From the course: InDesign 2023 Essential Training

Drawing path and frame shapes - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2023 Essential Training

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Drawing path and frame shapes

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- [Instructor] InDesign has a wide variety of drawing tools, including a fully featured bezier pen tool, just like Illustrator. Now, I wouldn't use InDesign to do a detailed technical illustration, but it's perfect for relatively simple shapes and even most logos. Let me show you how it's done. I have my magazine document open from the exercise files folder, and I'm going to hold down Command + Space Bar on the Mac or a Control + Space Bar on Windows and zoom in on the upper-right corner here. I'll just do that and move over a little bit. I just want to focus on this space up here. Let's also open the View menu, and I'm going to turn off the Match Pasteboard to Theme Color feature. That makes it easier to work out on the pasteboard. Now, over here in the tool panel, there are several tools to let you draw shapes. For example, the rectangle, ellipse, or polygon tool, and up here, there's the line tool. The line tool just draws simple lines. You can draw any angle you want. Of course, this line has no stroke, so it's basically invisible. That's not helpful. So here's a quick trick. Press the D key on your keyboard, and it assigns the default coloring, which is no fill and a one-point black stroke. And if you click up here on the page to deselect everything, and then press D, because nothing was selected when I just changed the fill and stroke, now that's the default for this document. So let's draw another line. Notice that if you hold down the shift key, it constrains the angle to either horizontal, vertical, or 45 degrees. And see how it now has that black stroke? The next tool down in the tool panel is a little bit more interesting. That's the pen tool. Here, you can click and drag to create bezier curves. Just click and drag, click and drag. You might use a line like this for text on a path. Now, to edit this path, you want to use the direct selection tool. That's the second tool down, sometimes called the White Arrow tool. When you choose the direct selection tool and place your cursor over the path, it highlights. Now you can click and drag points or their handles. You can even drag the segments between the paths. Those are all different ways to change the curve. Here's another way to change the path. Let's switch back to the pen tool, and now notice that whenever you place the pen tool over the path itself, it changes a little bit. It gets a little plus cursor, and that indicates that it's actually going to add a point. So I'll click and drag, and you can see that it actually added a point onto the curve. On the other hand, if you place your cursor over a point, it changes into a pen tool with a minus symbol. Click and the point goes away. Here's another trick. Whenever you're editing paths with a pen tool, you can always hold down the Command key on the Mac or the Control key on Windows, which temporarily switches you back to the last used selection tool, in this case, the direct selection tool. That way, you can come in here and move these points around, or you can adjust our handles. Then, when you let go of the Command or Control key, it switches back to the pen tool. Okay, let's draw some more paths. I'm just going to click out here, click, click, click, click. You can see that you can very easily make a path with sharp corners. Then when you're done, you can either switch to a different tool or Command or Control click in a different area to finish the path. In this case, I'm going to choose the selection tool. Then, I'll open the Object menu, and look down here at the bottom. There's a whole menu called Paths. This lets you do all kinds of things to paths. For example, you could join two paths or close the path, you know, like turn it into a closed frame. There are other paths tools here too, like Convert Shape. I find these things really useful. For example, it's really hard to draw a perfect triangle in InDesign, but if you select this item from the menu, boom, that was easy. Now, as you can tell, I'm not the greatest artist, but I do find these pen tools useful inside of InDesign, especially when I already have a frame that I want to tweak a little bit. You know, I want to make it a little bit more interesting. For example, let's scroll down here to the bottom of the page. This text frame here is just a rectangular text frame. It's fine, but it would be nice to give it a little flare. So let's head over here to the tool panel and choose the pen tool. Now, I'm going to place that pen tool right over the left edge of the frame so that it changes to the add point tool, right? Now I can click and drag. Notice that as I drag, it changes the shape of the frame. It's still a frame, but the text reflows into that shape. It's much more interesting now. Of course, if you really need heavy duty illustration tools, you should switch to Adobe Illustrator. But in most cases, when you're just trying to make your design look interesting, InDesign gives you everything you need.

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