Draw Lot Of Shapes At Once InDesign Gridify Live Distribute

Hi there, in this video we're going to do cool things with Gridify, where we drag out as one image, no, no, it's a couple of images, all at once, all the same size. Plus things like this, where I draw a line, and I grab it, and I drag it down, and I make loads of versions in between. I'm not sure what I'm doing there but let's learn how to do that, plus a few other cool little tricks here in InDesign.

So first thing is, create a blank document. I've got no margins, I've got US Letter, Half Letter. And I've got a Landscape, any shape you like. We're going to make it-- I've saved it as 'Roar Cycles Catalog'. So use the Gridify tool, you pick any shape. So, rectangle, ellipse, or polygon, anything you want. Start dragging out with your mouse. Keep your mouse held down, so don't let go like that. Hold it down, and before you let go, use your up arrow, then the right arrow. And it will just keep adding circles. Going back the other way, so left end down to get rid of them. Let's have a little practice with how many we need. You can drag out loads of them, then just keep dragging out with your mouse. Hold 'Shift' if you want them to be perfect circles. And let go when you're ready. You'll have lots of little circles, or squares, or stars. I'm going to delete those, I'm going to grab the Rectangle tool, and do something.

So I'm going to drag it out, then tap right twice, and up once. So I've got kind of a group of six. Now, see these spaces in between them, you can adjust as well. All you need to do is hold down, on a Mac, the 'Command' key, or on a PC, the 'Control' key. I'm having a little go at my mouse. I'm also holding down the 'Command' or 'Control' key, and use the up arrow. You'll see, it places these spaces more there in the middle. And down arrow gets rid of them, just keep tapping the down arrow. It's a bit of a thing of gymnastics, and you're like "Ah, this is really very easy." Maybe not. It's cool. Gridify is awesome.

Left and right does the gaps horizontally, I mean vertically. So you can do a nice kind of grid like-- I'm going to delete that, draw out another one. Another thing you can do is, I'm going to make the same kind of cube shapes. I'm going to switch to this one here, the Gap tool. The tool you never use, the fourth tool down. Its job is-- and you can see I can click, and drag, and it starts adjusting the space in between different boxes. So it's just a really handy way of keeping the exact same measurements but moving things around. You can also hold down a couple of keys to get some other tricks. I'll hold down the 'Shift' key, and it will just move one of these. Another key is, hold down the 'Alt' key on a PC, or 'Option' key on a Mac. You can see, it kind of changes it to moving a huge kind of connecting chunk.

Another shortcut is, hold down the 'Command' key on a Mac or 'Control' key on a PC. You can see, I can close them up, or open them up. So couple of little shortcuts. You'll never remember exactly but smash away at the keys when you got the Gap tool and it's really easy to kind of eventually find the one you want. It's really good and handy for margins.

Say you've got some logos all lined up, you just need to push the margins away a little bit, you can see, I can kind of do that. Holding different keys gives me different effects. They all look at the same effect. I can grab all of these, and just kind of move them up. That is the Gap tool used with the Gridify tool. Another thing you can use with the Gridify tool - I'm going to select all these and delete them. - is we can deal with text boxes, which is handy. Grab the text box, start dragging out, and I drag it all the way across, and use my right arrow just like with the Rectangle tool, I get boxes but these guys are linked text boxes. So if I go to 'Type', and go to 'Fill with Placeholder Text', genius. So it's worked with shapes, and it's worked with text. What if we could work with images? And it totally does. And this is probably its best use. I'm not sure why I waited till the end to show you, but go to 'Exercise Files', go to '02' and go to image 1 to 6. I clicked on the first image here. Hold 'Shift', click on the sixth one, and it selects them all. So with them all selected—

A little side note before we do the main event trick is that, can you see, 6 is in the brackets there. If I use my arrow keys to tap along, just use your right arrow. It will toggle through the images. If I click on right-- for some reason, mine doesn't update, it used to, there it goes, it updates. It's a bit weird. Hit down. Yours will. Mine used to work, mine's stopped working. So just use your left and right arrows. You can just decide on which image to drop in first. That's why that's quite useful. So if yours is working, mine is not, here it is, it switches out. Got to give my mouse a wiggle for no reason. So that's one thing. What I'd like to do is drag out, and I click and drag out but before I let go, we’re going to do our Gridify tool. Exactly like we did before. This one's got a fixed height and width because that's where the images came from, but if I use the right arrow, you can see, I can do my kind of, like up, up one, across two to get my images here. I can hold down 'Command', and use up and down to change the spacing between them if I wanted to, but that's going to work for me. I'm going to do something that looks like that. That is a super quick and easy way just to dump them all in the page. They're all the same size, which is great. Rather than trying to import them all and scale them all down to yellow, or change them all separately.

One thing I might do though is, they kind of fit in there, but they've got this kind of white area around the outside. With them all selected, right click any of them. If you're on a Mac, hold down 'Control', and click any of them, if you don't want to right click, and go to 'Fitting' this is the one we want, 'Fit Frame to Content'. So that shortcut there, not a sexy shortcut but it's one of the ones that I use quite often. Watch this, when I hit it, it just wraps the frame around the box. So that's just a really quick way I guess to make them snap to the edges. That particular one, just as a side note, works for text boxes as well. So say you're drawing something, and this is my title. I find all this area around here I don't need. That exact same shortcut, 'Command-Option-C' will just wrap the text box around that, which is handy. And if you're on a PC, that's 'Control-Alt-C'. Or just, right click, go to 'Fitting' and 'Fit Frame to Content' will work there. Awesome!

Next part of that, kind of whole shifting things around Gap tool, Gridify thing, is let's go to Page 2, and there's something called 'Live Distribute'. So, let's draw out a rectangle, I'm going to use Gridify to make it into say, this many of them. And what I'd like to do is, let's say I want to kind of adjust the spacing between them all. I got a couple of options, I could kind of drag them out then drag you out to be the same distance, and Smart Guides will try to automatically, you see goes, "Ah, magic, you mean these sizes?" See the little green arrows match the sizes up, but then you got to stretch the top ones out and you want to kind of disperse them perfectly. So, with them all selected-- the shortcuts are a little hard to remember, it's a weird shortcut. So you start dragging and that's not what I want. I just want big gaps to get that go, right?

So if I start dragging, if I hold down the 'space bar' after I started dragging, so I'm holding, dragging with my mouse, then hold 'space bar' Cool, huh! So it's my little squares, and I just get to play with the space in between. I'm going to undo. Same with the bottom, remember, drag first, while I'm dragging, holding 'space bar', it will kind of separate them out. Great for the bottom right as well, so start dragging and then hold 'space bar', and you can kind of Live Distribute all of these guys here, hold 'Shift' and it will kind of lock the height and width. It's just really a nice way of opening up gaps and-- it could be text boxes, it could be images, anything you like. Live Distribute. If you hold 'space bar' first, then start dragging, you end up moving this around, or going into like the zoom preview thing, so make sure, drag first, then hit 'space bar'.

Another thing we're going to do in this kind of super fantabulous drawing modes is I'm going to-- actually I don't want these big boxes, I want you guys to be on actually Page 1. So I'm going to go to Page 1 now, here you go, Page 1, zoom in. And we're going to do some lines, grab the Line tool. And I'm going to make sure my Stroke is set to 'black'. And I'm going to have the Fill set to 'none'. So I'm going to have a 2pt Stroke so it's just going to draw a line like that. So what I'm going to draw is-- I'm going to hold 'Shift' while I'm dragging, gives me a straight line. And another thing I'm going to do is, I'm going to duplicate all of that. So I'm going to grab my Black Arrow, and you may, or may not know this already. If you hold 'Alt' key on a PC, or 'Option' key on a Mac while you're dragging, it will give you a duplicate. If you just drag it, obviously, without that key, just moves it around, but if you hold 'Alt' while you're dragging, gives you another version.

This is what brings us into this next cool little trick. Is, if I do that, I'm holding 'Alt' to drag it, but I haven't let go of my mouse yet. So I haven't let go. Use your up arrow, like Gridify. There's one in the middle there. It's all hard to see I guess in this video because it's really faint. They go into these weird line, don't worry about all those lines. I need to kind of like, I'm pressing 'up' loads. And I just get loads to join them too. Let go of the mouse, and there's a really easy way instead of like, maybe step and repeat or-- what is it called in here? It's called 'Step and Repeat', you might have done it in Illustrator. So super handy, super useful.

I'm going to draw out a box. Same thing, I'm going to give it a Fill color. Lovely Fill color. Hold down 'Alt', drag it across. And before I let go of my mouse, 'up' key, and it joins the two. I can hit the right key as well. And it gives me kind of a like a Gridify thing going on of that object. Don’t use that one so much, but play around with it, drag it out holding 'Alt'', or 'Option' on a Mac and use the up key, and maybe the right key. You'll get lots of multiples of it to fill in the gap. So that's going to be it for our super fantastic drawing techniques.

I'm now going to follow on with our little tutorial. It's going to be a bit of a production video, so you can continue watching, or skip to the next one because we're going to import some images, and build out our Home Page. We want to actually end up with something nice. I'm going to go to 'File', 'Place', and I'm going to go to '02 Drawing', find 'Cover Image'. Drag this one out from this edge to this edge. It's a little big, so I'm going to grab my Black Arrow. If you're bored already, you can move on. So I've got this, I want to use my Line tool trick. So I'm going to drag a line that goes-- holding 'Shift', so it's a perfect line. I'm going to fill mine with actually white. It's going to be '2 pts'. I'm going to drag it so it's kind of in the middle of the document. Something like that. Holding 'Alt' down on a PC, 'Option' on a Mac to drag it down to the bottom. Before I let go of the mouse, I'm going to use my up arrow because I want this kind of stripy. I want to say, kind of a line, go on. Maybe a bit past there. Great! I'll lower the opacity of all of these guys. I just want this kind of stripy line thing going in the background.

Why are we doing it? It's mainly so I have an excuse to use that little line trick. I'm going to bring in a logo. So nothing selected, bring in the 'logo.ai'. I'll drag it out so it will be in the middle here. And on page 2, I want to kind of tidy this up. I'm going to grab my Type tool. This is going to be my 'Bike Catalog'. I never get to spell this right. I'm going to change the color because I want to put this in the background. So I'm going to drag this, I'm going to grab the Eye Dropper tool. So instead of the Color Theme tool which we've used, the Eye Dropper tool just steals colors. You can steal it from images. I'm going to steal it from this kind of color here. So put it around my Stroke. See this little arrow here? He toggles between being the pink on the Stroke, to the pink now, bringing in the Fill, that's what I want. So I want you. And do I want anything else? I'm not sure. Let's do a slashy thing.

So I'm going to copy and paste this. I'm totally now just trying to make it look okay. I'm going to rotate it around. Hit the 'W' key. W key is the preview key. Just gets filled with all the background stuff. We've already done that. And I'm going to grab him, bring my Fill to the front. And over here, I'm going to switch it to a slightly darker color. Often it's easier to go to CMYK to switch this around because you can just drag that case out a little bit. I'm going to select both of them, send them to the back, then hit the 'W' key again. That's what I'm kind of trying to do. That Fill's always got a white Stroke around the outside. It's just a bit small. Yes, it's not attached to any of these. You could be bored. The dog in the background. This is such an amazing video. All right, 'Bike Catalog'. Doing it, just finishing some basics. All right. That's not that good.

So that's going to be it for this video. Finally getting to the next one where we're going to do some cool stuff with Strokes and Arrows, and stuff. Let's go do that one.