Id: Setting Up Your Business Card

Today’s essential question: How do I create and work in a document in Adobe InDesign?

Today we will:

1. Set up our business card document in Adobe InDesign.
2. Place our logo onto our business card.
3. Utilize the Frame Tool, Guides, Shape Tool, and Text Tool to design our business card.
4. Save our file as an .indd file.

Document Set Up:

1. Open Adobe InDesign.
2. Click on “Create New” in the window that pops up.
3. In the new document window that pops up, set your document parameters as follows:
   • Click on “Print” at the top of the window.
   • Choose “US Business Card”
   • Units: Inches
   • Width: 3.5″
   • Height: 2″
   • Orientation: Choose vertical or horizontal
   • Pages: 2
   • Uncheck “Facing Pages”
   • Margins: 0.125″
   • Bleed: 0.1575″
   • Click “Create” once you have everything set up.

Printing Layout Basics:

Bleed: Printing that goes beyond the edge of where the sheet will be trimmed. Bleed is the area to be trimmed off. It gives the printer a bit of leeway when printing incase there is movement in the paper and it ensures there are no unprinted edges on the document. Any color, shapes, lines, etc. that you create on the edges of your document should extend to the bleed. DO NOT put anything important, like text, in the bleed.

Trim is the edge of the document where the paper will be trimmed. In mass printing, a stack of documents will be trimmed together to ensure a perfect edge.

Margin is the area where the main content should be in your document. All important imagery and text should fall within this margin. The margin allows you to justify text to the right or left very easily. The margin line you see in InDesign will NOT save or print to any exported files (i.e. PDF or PNG).

Guidelines can be created by clicking and dragging a turquoise blue line from the rulers at the edge of your workspace. You can create guidelines to help set up your document and to create boundaries for you to work within. These guidelines will not save or print in an exported documents (i.e. PDF or PNG). They will save in your .indd file.

Frame Tool vs. Shape Tools:

You’ll notice in your InDesign toolbar that there are two rectangle looking tools. They are slightly different in how they work.

The Rectangle Frame Tool will draw a rectangle with an “X” through it. That is the symbol used “back in the day” when designers were showing that an image would be placed in that location.

The rectangle drawn with the Rectangle Shape Tool does not have an “X” through it. This means that the shape is merely a shape that can have color or gradient added to it, a different outline applied, etc. The shape tools work very similarly to the shape tools in Photoshop and Illustrator.

Use the rectangle frame tool when laying out the design of your business card. You can place the frame where you plan on eventually putting your logo. Resize the frame, move it, etc. before committing to placing your logo inside it. This will make things a bit easier for you in the long run.

***Remember: When putting an image into your frame, you need to use File—>Place. This links your image file directly to the document. Any changes you make to your original image file will automatically happen in the InDesign file so there will be no need to delete it and reinsert it.

Type Tool:

The Type Tool works the same in InDesign as it does in Illustrator. You can draw in a text box to type in, or you can use the “Type on Path” tool. There is a pen tool, line segment tool, and the shape tools on the toolbar that you can use to create your path with.

On the right-hand side of your screen, you have the Properties Panel where you can change your font size, type, fill, stroke, text alignment, etc.

Blog Post:

At the end of the period, be sure to:

1. Save your working .indd file.
2. Take a screen shot of your InDesign work space (Command+Shift+4).
3. Create a blog post with the following:
   • Your screen shot (I want to see your guidelines)
   • A few sentences about how it’s going. Any troubles? Is it easy?