How To Make Arrows In Adobe InDesign CC

Hey there, in this video we're going to look at Arrow Heads and some more advanced Stroke things. It's not super exciting but we only didn't know how to make arrows, and there's some little tricks you can use to help your work flow.

All right, I'm on page 3, and let's look at Arrow Heads first, so I've got the Line tool. I'll drag out a line, I'm going to make it a bit thicker. I'll make sure my Stroke is at black. And I've got a thickness of '5 pt'. Now the Stroke panel might look like this where it's quite small, you can only change the weight. You can double click this little tab here, and it gets joiners and get a lot more options, and this is what we're looking for.

So the first one is this 'Start/End'. Basically, this is easy, where you get your Arrow Heads. So depending on how you've drawn your line, so Start is where I first started drawing, so I want the opposite way. So I want you to be there, the barbed end one. It's not the one I like. I'm just going to have the-- I just want the triangle. And the start, I might do-- It's like an Austin Powers male symbol thing. One of those.

Now one of the things, and the new things in 2018 is that when you scaled it up you end up getting kind of disproportionately sized ends and beginnings. You can see, like that, it's joined and almost completed that. This Stroke is the same around the outside, but now what you can do is, see this Scale, it's kind of a new thing. So I am going to scale this end bit up. You can see here, I can kind of raise it up and I can make it nice and big there to kind of match everything else there. So that's a new feature. It's not really a feature, but it's something we've all been missing.

One of the little tricks I did there was, can you see, I'm making it smaller by clicking it, and it's just going down 1% at a time, slowly. If I hold 'Shift' and click that exact same option, can you see, it does it in multiples of 10. So I find this, just really handy thing for anything. If you want to raise the weight of this, if you want to do it in big chunks, hold 'Shift'. Any sort of option here, with a number, if I want to make this go up by 1% I just click it, but if I hold 'Shift' and click it, it goes up by multiples of 10. It's looking kind of cool there. I think I like it.

One of the other things for Strokes that's useful is, I'm going to zoom in on this thing here, like this one. What I want to show you is, it's a little hard to see, maybe I'll change the Stroke to black, so it's easier. Maybe a bit of contrast, here it is. You can see, my line here, it's actually this rectangle I drew, it's actually the center of it, so if I draw a rectangle, when I let go, watch the black line, it straddles it either side. It's a little hard to see, but, can you see? It's actually going left and right of this. That can be a bit of a pain because you're trying to get things to line up but they're lining up to the center bit here.

So what you can do, with it selected, you've got options over here to align Stroke. By default it's left and right, but here, I can go actually on the inside, or all the way round to the outside, or just straddling this center. Another thing you might look at is the unfortunately named Butt cap. So if I draw a line here, and I make it nice and thick, it's got what's called a Butt cap, which means, it's just-- if I grab the line again, can you see, it just gets the end and then completely butts up at the end of the end point. So that's what these one's here for.

You probably won't use this third one, but the second one here, the Round Cap kind of adds-- it's just a different style of line. And this end one here is kind of a Block Cap. It goes all the way around that side here, and then there's the Butt Cap.

One last thing you can do is, if I put an Arrow Head on this one, I'm going to go, you, Arrow Head can you see, it used the end of the line as the tip of the Arrow Head. That might not be what you need. You might want to go through, and say, see you here. It's using the edge of the line, watch this, it kind of uses the end of the line to start the Arrow Head. So it depends on what you need. Just know that you got a few little options.

Getting a bit nerdy, and a bit boring. Let's get on to the next video. I love the next one. It's fun, let's make that flowery thing in the next video.