How to Create Design Systems in InDesign Tutorial

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These are just a few not-so-secret tricks I've picked up working with InDesign for the past ten years. Hopefully, you'll be able to use these to save time the next time you're working on a multi-page document. Here's what we're going to cover in a nutshell:

00:00 - Overview
02:35 - Grids and Masters
06:25 - Type Styles
11:09 - Color Swatches

Side note: if you're one of those people who love using Illustrator, but haven't broken into InDesign yet (or don't see the point of it), this video is perfect for you.

But first: design systems. We're not going to go too deep here, but a design system outlines the rules, patterns, and elements that are used to make something look like it should. At its most simple level, a design system outlines basic patterns like color use, typography, and the way you use the space available.

When these patterns are established, it's really tedious to keep entering in the right settings in our design software. When I was using illustrator for most of my layouts, I'd always copy and paste blocks of type just to keep the formatting in place - who does that now?

Lucky for us, InDesign has fantastic features that help us automate the process of creating, using, and updating design systems.

Today we're going to be working on the Pebble Coffee Style Guide - Pebble is a fictional brand that I created (I love coffee). I've already established the bones of a design system here in this document that we're going to edit today.

I'm going to walk you through the process of adapting this style guide to a new brand or reformatting it to fit a pretty significant brand shift. This template file is over 100 pages long, and every page has actual copy on it (not filler text). So if we were going to update the design without a design system and reusable elements in place, it would take forever: it'd be like creating a new document.

Whenever I start something new, I always begin with the bones: the grid. Lets' go ahead and make the grids and guides visible in our template. I have that set to one of the buttons on my mouse, but you can use Command + ? to show them on your keyboard. Notice how our type area is nicely off-center to accommodate the page number? Well, let's say we want to get rid of that and have equal margins all the way around.

Now, pages can have their own grid systems in InDesign, but I prefer to work with masters for grids because you can apply masters to any page, and make big changes to multiple pages at once. Once you drag a master onto a page, all of its elements are applied on-page, and overrides the page content. You can tell if a page has a master assigned because it'll have a little letter flag on its thumbnail. That letter corresponds with the right master above.

So if I go up to our masters pane, you can see that I have a few dedicated to grids. I like nesting my masters as well, so you can see I've applied the A-Grids master to the ones with mouse type headers. It's a master... applied to a master... that gets applied to pages. Welcome to the matrix.

Obviously, we want to edit our grid, so let's double click into the XX master. You can see it's a blank page, with a solid color background, and it has our embedded grid.

As you can see, we have completely transformed the overall look and feel of this document by using the design system features built right into InDesign. 103 pages completely done in just a few hours. If you didn't love InDesign before, you'd love it after this project.

I hope this has been helpful for all you people who are staring down the barrel of a long document project. If you have any other tips about working with design systems in InDesign, I'd love to hear them. Put them in the comment section below - or just say hi! I'll be stalking the comments, as always.

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