In this lesson we walk you through creating a new double sided post-card, setting the margins and showing you the ropes in Adobe InDesign CS3.


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Video Transcription

[Music Playing] I will begin in the new welcome screen of Adobe InDesign CS3. If I do not see the welcome screen, I can always access it here in the help menu just by choosing welcome screen. I will click this button and it will start creating the specifications for our new document. The first thing I am going to choose is the number of pages. I will make sure that this document has two pages because we are actually going to create the front and the back of a postcard mailer. The second thing I am going to do is I am going to uncheck the facing pages options that would be appropriate if I was working on a book or a newspaper or a magazine but does not really apply in this case. Next, we will choose the page size, we have several common page sizes built in but in this scenario, I am going to create a custom page size specifically this one is going to be five inches wide and eight inches high. Here in the middle, I am going keep the default number of columns but at the bottom, I am going to add a margin to this document. I am going to use a quarter inch margin so .25 inches and because this icon right here is already depressed that will synchronize the same margin on all four side: top, bottom, left and right as soon as I tab out of that margin field. Now, we are almost done but before we are finished, we have to click more options and that will reveal these two additional fields here at the bottom of the dialog box specifically they allow us to add bleed and slug to our documents. Now, bleed is the extra area outside of the final trimmed dimensions of our printed pieces and this allows us a little bit of wiggle room on the final pieces trim. So I am going to add one-eight of an inch bleed so .125 IN and again, the sync button here is depressed so when I press tab, it gives that same value to all four sides. In a real word scenario, I would encourage you to make sure you talk with your printer to figure out exactly how much bleed they need but one-eight of an inch is pretty common. The slug value here is commonly used in advertising work close so that various designers and production artists throughout the process can add a little bit of an area outside the trim where they might put some job tracking information to keep track of a project. In this case, I am not going to use a slug but instead, I am just going to click Okay and see that new document that we have created. Now, I will grab the zoom tool here in the tool bar and zoom in on the top left corner of this document, I am just going to click and drag around the corner here. And now, let us explain what we have created. We have this document that is five x eight inches and the trim size is indicated by this black line here. Now, you remember that we also have a quarter of an inch margin. Think of that as our live or safety area and that this purple pink line that you see right here. And then the final line that we created is the bleed that was one-eight of an inch bleed and that is indicated by the red line. Get it? Bleed, slug, we actually did that on purpose. So, let us go ahead and zoom all the way back out by pressing CMD+0 or CTRL+0 on windows to fit the entire document in the view.