Beginner’s Guide to Getting Started with Adobe InDesign

Adobe InDesign is the industry-leading page design and layout application that lets you create, preflight (a.k.a. quality check), and publish beautiful documents for print and digital media.

However, if you’re a beginner who’s opening Adobe InDesign CC for the first time, it can feel a bit overwhelming.

The good news?

You’ve come to the right place.  

In this article, you’ll learn when it’s best to use Adobe InDesign, and gain a fundamental understanding how to get started laying out your designs. 

What is Adobe InDesign used for?

While it’s true that you could use Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator to build multi-page documents or text-heavy layouts… Adobe InDesign was specifically created to do it.

And when starting out with graphic design, it’s absolutely essential to know how to choose the right tool (or software in this case) for the job.  Going forward, this will not only end up saving you headaches… but it’ll also save you tons of time and money in the long run.

In fact, we feel so strongly about this that we wrote an entire article about it.

Feel free to check it out:

When to Use Adobe Photoshop vs Illustrator vs InDesign

But back to Adobe InDesign…

Basically, the simplest way to know when to use InDesign…

If you’re going to have large amounts of text in your design — choose Adobe InDesign.

Beginner’s Guide to Getting Started with Adobe InDesign

Like any other professional design program… there’s a little bit of a learning curve with Adobe InDesign.

But fear not:

In this fantastic Adobe InDesign tutorial walkthrough, Terry White of Adobe Creative Cloud TV teaches beginners how to get started with Adobe InDesign CC:

How To Get Started With Adobe InDesign CC – 10 Things Beginners Want To Know How To Do

In this beginner InDesign tutorial, Terry covers 10 tips and techniques that beginner’s want to know how to do, including the following:

• Setting Your Measurement System (points, picas, inches, etc.)
• Creating a New Document
• Placing Images into Your Design Layout
• Working with Images
• Understanding InDesign Workspaces
• Editing Images
• Adding and Formatting Text
• Using Fonts from TypeKit
• Linking Text Frames
• Using Placeholder Text
• Adding Color to Your Text
• Using Color Swatches
• Using Character and Paragraph Styles
• Wrapping Text Around Image with Transparent Background
• Using Master Pages
• Adding Automated Page Numbers to Your Document
• Saving, Exporting, and Packaging Your Design Document

Final Thoughts

Our goal with this lesson is to help you become more comfortable, confident, and familiar while working within the Adobe InDesign software.

Hopefully, after reading this article and watching this tutorial… you have a better understanding of how to get started with Adobe InDesign.

How About You?

Do you use InDesign for your design layout work, or is there another program you’d recommend?

What kinds of challenges have you had while working with Adobe InDesign?