[Music] [Kladi Vergine] We're going to be talking about Creating Consistent Brain Guidelines for Creative Teams. And in particular, I'm going to focus on what are the pitfalls and issues with brand guidelines and creative teams. Yesterday, I had also a broad audience for these sessions. Half people come from larger corporations, some people are freelance, so, I'm going to always try to balance it out so everybody is happy, hopefully, with the content. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Kladi. I am an Italian designer based in the UK, and also it's about a year that I formally joined Adobe as their senior designer, evangelist, and community advocate. That means that I'm that person in between the company and the designers. So if you ever need any help or if you have any questions, even beyond this presentation, please feel free to reach out. I'm always DM away, it's literally the core of what I do to connect with you guys. So, please, that is the place where I always will be there and replying for you.
Okay, so about the content today. We're going to be talking about brand guidelines. I'm going to show you an example of brand guidelines that I've created for a previous client of mine. They've been absorbed by another company. So, I was absolutely free to show you and share also with you their brand guidelines. In fact, you'll find them on my website so you can have them as a reference afterwards as well, and you can always check that back. I'm going to show you where my website is and how to get them in just a second. Then we're going to breeze through foundations of how to set up a document that is ready to create digital guidelines because hopefully we all know it today, guidelines are moving to the web faster than we possibly can imagine, but we can still use our beloved InDesign even if we're not producing necessarily printable brand guidelines, InDesign will still be the place where we can produce guidelines and then push it out on the web, and save them in the Adobe Server, Secure Server. I'm going to move to CC Libraries and how powerful they are. I'm going to hop back to Creative Libraries quite a lot because they are an extremely powerful tool. If you and your team do not use CC Libraries, hopefully, after this session I'll be able to change your mind. And then again, one word that I'm going to repeat besides the CC Libraries is consistency. And we're going to see in just a moment why consistency is so important. Okay. You have these outlines as I say and these slides as well on my website. So before I move forward, I'm just going to direct you real quick to my website, which is iamkladi.com/max24. Nice and easy. I'm going to give you a little bit of a zoom so everybody hopefully is comfortable to see that URL. Iamkladi.com/max 24. That is the place where you can find the outlines, but also you will be able to watch the sessions again and get the brand guidelines example that I have here for you in just a moment. So let's hop back in the presentation, which by the way was created also with InDesign and publish online, which is one of the features that we're going to be touching on today. A little bit more about me. So you know where these information is coming from. I used to work in PR, so I used to be a marketing person. I used to work in the UN, and then I used to be a graffiti artist, spraying trains and streets and running around with a rattling bag of cans. Yeah, So as you can imagine, working in the UN and then running with a rattling bag of cans at night usually will get you to be fired or maybe arrested and all these things. But I always say graphic design saved my life because it brought together the design, colorful aspect that I was finding love in when I was doing my graffiti art and the marketing side that I was experiencing with my job at the UN. And I would say that that's probably one of the reasons why I love brand guidelines so much. We're going to see how a secure and complete brand guidelines does incorporate and must incorporate both the marketing side and the design side. This is the place really when you ever have conflict in creating any sort of communication, visual or even a PR script, that's where you will always come back. In fact, I call the brand guidelines the foundation of a business, and those are some reasons why this is a foundation. Consistency across all channels, I mentioned, I'm going to use that word quite a lot. Consistency means that we're all moving together. And what does it mean? It means that from outside, we are perceived as predictable. And I know that that from one side can be boring, but if you imagine the chaos of information that we are exposed to every day, having a brand and having a business that is predictable and always speaks with the same tone and always shows the same sort of music or vibe, it makes us feel safe. It builds trust. That's why consistency is such a big, big part of a business and, most importantly, it needs to be underlined within the brand guidelines and protected, I will say, by the brand guidelines because the brand guidelines set the standard that provide consistency throughout the business. And that's why the next point is internal and external alignment. Inside the business, when we communicate, even at Adobe, we have the same brand consistency that we show you guys outside. Our document, our brand and our presentation, internal presentation amongst our peers are, I would say, 90%, all branded like you will see outside because that is part of the formation of the teams. So I would strongly recommend to make sure that you are consistent also in the internal communication. That will facilitate the way that your teams and your colleagues and yourself as a person will communicate outside. And we're going to talk about brand values and core values in just a moment. And again, I already mentioned the word foundation. You can always regroup in the brand guidelines, especially if you are part of marketing or design, or you're dealing with colleagues between these two different teams, that's where you can come back together and regroup as a solid foundation to make decisions, maybe for a campaign.
Those are the key elements. As I mentioned before, the visual side is what I identify with all the design choices. So that's part of the design department. If you work in a larger corporation, while the verbal identity is what is called the soft side of the brand guidelines is part of the marketing, that's the marketing realm. If you are in a smaller company, probably you have the one person marketing powerhouse that also doubles maybe as a designer with Adobe Express, or maybe a designer who's also trying to cover marketing, but those are the two aspects that needs, no matter what, if you're a group of 20 or just a group of two, need to come back to. And then we have the tangible assets. Those are not the color choices but the actual files, logo files that are provided for everybody and must be provided to everybody in the team. And we're going to talk about access and how to make sure that those are easy to access for everyone on the team. I said access, not accessibility here. I have my lovely friend and colleague and speaker Dax here. He talks about accessibility, so hopefully, we'll touch on that at the end as well.
Last point is, guidelines, how to evolve. Of course, we're going to show you how you can update a document. We have a very cool trick in InDesign in which you can update the same link without having to provide chaotic multi-link information. You can just give one and then keep updating the same link over and over again to make sure that all assets are up to date, and same with the CC Libraries. And now let's come to what are the issues. So what are the critical points when we work in teams per document set up? As I said, people create documents that are not ready to be shared in the web, and that will be our very first point that we're going to be touching on very briefly, but extremely important to be set up for success. So you want to make sure that you prep your intent of your document for the web, consistency, making sure that the brand elements are used throughout the brand guidelines. I've seen brand guidelines in my years of experience that have got nothing to do with the brand, even though they talk about the brand. So you want to make sure that the brand guidelines itself gets treated as a document, that respect the rules, that is talking about like practice and not only preaching. That is the first step. Make sure that your brand guidelines are also on brand. And again, updated access. I'm going to share with you how InDesign can help you in particular to leverage these particular points even with styling text. So, again, I think that here, I'm probably going to repeat myself. You're going to have access to that. I just wanted to give you some sort of a base to which we can then ground our practice that I'm going to show you. It's important, the consistency, as I say, not only to build trust. To me, this is the most important part because I really care about relationship with customers. I think that no matter what relationship is what going to save a company at the end of the day, if you build strong relationships, you can overcome even the hardest time that every company faced through their lifetime. Building trust and differentiation. So differentiation is a reason why it's important to be consistent because when you make a statement, a bold statement about who you are, you're also defining what you're not, and that helps you to stand out from the crowd. I think that during the inspirational keynote, one of the speakers at the slide said, "The best way to be part of something is just to be yourself." And that is also true for the brand. Like the best part for a brand to really stand up for itself is just to be boldly empowered in its value and showing up consistently with those values, tone of voice, color palette. Okay, so let's move on into InDesign because we're going to get to do some practical tricks here, as I mentioned before. Actually, I'm going to guide you through real quick the brand guidelines that you have available so you have an idea of what we're going through. And probably that's already an example of what we talked so far. So Plantorium is a company that was distributing plants. And those are the two main areas that you can now see actually coming to life because that was the big nice theory. But that's when they show up inside the document. So the section one, defining the brand, is the soft side that is marketing domain. Section two, design elements are the color. So all the design choices plus the logo assets. Those are the two elements that have to come together. I like to split them into session. So when you work on a document, you can also share your document and have the marketing team focusing on one session and then the design team focusing on filling in the other session because I truly believe, and I really hope that I empower you after this talk, if you are in a team to go and Slack or E-mail your colleague and say, "Hey, why don't we work on this together?" Because otherwise, there is usually one person that is responsible for this, either from the design side or the marketing side, and you end up missing something from the other side of the business. So I will encourage you to have both teams coming together in the creation of this document.
Again, here the section, as I said, is defining the brand. Those are all the marketing side of it. So what the brand is about, that sharing a bit of the history of the brand, really having a story behind it. I think it really grounds the mission and the vision because everything starts for a reason, right? For example, I run a show called Creative Connection here with Adobe. There is a reason why, there is a story why I run that show is because as soon as I got this job, I had a lot of creatives doing one on one with me, and I feel privileged. And I was like, "Why I am the person that is so lucky to have all these creatives?" So I started my show Creative Connection so I can share that with everybody. See, that's a story. Every business is a story. Every business has started from a need, and it's very important to make sure that everyone inside the company is aware of that story, because that's the real fire, that's the soul, that's the fuel that will push the product and the brand also to grow. And of course, it translates in the mission and the vision of the brand. Those are the core values that I was mentioning before. Those are very important to be outlined. I love to use keywords, but of course, it's nice to have a little bit of a breakdown on what they really mean so you can have an explanation of what the core values stand for. For my team in particular, as I said, I focus on connecting with creatives. So our mantra and our keywords is to connect with a positive, healthy, and robust community around Adobe. This is my mantra. Like I know it by heart because remember what I mentioned at the beginning? Alignment inside the company and outside the company. If I'm so connected with my mission that my team has, I can show up with you. And the first thing when I say on stage is, let's connect because I want to create a beautiful design community with you. And that's why the brand core values is important, to take a little bit of an extra time to make sure that everyone inside your company is aware of what they are about, and again, spending a little bit more time or asking the marketing team to spending a little bit more time to make explicit words and sentences saves a lot of time when you are creating campaigns. You can literally go back to your brand guidelines and go and find the keywords that you want to use. That works for PR, so if you're a marketing person or works in design, if you have the task to create a campaign, always go back to these wordings because it will really guide you to then find a solution and to solve a problem when you are creating assets or text. And again here, just a different example that gets also supported with some images as well. And also as I say there, it's important to state who you are, but we will see throughout the guidelines that is very also important to say what you do not want to do. Maybe in this case, it's a little bit understated in this particular example, but it's still there. You want to say who you are and what you stand for, but if there is something that you want to be, make sure that everybody stays away from, you want to make sure that you highlight that and you put in the brand guidelines because this is also part of the value. I associate, and I am all of these, and I do not want to associate my brand with that specific behavior.
The second part, as I mentioned, this is the realm of the designers. And not only-- When I say designers, everybody is like, "Okay, so there's going to be the logo." Yeah, the logo is actually part of the assets that we're going to see how we can link with the CC Library and linking hyperlinks within your document. But not only assets, we're talking that design choices. So respecting the space around your brand, how many times as designers we had to make sure that the logo doesn't come slapped next to the other logo, especially maybe if you're promoting something and then you have all this series of logo, thanks to our sponsors. So you have one logo next to each other, and they all end up cramped up. Whenever I do a collaboration or whenever I worked with other companies, it's good to share that slide. You can share that slide with the company that you work with, requesting to maintain a safe space around your logo because there is a reason why, it's for legibility and to make sure that your logo gets recognized. And this is part of protecting the brand and the brand power empowers you to do so. So even if you're not a designer, you are able to leverage this kind of documentation and send just one single page for that. Talking about the assets, that is the place where you will have the useful links. I'm going to show you how to add these hyperlinks, not only external hyperlinks. So I have here one hyperlinks just drives to the Dropbox, which is just a logo file. Actually, we can click on it and show you. That's a Dropbox where I have all the different assets of logo, PNG, SVG, and all the different EPS and logo files. But then I also have linked in here and I'll show you how to do that, the CC Libraries. So that will be so useful for your colleagues, especially when someone is joining the team by sharing the CC Library, they will be able, from a browser, to download it to their machine. And what happens is that that goes inside the CC hub that we all have here on our computer. And from there, as you can see, you can add it to your libraries. Once you click on Add to the libraries and it gets fed inside the Creative Cloud here, what happens is, it automatically gets injected throughout the Creative Cloud apps installed on your machine. In just a click, all your apps are informed and, again, that protects that consistency. And we're going to see in just a moment how important that is because also, those are live documents that you can update and they will update throughout in everybody machines once the CC Library gets updated. Very important link that I don't see very often is the request, request assets or request access. Yeah, fair enough. You're giving the thing that you have, but what if something is missing and you're not aware of it? Make sure that there is always-- even better if it's in the navigation. All of these are links, by the way, so I can go ahead and link back to my Table of Contents, and I think here I was at the assets link. Those are all links that have been created also with hyperlinks within InDesign. So again, Request Assets is going to open up my email. If I click on it, it just simply email to, as you can see, open the emails, I don't have this set up on this machine, but it will open the email right away with the right email address and will allow the people that receive this brand guideline to reach out to you and say, "Hey, this is awesome, but I'm missing this information." Okay, so when I was talking about design, I said, let's move past the idea that it's just a logo. We have information about colors, details about colors. And another thing that I don't tend to see very often is also tints of color. You want to make sure that you establish all these details, again to provide consistency because tints of colors look like different colors. So if you use a different tint of a specific hue, you will show up differently. And I know, I understand that sometimes we print and when you go on the web, you have different shades that appear by default, but that's why it's very important to work with professionals that know their job. They do a color match, that's why there are all these safe way of trying to produce the color as much as on brand. And that's the reason why I'm saying if you already start by setting up the color wrong, then you have even more chance for things to go wrong. So I will recommend you to make sure that you also look things in details, primary colors, secondary colors, and also access and tints, alongside the RGB, CMYK distribution and X values. Of course, this is just a quick example of the brand with the different colors. And then we have also, and I hope that your brand has the flexibility of showing up in pictograms or icon forms that allows you to use the logo in smaller versions. I see some of you have the Adobe A on the sweatshirt that was gifted here. And this is actually part of the new logo. So we have a new Adobe logo, I don't know many of you have noticed. Before, Adobe had the A, which was like a square with the A cut out and then Adobe. Well, right now, we got rid of the square. We just have the cut out of the A, which is what you guys have on your top, and just Adobe, like the word coming out of the same A. Again we are trying to shrink, there was actually a speaker a few years back here at Adobe MAX, which is called John Maeda. He works at MIT, and he's the person behind, like the first iPod and iPhone. The one button solution when we went from having a screen and then the button to just having one screen and one button, it works under the principle of SHE, which is shrink, hide and embed, which is the principle to work when you work on your branding. So making sure that you can, under one single element, make it smaller, embed, hide it for your brand. So this is a little bit of the icon and brand pictogram that is very useful. Imagine if you have to like print it very, very, very small. If you shrink your entire logo, if I had like all the planetarium logo, really tiny, all you can see is literally like a rectangle. Okay, then the other part is of course the typography font. I will say this is an example that has a medium level of quality in terms of details on the font. It will be really nice to also see a declination of points in all the brand guidelines. So here, this is a medium business. And that's why, depending on how big your business is, the brand guidelines and how much your business grows, your brand guidelines will evolve. It's okay to start by just having a font and making sure that the font is respected, that's the first step. The second step is to make sure that you have, at the very least, a secondary font that can work especially for text, and then perhaps the third spot, we'll see it in the other document that we're looking at is to also decline the point of the text that you want to use and that will feed your paragraph styles. Okay. So here we have some logo usages. This is just an idea to see, okay, this is the logo, but how do you want to use it? How big do you have it in the different displays on social media, and maybe on print? Talking about contrast, what kind of background you want to use with the specific logo? This logo is also a cutout, so it can be a little bit tricky. So here we are seeing that we have a dark color of the logo against the colorful background and vice versa. When we have the orange cut out, we have a solid color. It's a picture, but it's almost like a solid dark green there, again, just to provide contrast. And those give you support when you're trying to start and think about how to use the logo within a context. Okay, as I said before, we do have the opportunity of seeing how to use the logo, which are the logo, but it's key to have this slide. This slide, like, really saved me a lot of arguments when I was working in my previous company because when someone does something wrong and thinks is really okay to squish the logo because they need a smaller version, you can just send a picture of this slide and be like, "It looks great, but you're not allowed to do that because the brand guidelines say so. So by policy, we are not allowed to do all of this to our logo." So it's very important to make sure that you I use the word policing because probably protecting is a nicer word to use, but it's very important to understand also what not to do with your logo. I mean, the one that is all I tilted is very fun, but it doesn't talk the language of our brand, so that's why it might be fun, it might be cool, but definitely not having something like that is important. And same from brain imagery. Here, I have a mis-usage of images, that means what kind of images I do not want to associate with my brand. I don't want things that look messy because we're not doing craft. This is not a company that is about craft. We want things to be nice and polished. We are shipping, we're shipping worldwide, so we want to make sure that everything looks nice, neat, organized. So you want to make sure that also your imagery has a focus. We're not doing interior design with little plants. So all these pictures do not represent the brand. And that's why it's very important to make sure that these photos are there. Include a picture that includes language that you do not want to be used. And on the other hand, we have the beautiful botanical, exotic vibes. And as you can see, I'm literally repeating the core value here of botanical exotic. Those are part of the core keywords of this brand, and they come straight through this imagery. So it's very important also to show the imagery that you want to display in order to bring that all the marketing soft soul element to life throughout your images.
And again, the same with the illustrated shapes. We have a little bit of a wiggle there, that's why probably someone decided to move that font at some point and then it got banned. But that's just to provide some brand shape assets that also should be part of the assets of the brand within the hyperlink. Okay, so it's time to move into InDesign and to get to some practical stuff. As I say, I'm going to build a presentation because I have this file here, but I want to show you how important it is to have a brand guidelines. So that's what I was talking about when I said a more detailed version. So that's an upgrade of having the font. So not only I have the name of the font, but I also am going to move my mouse. But you also have the point type and that will inform your paragraph style. So are you guys familiar with paragraph and character styles? Can I have a hands up so I know how many. Okay, perfect. So I'm going to jump to that and I'm go right away into nest styles and GREP. Introduction to GREP.
Do many of you work with GREP already? Not many. Okay, perfect. So I'm going to go through that quickly. But it's again useful for consistency as the one that you work with it now. Okay, before we get started, so the first step is setting up. So before jumping into styling right away, I'm just going to breeze through. I just want to make sure setting up for success, what did I mean with that first slide? Whenever you create a new document, the easiest way to set up for success is to make sure that you choose the right intent. And when I talk about intent, I talk about these little tabs up here. Once I click on them, all the preset details will change alongside all the presets available to get started. And that means that you have all the resolutions and colors that get automatically set up for web. And because we're going to be producing a document that is safe to be published online because that's our ultimate goal, we're going to be providing the option also to download it as a PDF, but we want to make sure that first thing we highlight and support the digital aspect of our brand guidelines, I would love for you to start by setting up with a web intent in order to get set up successfully. And alongside that, something that is very important in terms of setup is to make sure that you have all your interactive elements, for example, hyperlink that we're going to talk in just a moment alongside pages, actions. We have the Epub preview, which is a very super exciting way of previewing all the hyperlinks, videos, and all interactive features directly within InDesign. What I do, I usually consolidate them. And then again, this is not my machine, but if I had my laptop here, you will see that under my workspaces, I can save a new workspace. I usually call this one web or whatever you want to call it. It will save the panel location and all the customization that you've done to your workspace, so they will enable you anytime that you're jumping back into a web document, to go back into your workspaces. For example, if I now jump back to essential and I reset it to essential, all the two panels that I've added go away. If I move back and I'm working with web, I can click on the new workspace and I have all the panels that I have at hand. So that was just a very quick breeze through how to work with setting up. Now I'm going to move into this presentation deck. And this is an extension of the brand guidelines. So this is part of a document that is part of the folder of the brand guidelines, and at the very end of the session, I will actually show you how to create another kind of link using Adobe Express because now we have the powerful integration of moving from InDesign directly to Adobe Express, and that means that this file that we're creating will be available online, ready to be shared with your team throughout. So let's get to build it first, so then we can move forward and share it. As I said, talking about consistency, I'm going to quickly start by text, and then I'm going to move into images and how to integrate files and images. So we're all familiar with paragraph style. I'm not going to talk through that because I had a lot of hands raised up in the paragraph style here. As you can probably see, I have quite a lot of paragraph styles and character styles already built. As we know, paragraph style will dictate the formatting of the entire paragraph, where character style will be overrides, sometimes can be colors, sometimes can be point size or font family for a specific paragraph. So if I apply the title to this slide over here, well, fair enough, it's giving me the first title, but it's not giving me the rest of what is their topic heading. I have something else there. I'm sure I have the subheading. Let me see. Oops.
Where has it gone? I have the subheading and all the other material there that is not showing up as it's supposed to. So how do we make sure that in one single click, we can style our heading and our title of our slide with all the different formatting that you see here. Well, we're going to be using Nest style. Nest styles are super cool because they allow us to link paragraph styles together. So I'm going to go ahead here and move from my title. From the General tab, here you have the opportunity to set up your nest style. What I'm going to do here by clicking on the dropdown menu, I have the opportunity to choose what do I want as a nest style. So after the title, I want the heading to show up and I have 1850, which also tells me the point type of the paragraph style that is coming after. And that's quite easy as well because that I'm going from 120 point to a 50 point, and then I'm going to jump into the heading and I'm going to set the nest styles to a subheading. So after the heading I'm going to have the subheading. And that works magic if you have to style also long pages with like Q&A or have a lot of repeating set of paragraphs that follow each other. Now what happens, if I click on my text box and I simply click on the first paragraph style? Same thing. It doesn't work. So how do we get it to work? Well, in order for that to work, you want to select your text area. You want to make sure that you select the box and not the text itself, and then you want to right click on your paragraph style, and you want to apply whatever is the name of your style and then nest style. So you have to force that to happen. If you click once, it's just because you don't want that to happen all the time. So I'm going to go ahead and click to apply text and then nest styles. And you can see that right away, I styled my title, and then after the paragraph style, after the first paragraph style, it brought that topic heading and then the subheading, which is pretty neat. Now if I notice here that perhaps there is not enough spacing between these two, I can always, at any time, as you know, jump back, for example, here into the heading and give it some indent and spacing and just maybe give it some space before. And because I have my preview active there, it will also apply it. It looks like I actually still had my little box selected, but not a problem. I can simply apply the nest style again and everything gets styled as we go. So this is the nest style. Nest style links paragraph style together and allows you to display them one next to the other, which is pretty cool. But what about nest style and grab GREP? Those two other categories of styling are the core of consistency when styling. Now, the beauty of this is that once we go and save them within your CC Libraries, they are sticky formatting that they will stay together. That means that once I have my CC Libraries-- And by the way, does everyone know how to create a CC Library? Yeah, can I have hands up so I can see from here? Okay, so whenever you set up a CC Library from your document, and I see some people-- It just simply creating a new library from your document, name it and then drag and drop your element in there. So you can see I have paragraph styles. So the GREP and nest which I'm just going to show you in a minute, you can just whack it into the CC Libraries, and then your colleague can leverage them and use them. And why are they important? Look at that. Here, I have just some lorem ipsum. But what I've done, I've inserted the name of the brand here and there because the goal of my consistency within my documentation is that I want my brand to show up in a specific style, and in fact, I've created an override for that thanks to the character styles, which is called brand name. If we go and have a look, we see that the brand name, what does it do? It changed the style to black, so it makes it heavier, and then it changed the color to purple. So this is the way that I want my brand name to show up throughout the document. How do I make sure that it happens all the time, and I don't have to go and highlight the word and then give it the brand name and so on and do it every time that the brand is mentioned in my text? Well, let's go ahead and go back to my paragraph style. I have here this paragraph text style, which is for my copy. What I have to do is to jump into my GREP style. By the way, this is just a very brief introduction to GREP style. There is my friend and colleague, Erica Gamet, that does a deep hardcore dive on YouTube and pretty much everywhere. She's amazing with GREPs There is so much more from there, find a menu that you can do with the paragraph style. But I just wanted to give you like a brief introduction because some find them scary because they come with formulas. But we're not going to use any of that. We're just going to use what we need to make sure that our brand shows up consistently. So I'm going to go ahead and create a new GREP style, easy. And when it says apply style, it's referring to a character style, an override. So I'm going to go ahead here and choose the brand name because I want to create a GREP style that overrides every time that I have my brand name. And that's why GREP are so powerful because GREP are there to recognize patterns throughout my entire text. That means that once I apply, see, that's the little formula that get people scared, and there are way many more here that Erica can beautifully talk to you about. But again, as I said, all I need here is my brand name. So my brand name is Plantorium, and you can choose any word you want. I want to make sure that we have that preview ticked at the bottom here. And in just one click, GREP went and recognized the pattern of letters in the letter that I've inputted in the text and apply the override of the style brand name, which was a character style that I created prior. Now because I have these within my paragraph style, again, once I go ahead and save it inside my libraries, which takes just a very click of a button to bring that back inside my CC Library, that GREP will remain there. That also means that you want to go ahead and bring your character style as well within your library. Oops. I need to learn that. Unselect my text. And once you go ahead and choose your brand name, character style, you want to make sure that you add that to the library as well, so your colleagues will be able to work consistently and leverage the power of this tool that will ensure consistency without your publication about your brands.
This was another quick example of the nest style, but I'm sure that we're all good. Like you can do the same for the quote and the author. So if we're here, apply, let's see. I think I have a quote. I can make sure that it's followed up by an author, name or paragraph style, and I can do the same. I can just go ahead and Apply Quote and Nest Style and will automatically style very quickly the text that come after. But now let's talk about nest style. So what I just showed you with the quote and author that was nest style link in paragraph, GREP looks at pattern throughout the text and apply override. What is nest style? So nest style is more similar to GREP because it does apply overrides to paragraph styles, and it lives inside the paragraph styles but is heavily dependent on the distribution of text on the line, so literally on the order in which the word appeared in line. While GREP looks at everything everywhere, doesn't care where you're at, is going to find you, nest style needs you to be in line to find that repetition. So let's go ahead and have a look at what this beautiful nest do, in one click, and I'm going to talk you through it. I was able to style my entire line, and again, talking about consistency, let's make it easy to be consistent. Everything that is with a semicolon-- It's last day for me as well, I think. So everything that is with a semicolon has been styled with a very specific character style that allows you to have your text bold and orange. Well, I don't know if you can see this little detail here. Everything that is in parentheses has a different style applied to it, has an italic to it. So let's go and have a look at how this nest style is built and where you can find it. So once you double-click into your paragraph style options, you have the opportunity to look at the different tabs. Here, I'm going to look at the Drop Caps and Nested Style, which is conveniently located just on top of that GREP style. Hopefully everyone can see it here. And it's called also drop caps because remember what I mentioned about the nest style? It really looks at the alignment. So every time that usually we have a drop cap, that's the first letter of a chapter, and that's why these two items are associated together. Okay, let's have a look at this structure here. So we have these nested styles, I'm going to go ahead and delete this one so we can do it together. On this left column, we have the character styles. You see we have the brand name. If I click the brand name, remember I think it was purple.
It should apply the purple override. Let's go ahead and see if we change this. Maybe I'm going to do it again. Let's go ahead and delete that. Oh, okay. So if we go ahead and create a new nested style, the first column allows you to choose the character style. So as I said before, I'm going to put here the semicolons so I know that the brand name will apply to everything through that semicolons. Look at that. I pushed it on the top because they run from top to bottom. So you want to make sure that the first thing that is in line is at the very top and that's why we have these two little arrows here. I've done it quickly, but that's just what I've done, pushed it up. So what I said I want this particular style, which is called brand name to be applied throughout that little semicolon. Now, if you don't want the semicolon to have that particular styling, you can choose the option of Up To. And as you can see, everything gets styled up to that particular mark. So it's looking at those symbols which can very easily be a word. You can type into it. As you see, I literally typed the semicolon. But in this case, I'm going to go back and have it through, and I'm going to assign what I think it was-- Let's see, I think it was the plant name list to it. You need to click out of it for it to apply. It doesn't apply right away. But as you can see, it changed that style to the override character style, and it applied it through the first semicolon that it found there. What about the italic here? I'm probably going to change this to something else because I don't think that's very visible. Here it is. So why this character style is set to none? This character style is set to none because, remember, I'm operating in line here with the nest style. So I'm looking at the very first part, and I'm going to have this plant name style list through the semicolon. Then through the first parentheses, I'm going to have none. That means that I'm not going to have any override, but I'm respecting the rules that are dictated by the paragraph style. So whatever was set for the paragraph style stays exactly the same, because I don't want nothing to happen to them. But then after that, so after the first bracket and up to the closing bracket, up to because I don't want the bracket to be edited, remember? If I go ahead and set it to through and I move it away, you'll see that also the bracket gets included just like the semicolon. So up to the bracket, you will have that other specific override. I hope that is a clear differentiation between GREP and nest style. Remember, they both look for pattern within your text and they are override of your paragraph style using character style, but nest operates in line while GREP looks at everything no matter where you are. Okay, so those were my tips to have consistency. And I mean, I can show you something even crazier, which is so fun. We use this kind of slide where you have very specific numbers. And this is so big at Adobe as well, like numbers needs to be big. We care about numbers. You know that we're a business, that's how we operate. Every business cares about numbers. So we want to make sure that those numbers are easy to see and easy to spot. So we have a very specific styling for it. So if I go here and I have stats number, as you can see, it's nice and bold. But all my text disappears of course because they are huge. So here, I have two different ways of operating. I have nest styles, so I know that after my number I use the nest style, which is that text which is definitely smaller. But then, I also have a GREP style applied to it. So I'm just going to go ahead and apply the stats number and then nest styles. And as you can see, it very quickly allowed me to style the numbers with their styling, the text with the other styling after, but what is this little small cap that shows up there? That's a GREP. So even if I have the numbers, let's go ahead and have a look at what it looks like, so even if here I have the numbers that show up with this specific character formatting, so 110, black, nice and bold and bright and orange, when I go into the GREP style, I know that the text M and the reason why I'm showing you this is because I want to show you these little dividers. So these little dividers are an or in GREP language. So if it's M or B or K, I wanted to show with a specific unit character style that, in that case, was just to drop a size and make it small cap. So I think that that's a very cool way for you to apply. And remember, you can always bring it inside your amazing CC Libraries so everyone on your team can access to it and of course promote their consistency when creating documents. Okay, talking about consistency, just remember that I skipped one important part, although I'm sure everyone is familiar with it, which is parent pages. Parent pages work like background, again, ensuring consistency. We have the opportunity, every time that we have a title here, we can just drop it. Let's see. This is page number three. I can go ahead and simply drop my background over there. Also, if I go in normal view mode, it tells me where the text is supposed to start. So not only gives me consistency in the look of what every cover looks like, but I also have options because I can create as many as I want, here it is, and I can keep changing the background over there to whatever I want it to be. Also, you can name them appropriately. I have here cover sections so you can inform your team of what these parent pages are about. But I want to push it a little bit more. So what if I want to add an image, maybe like a Photoshop file into this? Command D is the shortcut to bring up the place dialog box. And from here, I have an image section that I've created inside Photoshop that allows me to have this lovely image that will work great with my section. So if I bring it back to page three, maybe we can change the color to something nice and contrast-y. Let's see if we have a purple. If not, maybe we have a blue, and we can bring it back down here. So if I use this image as a section divider, how do I provide my team access to all the other opportunity that we have inside of this specific Photoshop file? They don't know how to use Photoshop. Well, what I'm going to do here is, first of all, copy and paste the entire document in these other sections. I'm just going to use this one as an example. So see these two are exactly I copy and pasted in place the same image. Now let's say that I don't have access to the Photoshop file, it's just integrated and linked and embedded within my document. But also, I don't really know how to use Photoshop. And just to give you a look at what this document looks like, it has different layers. So my designer has been so nice and kind to give me like a right option, a left option, and multiple images that I know that I can safely use because they are part of the brand guidelines. So how do I make sure that they show up consistently? Well, I can ask the designer to go ahead and change it and save it and then relink it, but what if I'm not there, speaking with him, of course. Now if I go back to my links panel because I've updated the document, I'm going to have a little error here that says, "Hey, the designer has been changing that, so you might want to go ahead and update it." But that's quite a long way of working. How do we make sure that we have access to all these different layers? Well, there is a fantastic tool inside InDesign that is called Object Layer Options. You'll find that under the Object panel, Object Layer options will allow you to trigger the visibility of all the different layers inside your InDesign document but directly pinching them from the Photoshop file that you have. Now what you want to make sure that you have your preview turned on so we can see that happening live. And also, you want to make sure that you keep your layer visibility override. The other option here is to use the Photoshop layer visibility. Unfortunately, that will not allow this trick to happen because it will anchor it. So if you want to lock it, and if you want to make sure that nobody can change it, you go back to the Photoshop layer visibility. But if we now keep the override, look what happens here. I can, nice and easy, switch between the different options that were inside Photoshop without even having Photoshop open. In fact, I can go ahead and just close this image, I don't need it to be open, and I can still jump back into Photoshop from another machine and have fun and choose within those safe images that are on brand. And again, this is always to promote the consistency. So you're giving options, but at the same time, you're giving access to your team to be able to leverage the options. And this is with a linked asset. What about the heroes that I was talking about which are the CC Libraries? So let's say that I'm using an image here. I'm going to go back to my CC Libraries. I have my designer who just brought in here also the logo but all these other images. I'm going to go and use this image. I'm going to place it inside this document, Shift, Option, Command E to make sure that it fills the document. How do we make sure that now this image look exactly always the same even if someone updates it? Well, we already done the first step which is we dragged it from the CC Library. And we can see with this little icon here that tells us that this is a CC Library linked item. That means if the designer in his own realm, in his own home, has this item from our company brand shared library double-clicks on it because remember, whenever you place anything inside the CC Library, this is not linked to your machine. It creates a copy that lives within your Creative Cloud or shared if you give access to someone else. So this is a separate one. So if you still have the same image on your machine that will not be touched, this is a separate asset itself. But look at that what happens if I go on Photoshop or the designer at home goes in, for example, let's see, just bring a solid color in, and just for the sake of keeping things consistent and on brand, because my team also has access to the CC Libraries, it can quickly go back to the color palette that we have displayed inside my brand guideline, and I can safely select any of the colors that are part of my brand guidelines. And then the designer who does it thinks maybe just multiplies it or does whatever we want with it. Once the image gets saved, afterwards, look what happened. It gets automatically updated inside the library. So remember what was pink is now orange. But what happens is that once the designer is doing that at home inside their Photoshop because we are sharing this powerful brand CC library that was linked inside my brand guidelines, once I go back inside InDesign, and I was here with you, and this is exactly the same document that we were styling before, that image gets automatically updated. And imagine that happening throughout your team. So if there is an issue with an image and we call the design team to update or to make a change, we know and we are safe and secure that that consistency gets immediately represented throughout. Okay. So this is the importance of using images. Now I want to give a quick shout out to one of the new features that I have here. I actually use it. Let's see if I have it. We can try with any image, really. So the beauty of working with GenExpand. So if I have a very specific image here, so this is a brand new feature that is now sadly InDesign, did not make the Keynote, but I've been speaking with our execs because I know there are so many people that love InDesign. So hopefully, we'll bring InDesign to the keynote soon. We have a brand new tool that is part of our Firefly GenAI family that allow us to expand the image. So if I want to use this image size because that's the size that I have to use in my document, but I have imported an image which is, you know, that's a safe image. This is part of my library. This has been picked for my brand. I want to be consistent. I don't want to go and search for another image. How do I solve that? Well, all you have to do is to select an image and InDesign understands that the image file is not completely filling the frame that you have there. So in one click, all you have to do is to select GenExpand, which by the way, because it's already understanding that is the nest suggested option for you. That's what the little bar is for. The contextual text bar is always there in every application to suggest you the next available and suggested nest step for your workflow. So in this case, to prompt or not to prompt, in this case, with an image that is quite complex, I will just leave it to do its thing if I want something specific. Maybe if you're using Gen Fill in Photoshop, or if you want a very specific color to it, I will probably type to it. Here is telling us that we are being safe and using an image that was our property. So what it's doing here, because I left it unprompted, it's actually looking at the entire image. This is not content aware. I don't know how many of you are familiar with Photoshop, but we used to have content aware. Content aware looked at the border, at the pixels, and then just sort of create something that matched the pixels. What GenExpand does, it looks at the entire image, and boom, here it is. Nobody knew that the image was and what it was supposed to be. It kind of extended it. And of course, I have the opportunity to choose between three different variations, and I can go ahead and generate as many as you want. And of course, all the feature, we also had the opportunity just to type if you want to create an image from scratch, making sure to go and check back with your brand guidelines and making sure that the image is on brand. But this is just quite exciting. Now something that I wanted to share with you though is that because I talked about the power of the CC library, because this asset is now being edited, as you can see, this is embedded and is linked file but is not part of the CC Libraries anymore. That means that the magic that I've just made happen with the Photoshop, editing with this image here, you cannot repeat because it is a different image now that we have placed. But you always have the option to bring that image back in inside my libraries, so now this becomes an extended asset. I do that all the time at Adobe because I create a lot of assets. So I go ahead and give like even with our logos, as soon as the new logo implemented, make sure that you do give access to your colleagues to these libraries because I inform and give the team a lot of different assets that they can work with, making sure that we always protect the brand because we started from an image that was approved and was part of our brand guidelines. Okay, I can't believe the time. I really want to share with you how to publish these online and Adobe Express. So I'm going to switch gears and talk about how to access, update, and share this beautiful document that you've created on brand. Very easy. Once you created your file. Make sure to save it and then head from the file menu up to publish online. That is the place where you will transform and transfer your InDesign file to the web. It's going to give me a bunch of errors. I apologize, I am already aware of that, but what we need to look at here is the Publish Online document options. You can choose a title and a description that if you do share online, will be shared. Like for things like Facebook. If you ever put that link that into Facebook, it will grab that description or the title will appear in the tab of your machine, you also have the opportunity to choose which page you want from your document to be the first page and the image formatting. You can also allow viewers to download a document as a PDF. People do appreciate that, so I would recommend to have that option ticked so they can take it on their machine. Maybe if they're flying, they don't have access to Wi-Fi and so on. And then if you are tracking the document, you can also plug there from your channel, maybe using MailChimp, maybe you're using Instagram or Facebook. You can have a measurement there in order to track it. But most importantly, especially because we're talking about internal documents, branding guidelines, what you can do here, and this is brand new for InDesign, we have a password protect this. This little toggle here is a small thing, but so many people wanted it so bad because otherwise, once you put the link out, everybody that has the link can access the link because that's just online. But with password protection, you will be able to add the password. I'm going to add mine. Help me remember it because I always forget my password. So I'm going to do KladiMAX24. Hopefully it's long enough. Yes, okay. Maybe I'll copy it. Once you go ahead and publish, what it's doing now is reading your InDesign file but also grabbing all the interactive links like you've seen before, we had the mail to, we had the library's links, the assets links, and it's bringing everything out to the web and it's ready to go. Oh, look at that. You can also copy link and password, maybe for those like me who forget the password.
Now you can go here and simply paste. And we have the password there. Can you see that the password is already inputted in. This will guarantee me a direct access to it. Oops. Maybe not. Let's see. I'm going to go ahead and delete that. So the password is just linked there, maybe if you have to send it to an email. Sorry, It's the first time that I've seen that myself is actually, as I said, a very new feature. So I went and deleted the password, and now I get prompted to the actual link that we can use. I have the password there. So clearly, I've forgotten now because I've been talking so much. Here it is. Okay, so I think that the copy link and password is something very useful if you have to share it with someone. So you automatically you don't have to write the password again, otherwise you just have the link and probably are going to have to save that password somewhere. But now the beauty is that after I inputted my password, I now have access to my entire document that we've been working on. And I know it looks like a little bit of a mess right here, but you get the gist. That's exactly how these brand guidelines were published online. And in fact, let's clean the mess up. Those are, I know, real quick, those are parent pages. So let's use the power of InDesign. So what if I share that link and, oh, my God, I forgot, and I didn't see that all these pages at the parent page apply to it, it looks like an absolute mess. How do I fix that? Okay, so I'm just going to go ahead and change this parent page here. I'm just going to maybe give it none. So let's say all these messy thing, this I can delete real quick okay. So I make all the changes that I need. This looks like a little bit neater. I'm just going fast here for the sake of time. And I save my document. Now in just one click, I can go back to File, Publish Online same path, and instead of selecting Publish New Document, I'm going to use Update Existing Document. I'm going to get rid of the password just for speed again, and I want to make sure that, let's see, I have my branded presentation deck as my advanced pages. This is still my first pages. It looks like I'm ready to go, and it's asking me, are you sure that you want to update the document? The reason why we have this safeguard here is because everything that you have uploaded before will be scraped, and this new saved document, by the way, you can also update different documents. So even if you create a different document, your published online document and link will always be stored. So even if you have a link and you create a brand new document, you will be able to inject it to the same link. If you made a mistake, nobody needs to know. If there is an update for your branding guidelines, all you need to ask your colleagues is to refresh and hopefully here, see, I got rid of that purple text on the cover, I got rid of the image that just by quickly changing the parent pages, but most importantly, I had the opportunity by simply refreshing. So no mess. "Oh, is this link? Oh, no. Is this other link? Oh, no, sorry, I got the wrong link." None of that because you can update this as many times as you want from different document. Now I know that we are out of time, but it's worth to share with you just one more thing, which is the express integration. So once you finish with your file, go to File and then Export to Adobe Express. This is quite amazing. I got some other text there. It doesn't matter. It's Lorem ipsum. Now what this box is telling you is now that you exported to Express differently from the link update that you can always keep updating, now that you create this web browser version that leads within Express is actually creating a complete separate document. So you will not be able to update this. You'll be able to push it back to Express but not to update it. But look at the beauty of this. So now you have used and leveraged the brand guidelines and the consistency and Photoshop and all these beautiful tools to create this presentation, which you can now push to Adobe Express, share with your team, and they will be able to edit it using exactly the same font that we beautifully styled with our font style, with our nest styles, with our GREP. Everything is there, ready to be accessed, ready to be edited. Starter change? No problem. You can easily go there and change it, but most importantly, share it with your team so you all are on the same page respecting the brand guidelines. And I think it is time to say goodbye. If you have a question, I'm here. And of course, you have the survey slide. But most of all, thank you so much for joining me this morning.
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