is why the guides are all positioned so accurately because everything can then snap to it afterwards.

Now we fill this with a default color of black that is going to be very heavy if we lay black type over it for now. So what we would do is quickly go down to the Color palette here in the lower right hand side, just expand that. We can see it is filled with a standard black swatch. Let us just adjust the tint value here. This is not transparency, by the way. This is not affecting the opacity of the layers, simply the amount of color that is applied to it and I am just going to bring that down to around 20%. That will give us a good amount of color to lay the type over and we are going to use this in a different way later on. But it just gives us a shape with which to design on graphics.