What’s New in InDesign

[Music] [Terry White] Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome back to one of my classes, for those of you who have been in my class before. And for those of you who are new, welcome. Today, we're going to be taking a look at what's new in InDesign, and I've got some cool things I want to show you. So this should be fun, at least for me. Hopefully, it'll be fun for you too. I also want to just point out there's a QR code up on the screen right now. Leave it for another 60 seconds or so. And if you grab that QR code, that will take you to all my links of everything I do, including my YouTube channel, which has thousands of free videos for everything and all Adobe products. So be sure to subscribe because I'm still just shy of 500,000 subscribers, and it's just bugging me that I just can't get to that number. So it's free. You don't ever have to watch a video. Just help me out. Just subscribe. Just click the Subscribe button. Turn off the notification, whatever. Anyway, now that the begging's over, let's go ahead and get into what we're going to be talking about. Today, we're going to be talking about what's new in InDesign. And this is a challenging class for me, not because it's InDesign, because I've been using InDesign since day one, since before it was InDesign, version one. So I've been using InDesign since its inception, PageMaker before that, QuarkXPress before that. I've taught all of these products before. This is not new. What is new or what's harder for this class is that InDesign is such a mature product that doesn't get a ton of new things. So I can remember in a couple years past, I'm like, "That's it? We waited a year for a new color space? That's it? That's all we got." So I'm right there with you. I'm always pushing the team to give us more, and this time they did give us a little bit more. So I'm going to take time to show you, obviously, all the new things that are relevant in this release that just came out this past Monday, but also highlight a couple things along the way that may have come out in the last few months that you may have missed. And there's one big thing I'm saving till the end, and I think that will kind of change a lot of people's lives, especially for InDesign users that have been using InDesign for years, and they hand off things to clients for them to continue working with. I think that this new workflow will really help you a lot. All right. So that's the QR code for now. We're going to pop back over to InDesign. Let me get my note up because I don't want to miss anything. I just want to make sure I cover all my bullet points...

And let me go to it real quick.

And...

I should be looking right at it. Why am I not... Oh, there it is. Okay. Got it.

Okay. Cool.

And I think we hit the first bullet point I missed in the first class, so I will not miss it this time. All right. Here we go. I want to be on this document, and we're going to start here. So InDesign, version I don't know. What is it? 25, 26 now? It is version 20. Version 20 as of Monday. Of course, you update this in your critical cloud apps like you always do, and it will ask you if you want to get rid of your old version, which you should. I can't imagine, unless you're keeping it around for plug in support or some other reason. I can't imagine keeping both versions. Also, it will ask if you want to carry over your preferences. And, again, that's personal choice. That's up to you. I usually don't because I want to start with a fresh set of preferences. But again, it's up to you. All right. Once you get InDesign loaded, the next thing you'll notice, and this is the thing I forgot to share, on my first time doing this week, is that there is a brand new User Settings. And by the way, anytime you see a blue dot that means it's a new feature. So there's a brand new Export User Settings and Import User Settings. So what this will help you do going forward, those preferences I talked about, if I were going to update the version 21, I would export my settings first, so I have all the settings I like, "Update to 21." Don't keep any preferences. And then import those settings. That way I get a fresh clean start of InDesign but with my settings. Also, if you go into a different machine, which is really what this is intended for, then you can take your settings with you to that machine. So little thing, not huge. Not a big banner item. Not going to change your world, but a nicety. A nice to have. All right. So export and import user settings, brand new, under the File menu. All right. Trust me. It gets better after this. Next up. Let's go in and let's talk about...

Generative workflows. So, as you know, a year ago, it's been a year, and it seems like it's been 20 years already. A year ago, we introduced Generative Fill in Photoshop. It kind of really changed the game. And for a lot of people, "Oh, my God. Yay. AI." For a lot of people, "Oh, no. AI, I hate this. Don't ever show me this ever again." And I can't control where you are on that spectrum. What I can do is show you how I think generative AI is useful in an InDesign workflow. It's a buffet. You take what you want, you don't want it, don't use it. You want it, use it, and I'll show you the implications of using it. So I'll give you my first example, so I'm going to skip Gen Fill. I'm going to go right to the new one which is Gen Expand and I'm going to select a frame, hit Command-D, Control+D on Windows. And I'm going to go into my computer, and I'm going to go to my folder with my images, and I'm going to grab this image of I want the image of Sarah. Sarah K. All right. So I open this image up, and it comes in, and it looks like it's doing a fit to frame because it's a vertical image in a horizontal frame, and we've all been here. So you have choices. You can do this. You can fill the frame proportionally, and then, of course, move the image down.

Now, by the way, notice I'm using a grabber hand, I'm moving the image down, I'm guessing where I should be. Don't guess. InDesign will tell you exactly what you're doing. So let's undo, undo, undo.

I've been showing this feature for 20 years and I call it, I've dubbed it, patient user mode. Patient user mode means that if I just click and grab, I'm moving a frame and I don't know where it is until I let go. If I click and hold down and count to two, oh, look, I can see what I'm doing and move it down exactly where I want it to be. So patient user mode is still there. Still works great. All right. And obviously that's not a new feature. But here's the problem. I can get her face in. Great. We can see who she is, but the original purpose of this shot, especially for Glamour Magazine, was the outfit. And now we're not seeing the outfit in this horizontal frame with this vertical shot. So in the past, I might have done something like fill in a different image behind it if it has to be this shape. Put a color or gradient in the background if it has to be this shape. In other words, I'd work around it. Because if I only had this vertical shot, and this is the one they wanted to use, I'm kind of screwed, because either I got to convince them this should be a vertical frame, which that's what I'm really trying to do, or I got to tell them that, you know, I got to do some workarounds to get this to work. So here's my first great use case for using the general workflows. So next, kind of new feature is the contextual taskbar. Contextual taskbar started a year ago in Photoshop, and it was where you would go put your text prompt in. But now it's become this general purpose taskbar that's usually predicting what you might want to do next in context to what you have selected. So since I have this frame selected, and it sees the frame is bigger than the image, it's prompting me to say, "Hey, do you want to use generative expand?" or "Do you want to re-link a better image that's horizontal?" So it's predicting what I might want to do. So I'm going to go ahead and say Generative Expand. No need to type a prompt in usually when you're doing Generative Expand because you just want to fill in the rest of the frame with the existing image. So I don't need to type anything in. I can just hit Generate. Now when I do that, two things happen. It gives me a progress bar, and it brought up some variations that I had done before on this document, which we're not going to use any of those old ones because we're going to do all new ones today. So when it finishes, I'll get three variations of this shot and I already love it. Even the first variation, I would absolutely love to use. But let's see what number-- Always check because sometimes you think the first one's the best one, and then, "Oh, my God. Two's even better. Oh, my God. Three's even better." So don't get so sold on the first result because you can go look at other ones. Now to that point, I recorded this video before I left for MAX last week. And when I recorded it, I was doing the post processing here, and, of course, too late to rerecord it because I'm not in my studio anymore. And I was zooming in in the video to show you what the result looked like. And when I zoomed in, I should have zoomed in before I left the studio because this one looks fine. Her sleeve was completely blurred. 'Cause keep in mind let's undo.

It didn't have a sleeve to work with. It had to build it. So the variation that I chose zoomed out looked fine, and her sleeve, when I zoomed in, was completely messed up. The other two variations were fine. I just didn't pick them. So let's go back, and there we are. We can go back again. Now speaking of this is a good chance to talk about the going back and forth that I've been doing. There's also a brand new panel, and I wasn't going to talk about it yet, but now is a good time to introduce it.

The History panel. Let's pull that off for now. The History panel is showing everything I've done since I opened the document. Now that's not new to InDesign. It is new to see it visually, but InDesign has always had unlimited undos. You could literally undo everything you've ever done to the document while it's open all the way back to the beginning. Problem was, once you got 4 or 5 or 10 steps in, who's going to remember what step number 25 was? I don't know how many undos I need to do to get back to where I want to be. Now you have a visual representation of it, and they're labeled as best they can. So I can go back to when I moved it. I can go back to when I replaced the empty frame with that and go back to when I placed. I can go back to when I deleted the other stuff before you got here. I can go back to any of this because I can go all the way back to when the document was open and my history is there while the document's open. So this is visual, it's called history because that's what it is in Photoshop. I'd call it visual undos and redos. Now there's some hidden things that you need to know about this. Let's say I got to this one, that one, and I like it and I like it so much that I want to create a whole different document from this result. And I'll come back to this one and work on it. If you right click on any history state, you get the option to start a New Document with that history state. So that's cool. I can go back in time and say, you know what? Before I get too carried away experimenting, let me save this as a separate document. Then I can go keep experimenting, and that way I got my safety to come back to. The other thing is that you can delete a history state, but it's not a history leapfrog. In other words, if I delete-- If I go back to the Replace and I delete it, everything forward gets deleted too.

So basically, you're saying, "I messed up. Go back to when it's good. Delete all that experimentation because I don't like it." So if I go back to this and say-- Or here, let's go back to the Move. There we go. I go back to the Move and Delete.

It's warning me, "Hey. The move will delete and all the following states, and you can't undo this." So it's the one thing in InDesign it won't let you undo. So, yep, I'm back to where I placed it. It was in the center. I hadn't done Generative Expand yet. None of that's there anymore, and I can't undo it. It's gone. So it warned you, you do that delete, it's gone, gone. All right. Great. So now I'll go back to the Move tool, patient user mode, move it over to where I want it to be. Great. And it moves there now, and I go into my Generative Workspace.

There we go. Generative Expand. Sorry. And Generate.

And see those original variations are gone too because, again, it went back in time and got rid of all that stuff. So it's like it never happened.

Wouldn't you love to do that? Go back in time? Make some stuff never happen.

All right. So here we are again.

First one, second sleeve's kind of funky. Third one, third sleeve's kind of funky. Now let me undo this. I want to show you something. I want to see if it'll do it. I moved it over too far. Let me move it over a little bit more this way. All right. Now generate again.

I want to see if it'll do it this time. It did it month or Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday. And it was a good example to show people.

All right. That one looks okay.

That one looks okay.

That one looks okay. But the second one is kind of starting to show what I meant.

The arm is straight here, even though the lines start to get a little messed up. And then the arm literally has a curve in it. And you got to look for stuff like that because Generative AI is not perfect. So generate-- Oh, you need an arm, but the arm as-- It was even more exaggerated yesterday on this. The arm was curved after the elbow. So it was literally like she had like a half C as an arm. So just keep that stuff in mind when you're looking at it. Examine, especially something with a pattern in it, like this jacket, and just make sure or this dress, whatever it is, just make sure it's got what you want in it. Now luckily, it didn't have to do the hand. The hand was already there. Definitely, if you're doing hands, check fingers, check counts of limbs and fingers and toes and whatever else you're generating, make sure it has only the number you want. All right. Great. So that is Generative Expand. Now here's the-- That's the bonus. That's the great part. Here's the downside because my job is to tell you not just good things but also the things that might be a gotcha.

When I recorded this video and I shared it, I shared it accidentally a little early and some people started watching it and started commenting, and then I pulled it down. But one of the first comments and I didn't think about it until someone said it. They said, "Hey, when you're doing the generative stuff, is it high resolution?" And I think about it because Generative Fill has always only been 1024x1024 resolution.

I didn't ask, but my 99% guess is that this is still only 1024x1024. So it may not be the resolution you need for a high quality print, even if you do do this and you do like it. So just keep that in mind. Now the workaround has always been if you need higher resolution, do it in smaller pieces. So don't generate a whole big page. Generate smaller things a little bit at a time. So for example, Generate Expand, expand a little bit, then expand a little bit more. So you just keep moving the frame out until you fill the whole thing. That way, you'll get 1024 blocks as opposed to one big 1024 image. All right. So just keep that in mind, and we're about to see that example right now. So I'm going to go here. And now because I selected an empty frame, it doesn't say Generative Expand. It says text to image. So I can click text to image, and it brings up some sample prompts. That's fine. I don't need a sample. I know what I want to do. And I want to do modern handbag. Spelling does count. I want it to be a photo when it's done, and I'll hit Generate.

All right. And here's the problem, it's cropped.

It's cropped because there was one thing I didn't pay attention to when I said generate or when I went into the prompt itself. Let's go back to it. Aspect Ratio.

So Aspect Ratio defaults to square. This is not a square frame.

InDesign introduced something with this feature that isn't even in Photoshop. It isn't in Illustrator. It isn't in the Firefly website. It doesn't exist anywhere else except InDesign, and I'm pretty pleased about it.

In Firefly, Photoshop, Illustrator, wherever you're generating from, you have a choice of square, wide, portrait tall, or 16x9 wide. That's it.

I don't know what this frame is and I guarantee it's none of those things exactly.

Frame dimensions.

Thank you, InDesign engineer gods. All right. Here we go. Frame dimensions now generate that modern handbag.

Perfect. No cropping required. No Gen Expand required. It's the exact size of the frame. Same thing over here. Let's do another one. Let's do a slightly exaggerated prompt, Text to Image, Frame dimensions, and I want to do modern handbag on a glass table surrounded by fashion jewelry.

Go.

Beautiful. Perfect fit. By the way, I didn't even go look at the other ones. There's that one. There's that one. I'm going to stick with number one. Same thing here. I didn't look at these.

Oh, I like number two better. Number two is the winner. Okay. So thank you. Thank you. I like it too. All right. Let's talk about the thing I just did here. These handbags don't exist, so no one can buy them. They're not ads. They're really decoration. They literally are just decoration in this. So when would I do this? When I need to show a concept. When I need to show my design and what it's going to look like when you give me the real handbags, when you give me the real photos, when you give me the real jewelry, that's going to go here because generating stuff that's fake is literally just, like I said, you could use it, for example, in a newsletter or whatever. But this isn't an ad 'cause you can't buy those things. So it's really just FPL, replacement only. That's what it looks like.

Give me the real photos. Let me go take the real photos as a photographer and then we'll put those in.

So that's another way to use it is for concepting and showing a client this is what your design could look like when you give me the real stuff. All right. Next step.

Go back to Menu.

Here's another one. So when you do a save, you've been doing saves and save as is for since the beginning of time. Notice my save is already grayed out because it already saved. When you do a save-- I'll explain that in a second. When you do a save as, you now have a choice. You've always been able to save it to your hard drive, whatever hard drive you want it on since day one, since InDesign one. But now you now have the option to save it as a Cloud Document. Finally, right? I know. Photoshop's had it for years. Illustrator's had it. Now one person's happy that it's on asset.

So finally, I would love to know why you said finally too. I want to know your reason behind it. But let's talk about it. So when I save it as a Cloud Document and I'm going to call this, what's today? Wednesday? Let's call it Wednesday. When you save it as a cloud document, you can put it in a folder. You can make your own folders. You can organize your cloud space the way you want. But, basically, what you're doing is you're not saving it to your hard drive. You're saving it to your Creative Cloud space. What's the benefit of doing that? There's a few. First benefit is that when I save it to a cloud document, I go to another machine that I'm logged into with my Adobe ID, it's there. Everything's there. I don't have to do anything special. I don't have to transfer it. I don't have to save it to a server. I don't have to do anything. It's cloud document. I just go to my cloud documents. I go to InDesign file open, point to my cloud documents, and it's there. Number two. There is a Share for Review feature where you can share your InDesign document with others. They get a link to open in a browser. They can make comments, and that has to be in the cloud in order to do that. Number three.

Let me go ahead and save it first.

When you do a Publish Online, it is now publishing that document online from your Creative Cloud space. Now publish online has also got two new features. Let's go to Publish Online.

And for those of you who are unfamiliar with publish online is, Publish Online lets you take your finished InDesign documents, so after everyone get good comments and you implement the feedback or not, and you now want to publish the document itself, the finished document, and let anyone be able to look at it in a browser. That's what this is. So they don't need InDesign. They don't need a Creative Cloud account. They don't need an Adobe ID. They just need the URL, and they can go look at your document, page through it, see the interactions, click links, play videos, whatever you've done to the InDesign document, they can do in their browser, which is awesome.

Two things are added this year. Number one, people ask for the ability to add a Password Protection. So if I share the original link to Joe and Joe says, "Hey, Mike. You want this? Hey, Anne. You want this? Here's a link." You would also have to set a password. There's just-- There's that. The password doesn't restrict anyone from using it if they know the password. So it's just one extra security step. It stops from someone from stumbling upon the URL and being able to look at your document because they wouldn't know the password. That's what it's really for. So you can enable password protection, create a password for it, must be 8 to 20 characters in length and have numbers and letters. All right. The second one, which I knew was late coming. I don't know if it's going to make it in this release.

This is great for companies that say, "I don't want to host it on your site. I can't. My IT department won't let me. Blah, blah, blah." Okay. Here's the HTML5 of this document. You go set it up on your own servers, your own web servers. You share it out your way in your own company environment. So for people that need to do that, you now can.

I've not looked at the HTML5. I'm not verified, not tested it. Literally, it just came out Monday. So matter of fact, I knew it was in the bullet points of my list of things coming as a maybe. So I didn't even see it until I did this class earlier. All right. So it's there. And someone said, "Oh, does it do this?" And I said, "I don't know." They said, "Okay. We'll go try it." I said, "That's great. You go try it, because I don't know." Now I just want to point out Analytics too because we used to do analytics for you in the Publish Online dashboard, and they're still there, I think. But there's a big note saying that this is eventually going away. So what we want people to move to is doing their analytics using something like Google Analytics. Put in the Google Analytics number in, that way you use Google to analyze how many people looked at your document, so forth and so on. You track it that way because the dashboard is eventually going away. Or not, I shouldn't say the dashboard. The analytics in the dashboard is going away.

So here's what the dashboard looks like.

There's a test, for example.

That's the actual document. Sorry. I want the dashboard. Go back. So here we go. Stats.

Let me go here.

So, yeah, these are all test documents. So in the last 30 days, no one's read it. Let's say since I published it, Continue. It'll take time to dig all that up. But, anyway, I don't want you getting hooked on this anyway because it's going away. So just know that you used to be able to do that and you still can for a while. All right. Next up. Let's go back to InDesign, and let's look at my list.

Yeah. Let's get an auto style pack. Cool. All right. Next up, let's go down to the "thank you" part of this document. Now the Thank You is in its own frame.

The text under it, which is just-- Lorem Ipsum is on in its own frame. What's new is that now you can select multiple frames at the same time and apply style packs to them. So under your Type menu, you have Auto Style. And as soon as I go to it, it's going to bring up it's going to process the cloud first, but then it's going to bring up the Style Packs panel. Or it didn't bring it up, but here it is. And what are these? So these are groupings of paragraphs-- I'm sorry. Headline style, subhead, body style, bullets and numbering styles, all grouped as a style pack so that you can quickly format blocks of text, multiple frames of text now in one click. Instead of the old way, click headline, click subhead, click body text, so forth and so on. No longer have to do that anymore.

So for example, if I click on the second one, boom, it just formatted everything that it had based on the second one. Click on the third one, third one's done. So now, here's what's going on out there in the audience. I can feel it.

Those are ugly.

I don't want to use those.

Do we have to use those? Are there any more when you scroll down that are better? You're asking all those. I know you're judging, that's okay. And if I scroll down, no, it doesn't get any better. It gets worse.

Okay. They put their best at the top.

Oh, yeah, a really good spat.

Here's the best part of this. You're laughing. You're like, "Oh, thank God. They just got to say something better, I hope." New style pack. Make your own. You never have to use those.

You literally just create your own heading style, your own subhead style, your own paragraph style, your own numbers and bullet styles, and then choose them and name them and you've made your own style pack. Fair enough? All right.

So then, it just works just like I showed you with a click, but it'll be your styles that look good. All right. So heading, you would go to your heading in your document that you already made. So Heading-All Caps for example. Subhead, it would be your subhead whichever one you want to pick, that one. So forth and so on, your body copy, body copy left align all the way down. And you would name this InDesign Wednesday.

Create.

And now you have your own Custom. So you'd never have to go to these. Don't ever click on that panel again unless you just want to laugh. Come back over here, this is where you live. And then you just choose it and use it. But now if I choose that one, it works.

Cool? All right. Auto Style packs. True story. Style packs is not new, the ability to do multiple frames is.

And when this first came out back in 2018, 2019, somewhere around there, I was in the Keynote at the time showing Photoshop alongside Danielle who was showing this. I was like, "Oh, that's cool." I could never get it to work. It never worked. I never recorded a video on it. I never showed it. I never did it even with it 'cause it never worked. Now it works perfectly.

Now it's good. Now it actually lets you make your own and create and choose multiple text frames. So I'm glad-- Oh, and by the way, they're always looking for feedback. Do you like the results? Yes, I do because they're mine. All right.

Next up.

All right. We did the History panel. We did that. Oh, this is going to be fun. All right. Let's do this next one.

Any math people in the house? People that need to do math stuff, math equations, this is for the five of you.

Math is important. I'm a fan of math. I'm just not that good at it. Like, I'm just not like I have a huge math brain. But where people have been asking for years, decades pretty much for InDesign to give you the ability to do math expressions. People that do math textbooks. People that do math documents that they need those expressions in. And up until now, if you wanted that in InDesign, you had to rely on, there's a few great third party plugins. You had to rely on plugins and subscriptions and other products to be able to do that in InDesign. Well, there's a brand new panel. It's under the Window menu and it's called Math Expressions. Built in. No extra subscriptions. No extra plugins.

See, they get it.

Here it is. Tear that off. Put that up there. Now I'm also not going to sit up here and pretend I know what I'm looking at, but let me show you how it works. So I'm going to go to my computer, my desktop here, and my drive where I have saved an example of this. Here it is. Let's open up in the text editor. There it is. This is the math markup language.

I've done code. I've done HTML. I've done all kinds of things. I have no idea what I'm looking at.

But I'm sure people that know know.

So I'm just going to copy it and trust that the people that knew knew.

And then I come here and I say Insert MathML and it's got a sample one. So this is a sample one that it made. I'm just going to overwrite that and paste in the one I just did. Now I'm going to say, "Yes. Take that over to the right and make an expression out of it," and it just did. Now when I say Place, I get my place gun. I can place that anywhere I want, and there's my math expression.

And I can even change the color. I can change the point size. I can make it whatever I need it to be to match the rest of my document.

That's it.

If I need to tweak it, you don't tweak it here, you click, you go back to edit MathML. And again, I'm not going to pretend I know what I'm doing, but I do know numbers when I see them. So let's change that to a nine. Let's change that to a three.

And let's change this to a two. Now this may mathematically not make sense, but there it is. Save and it updates it.

So you would either learn that markup language for the math expressions, which didn't look hard. I just don't know what it is. And then you're all set. You can make whatever expressions you want. And I'm sure when you go back and look at this, like, if I started to decipher it, each one of these looks like it's basically the part-- Well, obviously, it's part of the expression, but it looks like mn is one thing, mo is another thing, mro is another thing. So I would just have to just get a description of what each one of those is. I probably could make up my own. But right now, today, I don't know what those are. All right. Fair enough. Math language markup, math expressions now built in to InDesign at no additional cost. Okay. And...

We're cruising through this. This is good.

All right. I think I'm ready to go to the finale.

I have a document here and this is not new, but now you have the ability for it to auto text wrap around the shape. So Subject Aware Text Wrapping.

Not new. That's been there, but it's cool it's there. And now what I want to do is I want to take this over to-- I want to save it as a cloud document. Or it's already a cloud document, I think. Nope. Save as. Let's save it as a Cloud Document, and you'll know why in a minute. Okay.

Okay. Done.

Okay.

If I want to take this over, this is really a longer document. It's got a lot of things in it.

And let's just focus on the first page.

If I want-- No, actually, let's talk about these pages. This will make more sense. If I want to hand this off to someone else, let's say this is a regular publication.

Bad example. I'm sorry. I used this one last time. This one just works better. Let's say I want to hand this publication off as a regular publication that people need to update. So it comes out every month. This is the August issue. Now we need to do the September issue. We're behind. So if I want to send-- If I don't want-- I designed it. But I don't want to be the one who has to put in the pictures, put in the text, and do that mundane work.

In other words, I just want to hand it off to the person that's going to do the writing and do the pictures and give it to them in a way they can't screw up my design.

Up until now, you haven't really had a great way to do that because it will require the person that you're giving it to have a copy of InDesign.

And even then, there's no real way to lock it down to where they can't mess it up.

So then we have InCopy, which is kind of that workflow, but then that's a whole different purchase, a whole different thing, and it just becomes complicated...

Until today.

You now for the first time under the File menu have the ability to public to Export to Adobe Express.

Now some of you are like, "What's Adobe Express?" And I get that because you're using the Pro Tools. You probably would never use it. If you're a Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign user, you probably already know how to start with a blank page and get what you want done. It's what you've been doing for years. You're a designer. You went to school for it. You've learned it. You know it inside and out. You know what good design is. You know what bad auto style packs are. You know what good ones are. So you've done this.

Adobe Express, let me toggle over to it quickly.

That's what I was in when I did this. This is what Adobe Express is. It's for everyone else.

I like to say it's for my sister. My sister retired from an accounting firm. She was a receptionist. She's not a designer. Never going to be. She's not good at design. Probably never going to be.

She has to create flyers and stuff. Sometimes for work, sometimes for personal needs.

She had InDesign. She was getting okay with it, but she was never really going to spend the money and learn InDesign well.

So what she needs is something that's easy. She could go in with a browser, find a template, and customize it.

That's great.

So that's the Express customer.

The InDesign customer we already talked about, how do we bring them together? Not yet. Not yet.

We're going to bring them together by you designing whatever you want in InDesign, exporting it to Express, locking down the pieces you don't want anyone to mess with, and sharing it as a template that any Express user, even free users can use and replace the placeholders with their stuff and never bother you again, unless they need the design changed. That's what this is. So now if I head over here and I say Export to Express-- Almost.

Here it is.

And everything is clickable, editable, changeable.

So if they wanted to replace a graphic, they could just replace it.

Oh, sorry. Hang on. My Group.

Done. They don't have to know anything else. Just know how to replace things. Now once you bring your InDesign document over to Express before you hand it off to them, what do we want to do? Lock stuff down. I don't want you moving anything. I don't need you to resizing it. I don't need you to do anything else. So for example, this graphic element behind it, it needs to be locked. Don't change it. This text needs to be locked, but you can replace the text. That's okay. Can't change the font, can't change the size, can't move it around, but you could put your text in there. That's what you would do to each part that you don't want people to change 'cause if you don't lock it, they can do anything with it. They can delete it, move it around, throw it away, replace it, whatever. So they get the ability to only do the things that you let them do. And then when you're done, you say Share and you say Make a Template. And that will make a template of this document with everything locked down that you will get a URL to that you can share out and they can use.

Hang on, we're going to do questions in a minute. All right.

I want to bring over-- I want to do one thing first.

I want to bring that American football document over. There's a reason. Because it's got regular text in it. So I'm going to delete all the other pages because I only want to talk about this first page.

All right. Cool. Save. Publish or Export.

Yes. I know the text is overset. That's fine.

Okay. Now this comes over and the text wrap did not maintain well. But anyway, now this comes over. I want to talk about one of the reasons why you would bring stuff over to express even if you're not trying to give it off to someone else.

It has Translation built in.

So I could say, hey, I need this document...

In German...

Italian.

Any Spanish speakers in the audience? Spanish.

And we'll also do Portuguese. Translate.

German...

Italian...

Spanish...

Portuguese.

You'd still want someone to prove it.

But it did the work for me, and it kept the layout as best it could. So that's another reason why you bring stuff over. One more or why you would use it.

Another use case. I know all the products we talked about, Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, I've used them since day one. Photoshop since version 1.02, Illustrator since version 88, InDesign since before it was version 1. So I know how to use them. Why would I ever use Express? Because it's faster. It's easier. Sometimes I just need to get in and quickly get something done and there are things it does faster and easier than the other the big apps. So for example, let's say I want to make something for social media. I want to make a new Instagram, let's just say, Story for now. I want to make one that's based on Photography. So give me a good starting point. Give me a good template to start with.

Great. I want to use this one. Cool. I'm not Shania. That's not me. I need to make some changes. So click on the photo. Where am I going to get the photo from? Well, Express lets you create brands. So I'm going to go get it from my Terry White Photography brand 'cause I got some photos in there. Great. There's one. Oh, sorry. I didn't hit replace.

Select the photo then Replace from a brand. There we go. And now go get that photo. Done. Oh, wait.

I need to move over. Great. Just double click move over.

Oh, wait. I don't want that blocking me. Move that down. That's not my logo. Delete it.

Photography portfolio. Sure that can come down too. That's not my name.

Everything's all here and ready to go easily. Smart guides and all. Now that I got this...

The social media platforms don't really want static content anymore. They love video. And what even if you've never ever edited a video before, you can do it easily in Express. You can even do it from a still image like this. There is now, as of this week, Animation to Animate all. Before this week, you could animate the individual elements, but you had to do it manually one by one. So now I can say, make a bloom out of this and now it made a video to where it just automatically brings in that text as a bloom. Now I could also animate the photo too because I had made it the background. It doesn't know to animate it. So let's go ahead and say that I want to animate that in. I want to fade that in.

And I wanted to take more time.

There we go. Go back to the beginning.

And when it comes in, I don't want it to just sit there.

I want Photography Portfolio...

To Animate and Loop.

I want it to breathe.

Like that. And also I want this longer.

So in a matter of seconds, I made a social media video that I can just export and post. I can add audio to it too. I can even do a voice over and talk to it as I'm playing it or just add music. And yes, there's music built in.

So here's the real killer app for this. Whether it's a video or a static post, chances are you want to post this on multiple platforms, and all the platforms have different size requirements. So I'm going to hit Resize, and they're all here. Everything you'd ever want to resize to is here. All right. So I need this to be a TikTok video, which is the same size, Facebook post. I need a YouTube thumbnail.

Great. Duplicate and resize. And also, we now have the ability to do Generative Expand as well. Let me go back to Resize. All right. But anyway, I'm going to go ahead and do-- Sorry. I jumped out of it. Facebook post, YouTube thumbnail, TikTok video, which is the same size. Duplicate and resize and it makes all those sizes for me. Now again, I still need to do a little tweak like on this one.

It doesn't fit properly.

So I need to move that one down, but that video will still play. And, hey, now I got more room, maybe I want the text.

Just get in there.

It's not letting me get to the text.

Show their timing. That's what I want.

There we go.

Move the text over here. Great. And while we're at it, since I have my own brand...

Let's drop my logo into.

And let's lower the Opacity on that logo.

So all of these pages are the different sizes all set and ready to go.

Fair enough. That's my time. Thank you, everyone.

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