
Just saying hi and covering what you will be covering in the course—what you can expect.
Trace the shift from traditional publishing to on-demand and self-publishing, driven by digital printing, proofs, and Amazon Kindle, revealing how authors control production and royalties with InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator.
This book covers quite a bit more than we do in this course. So, if you feel you need any additional information about a particular lecture, just look it up in the book.
Explains the 256 basic ASCII characters and how OpenType expands a font to thousands of characters, and covers baselines, ascenders, x-height, cap height, and optical alignment.
There are many characters which you are expected to use as a typesetting professional. In fact, to not use them is considered a typo. Here we talk about some the more common issues you'll face.
Explore basic font classifications, from serif and sans to obliques and weight ranges, and learn how font families, readability, and type color shape effective book production.
Explore the character panel options in InDesign, including font family, size, leading, tracking, kerning, ligatures, and baseline shift, and learn how typography choices affect readability and layout.
Master alignment options (left, right, center, justified) and tune indents and paragraph spacing to improve readability with soft returns and balanced line breaks.
Master tabs and ruler to align text, set decimal and left tab stops, and create leaders for column layout; apply paragraph rules and borders for print, noting ebook reflow limits.
Explore hyphenation and line-by-line justification to keep body copy neat and the right edges aligned. Learn how InDesign’s justification controls and words facing affect readability and paragraph balance.
This is a slightly rambling demo designed to show you the workflow as you manipulate a paragraph into what you want. These things are always fluid with many adjustments to get the formatting just right. This will give you a feel for the process—plus it will show you several tips and shortcuts in the process.
Create a complete set of default paragraph and character styles in InDesign, including indents, first-line formatting, and numbered or bulleted lists, for consistent book production.
This is an essential typography course. Books, almost more than any project, need superlative typography to enable your readers to actually read the book. Without these skills and knowledge, your books will be compromised before you even release them.
You will discover why InDesign is necessary for book production. Word, and word processors in general, do not even have the capability of producing excellent typography.
This course covers the basic concepts you need to understand before you start putting your book together: how to set up your document—size, margins, and column width; Typography: what it is and how you produce excellent, readable typography so you can design your paragraphs to enable your readers to comfortably enjoy reading your book. By the time you finish the course, you will be amazed at all you didn't know about typography, readability, and how to communicate with your readers [or the readers of your clients].