InDesign is for documents that have pages: reports, brochures, booklets, catalogues, leaflets, books. It is not a better Illustrator and it is not a tidier Word. It is a layout tool built around three ideas, frames, parent pages and styles, and once those make sense the rest of the application follows quickly.
Over two days you build a twelve-page booklet from a supplied text file and image set. Day one covers document setup with facing pages and bleed, the difference between the two selection tools that trips up everyone arriving from Illustrator, parent pages carrying running heads and automatic page numbers, and then type. You thread a long story through the booklet and control it with paragraph and character styles, so that changing every subheading in the document is one edit rather than forty.
Day two brings in pictures, colour and tables, including a formatted table built from a supplied spreadsheet using table and cell styles. You then assemble a two-fold A4 leaflet with correct folds, bleed and trim, run pre-flight to catch missing links, overset text and low-resolution images, and export both a press-ready PDF/X-4 and a tagged PDF with alt text and a sensible reading order. The final session packages the job so that a printer receives the fonts and links along with the file.
The syllabus maps to the published exam objectives for the Adobe Certified Professional in Adobe InDesign, which is delivered through Certiport. We prepare you for the exam. We do not award the certification, and no course can guarantee a pass.
Most print jobs pass through more than one application, so people who take this alongside Illustrator Level 1 tend to find the two reinforce each other: the logo and the diagrams are drawn in one, the pages are built in the other.
