Adobe InDesign CS5 Review

Host: We’re with Colin Smith from Adobe today looking at the latest Creative Suite 5 and whole sorts of different modules but one Colin InDesign.

Colin Smith: Sure.

Host: What are some of the cool new features?

Colin Smith: Well in designs CS5 is the staple out there for publishing it’s what people use for magazines, newspapers, you name it but there was a few things that people wanted that it didn’t have but one is multiple size pages. So right now you can have hundreds of pages that are the same size but in this example here we want to flap on the right hand side and we see this sometimes in magazines, right? A little flap that folds out of course.

So we do that simply by adding a page and this is not new, we just insert a page but what we have is the ability to choose this new page tool. So when I click on it I'm selecting that particular page and when I select it I can do something with it like change its size to something different.

Host: Oh, okay.

Colin Smith: It sounds obvious but you know we didn’t have that before. So now we’ve got complete control over those page sizes. Next stop is being able to move and scale two images at the same time or any two objects, we’ve been able to do this in the past but it was a little bit cumbersome. You actually had to take the object script them together and grab the scale to grab them and move them. So here’s an example right here I’ve got two images, so this image have been cut out of the background.

Host: Yeah.

Colin Smith: And we’ve got the other background image in here, I want them to be over here on the right hand side. I’ll select it, drag it over and boom it's done a little bit easier right.

Host: Yeah, instead of doing all the different components to it.

Colin Smith: The main thing that people do when they're laying out magazines and things of that sort is they're bringing in images and they're placing them on the page. And that’s usually a tough job of you know measuring things out, using math and rulers and guides and stuff like that. But the computer is pretty accurate so why don’t we use that. So I'm going to start by calling up something called Mini Bridge and this is a little version of the normal bridge that we have but now its right in the application. Some people didn’t like that they had to leave in design, go all the way to bridge and then come back here. So we now have got Mini Bridge right here.

We shall call it Mini Bridge. And I’ll select these four images four at a time and drag them in. And I want them to be placed into these quadrants, so very simple one, two, three, four images equal size lined up perfectly. And it’s not like we couldn’t do that before.

Host: But these images are all different sizes right now.

Colin Smith: Exactly, all different sizes, different aspect ratio. So as I click and drag you’ll see it’s coming in as the aspect ratio of the first one.

Host: Yeah.

Colin Smith: But I want four images watch what happens when I hit my up arrow, it divides it into two my right arrow divides into four. So now when I let go you’ll see all four images would drop in place. But they're not sized correctly.

Host: No.

Colin Smith: The next step that the InDesigner will do is that meticulously grab each one, it scale it up then move it around, while we’ve got--

Host: So it takes time.

Colin Smith: Exactly, something really easy up to the top there its called auto fit and fill frame proportion.

Host: Oh, I love it.

Colin Smith: So now we just need to--

Host: Give it – I have my ways to doing it.

Colin Smith: I know.

Host: On brochures and stuff like that, like it can take sometimes 20 minutes just to get everything sized properly.

Colin Smith: Yeah, and notice that I can just grab the inside of the image or I can grab the whole frame very easily.

Host: Yeah.

Colin Smith: Because we have the ability before to take something like the inside of this image and move it around but if you didn’t understand the idea that there’s a selection arrow and a direct selection arrow and you had to get in there, which is have – I like to call it the donut. It’s just this little circle that shows up inside, you can click it and move it around.

The last thing to talk about is the interactive aspect of InDesign, we have the ability now to work with documents and I’ll load one in here very quickly this is a document that’s created as a City Guide. And it’s created by a traditional print designer but InDesign now has this really cool interactive features. Where this can be a button, it can have rollovers. We can have animations, we can have all of this stuff happening, in fact we have a special work space just called interactive. And right from here I can preview what this looks like. So let me just open this up in a browser, Test in Browser, so we’re going to see flash output directly from InDesign CS5.

Host: So do you have to know flash?

Colin Smith: Not at all. Okay, we’ve got tools in there, we’ve got presets for things like look at that, animation here comes the little clouds and we’ve got roll over. So when I jump to these, it’s going to jump to different areas. All these animations, every single thing you’re seeing was done in InDesign CS5, not in flash.

Host: Very cool. What about some exporting as well.

Colin Smith: Well we can export of course to PDF format but eBooks are all the rage now.

Host: Yeah.

Colin Smith: And ePub is the universal format. So we can export this out to that universal ePub format.

Host: So like things like the iPad, the Sony Reader, the Kindle.

Colin Smith: Exactly.

Host: Yeah.

Colin Smith: We’ll be able to play it. So if you’ve got business documents, you got brochures or whatever load them right in. You know Microsoft Word format we treat it well, bring it in and then you're out to ePub format. That’s it.

Host: Colin Smith from Adobe talking about InDesign with the latest Creative Suite 5. Thank for coming on the show.

Colin Smith: Thank you.