How to design a book in InDesign. By The Book Designers. Computer Arts Follow these top tips to create and lay out a book using InDesign. 22 free ebooks for. A Step-by-step guide to create an Interactive eBook. With the use of Folio Overlays Panel in Indesign. You can create a more reader engaging content with the. Design a Paperback Book Cover in InDesign: Tutorial • March 4, 2016 In this simple-to-follow tutorial you’ll learn how to create a full paperback book cover in Adobe InDesign, and take away a template for using with other cover projects. As an example, we’ll redesign a paperback cover for War & Peace, and give it a distinctively modern design. 1. Before We Begin Before we delve into designing our paperback cover for War & Peace, here are a few top tips for creating book covers in Adobe InDesign: • It’s always best to design the front of your cover only first, before you create a full cover, with spine and back. This will allow you to visualise the arrangement of type and images, and judge how well elements are centered on the page. • Duplicate the front page, and keep the original as a stand-alone front cover—this will be useful for online promo shots, and eBook covers. • You should expand the duplicate page using the Page Tool, and expand it to the full width of the cover, including both front and back cover widths and a spine width (we’ll look at this in more detail below). In this tutorial we’ll look at giving Leo Tolstoy’s War & Peace a modern makeover. I’ve tried to recreate the mood and theme of the book, with collage-style silhouettes of St Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow—one filled with an image of floral-printed china, to represent peace and domesticity; and the other filled with a military-style map of Prussia, to represent war. Redesigning covers for classic novels is becoming increasingly common in publishing design; allowing publishers to market vintage classics to new, younger audiences. You’ll learn how to set up a paperback (softcover) version of the full cover in Adobe InDesign and create a collage effect with the help of Adobe Illustrator. We’ll bring in a bit of stylish typography too, to give the cover a modern design. This design style can be adapted to all sorts of book covers—just switch up the silhouette and inside image! Ready to create your cover? Let’s get started. 2. Set up the Cover Template in Adobe InDesign Step 1 Open up Adobe InDesign. Go to File > New > Document, and set the Intent of the document to Print. Increase the Number of Pages to 2 and deselect Facing Pages. From the Page Size menu choose Custom. Name the custom size Paperback Book and set the Width to 132 mm and Height to 197 mm. Click Add and then OK to return to the New Document window. Step 2 Set the Margins on all sides to 11 mm and the Bleed to 5 mm. Click OK to create the new document. We’ll work on the front cover design on Page 1—it’s always much easier to work on the front cover design alone at first. Then, a bit later, we’ll expand Page 2 of the document into the full cover, complete with spine and reverse, with the help of the Page Tool. Step 3 With the rulers visible (View > Show Rulers) click and drag a guide out from the left-hand ruler and drop it onto Page 1 at X position 66 mm, which marks the center point of the page. 3. Give the Cover a Colored Background Step 1 Take the Rectangle Tool (M) and drag onto Page 1, across the whole page, extending up to the edges of the bleed on the top, right and bottom edges of the page. On the left edge, just extend to the edge of the page, not all the way to the bleed. Step 2 Expand or open the Swatches panel (Window > Color > Swatches). Create a new CMYK Process swatch, C=100 M=97 Y=48 K=56. Click Add and OK. From the Swatches panel’s drop-down menu choose New Gradient Swatch. Name the swatch Blue Gradient and set the Type to Radial. Move down to the Gradient Ramp and click on the left-hand stop to be able to edit it. Choose CMYK for the Stop Color and set the levels to C=89 M=49 Y=62 K=62. Click on the right-hand stop and adjust the Stop Color to Swatches. Choose your new swatch, C=100 M=97 Y=48 K=56 from the list below. Step 3 Apply the Blue Gradient swatch to the Fill Color of the rectangle shape. This will apply a lovely subtle gradient to the background of our front cover. 4. Create Collage-Style Graphics Step 1 Expand or open the Layers panel (Window > Layers) and double-click on the default Layer 1 name. Rename the layer as Background Color and click OK. Click on the Create New Layer button at the bottom right of the Layers panel to create a new layer. Double-click, and rename the layer as Graphics. Lock the bottom layer, Background Color by clicking in the blank space to the right of the eye icon, next to the name of the layer in the panel. Step 2 Now we’re ready to start working on our cathedral graphic! File > Save As your InDesign document, and minimize InDesign. Open up Adobe Illustrator and create a new document. To make our collage-style cathedral, we need to first create a basic vector silhouette of the cathedral, and then, a bit later, we’ll fill it with a photo image. You can download a ready-made vector image of St.Basil’s Cathedral. Step 3 Making sure your silhouette has only a simple black fill and no stroke color, select it, and then go up to Edit > Copy in Illustrator. Return to your InDesign document and Edit > Paste the vector onto Page 1 of your document. Hold Shift to adjust the scale of the pasted vector. From the Swatches panel (Window > Color > Swatches), set the Fill Color of the vector to [None] to get rid of the [Black] fill. Step 4 Next up, you need to choose an image to ‘fill’ the cathedral silhouette. I’ve chosen a commons image of an antique map of Prussia, which you can download. Download the image and return to your InDesign document. With the vector selected go to File > Place and choose the map image. Click on the Fill Frame Proportionally button in the top control panel to size the image to the frame. Double-click inside the vector frame to manually adjust the scale of the image, holding Shift while you do so, to make sure you’re happy with the effect. Make sure the image extends across the whole of the silhouette. Step 5 Select the vector and Edit > Copy, Edit > Paste. Ctrl-Click (Mac) or Right-Click (Windows) > Transform > Flip Vertical. Position this flipped cathedral at the top of the page, and go to File > Place. Choose a different image to fill this vector with—to represent ‘Peace’—I’ve gone for a photo of a vintage china plate, which you can download. 5. Add in Typography Step 1 Create a new CMYK Process swatch, C=3 M=0 Y=19 K=0, and rename it Cream. Step 2 Unlock the Typography layer and use the Type Tool (T) to create a series of text frames on Page 1. Here I’ve used the typeface for most of the text, with the central ampersand set in. Set individual characters in separate text frames to be able to have more freedom with how you place the type on the page. Set some of the text in [Paper] and some in your new swatch, Cream. 6. Expand Your Design into a Full Paperback Cover Step 1 Unlock all the layers in the Layers panel, then drag across Page 1 to select everything on the page. Edit > Copy, then scroll down to Page 2 of your document. Edit > Paste in Place to make a copy of the front cover on the page. Now we need to work out the width of the full length of the cover. This will depend on the width of the spine, which in turn will depend on the number of pages inside the book. You can find calculators online for working out the width of a spine depending on the page number and paper weight (gsm), such as the. Using this I’ve worked out that to accommodate for 1456 pages (the length of War & Peace—yup, it’s a long one!) printed on white offset 80 gsm paper, we will need to have a 73.7 mm spine width. The equation for the full width of the cover is this: Front Cover Width (x) + Spine Width (y) + Back Cover Width (x) = Total Width (x + x + y) So, for our War & Peace cover it’s going to be 132 mm + 73.7 mm + 132 mm = 337.7 mm Total Width Step 2 Select the Page Tool (Shift + P) and, holding down Option (Windows) or Alt (Mac), drag the left-hand edge of the page out to the left, increasing the page width to the full 337.7 mm. When you let go, the page width will remain at its new width. If you’re struggling to get the width exactly right as you drag, you can simply type in the correct width in the box at the top-left corner of the workspace. Step 3 From the left-hand ruler pull out a guide to X position 137 mm, to mark out the left edge of the spine. Pull out a second guide to 168.85 mm, which marks out the center point of the spine. Finally, pull out a third guide to 68.5 mm, to mark out the center of the back cover. Step 4 Return to the Layers panel and lock all layers except the Background Color layer. From the Swatches panel, click on the Blue Gradient swatch to select it, then click on the New Swatch button to duplicate it. Double-click on the duplicate swatch to open up the Swatch Options window. Rename the swatch Blue Gradient Spine. Keep everything as it is, just move the right-hand stop on the Gradient Ramp to the left, until you reach about 46%. Click OK to save your edits. Use the Rectangle Tool (M) to create a shape that extends across the spine, and up to the bleed on the top and bottom (73.7 mm in Width). Set the Fill Color to Blue Gradient Spine. The gradient on this is a bit tighter, so the lighter tone will not extend too far away from the central part of the spine. Create a second shape using the Rectangle Tool (M), extending it over the whole of the back cover, up to the left edge of the spine, and up to the bleed on the top, left and bottom edges of the page. Set the Fill to Blue Gradient. Step 5 Return to the Layers panel and lock the Background Color layer. Unlock the next layer up, Graphics. Copy and Paste the cathedral vectors on the front cover, onto the back cover, and arrange them as shown below. You can switch up the fill image of the vectors too, if you like. Paste a couple of vectors onto the spine too—here, I’ve removed the image fill, and given them a pale blue Color Fill, C=57 M=12 Y=21 K=0. Step 6 Lock the Graphics layer and unlock the top layer, Typography. Zoom into the spine and create a few rows of text frames using the Type Tool (T). Type in the title, allowing one text frame for each line of the title, and mimic the typography formatting used on the front cover but at a smaller Font Size. Set all the text to Align Center and make sure the frames are perfectly centered along the center guide. Use the Ellipse Tool (L), and hold down Shift, to create a circle on the center of the back cover. Select the Type Tool (T) and click into the circle to transform it into a text frame. Add a blurb to the back cover, aligning the text centrally. Here, I’ve set the Font to Columna Solid, Size 10.5 pt, Leading 13 pt. Use the swatch colors we created earlier to add a touch of color to the typography. 7. Export Your Finished Cover The artwork for your paperback cover is finished, fantastic work! All that’s left to do now is to export it ready for printing. Of course, you can also export Page 1 of your document as an eBook cover (check the file format requirements of the eBook store before you upload it), but here I’ll walk you through the steps of exporting this as a print-ready file, which is suitable for sending to a professional book-printer. Step 1 Go to File > Export. Choose Adobe PDF (Print) from the Format drop-down menu. In the Export Adobe PDF window, choose [Press Quality] from the Adobe PDF Preset drop-down menu, and adjust the page range from All to Range: 2, just to export your full cover. From the left-hand menu in the window, click on Marks and Bleeds. Check All Printer’s Marks and, under Bleed and Slug, Use Document Bleed Settings. Click Export to create your print-ready cover. In this tutorial you’ve learned how to give a classic book a modern makeover, and set up the full paperback cover in Adobe InDesign. Awesome work! Continue Reading. Ever wanted to easily convert your InDesign layouts to eBooks? With the right know-how, it’s super-simple to do. In this tutorial we’ll look at three different ways you can quickly turn your designs into interactive PDFs or EPUBs, ready for sharing or selling online. How to Create an eBook in Adobe InDesign There are a few different eBook formats to suit different purposes. An interactive PDF is not strictly an EPUB format, but it can be shared easily with others and includes interactive elements that differentiate it from a standard EPUB. Interactive PDFs can be read on most (but not all) eReaders, tablets, laptops, phones, and computers. However, if you’re looking to sell your eBook via one of the mainstream online stores, such as the Amazon Kindle Store or, these marketplaces often require you to provide the eBook in EPUB (‘electronic publication’) format. There are two forms of EPUB—reflowable and fixed layout, the former of which we’ll look at creating in section 2 of the tutorial, below. First, let’s take a look at how you can export your InDesign document as an Interactive PDF. I’m going to be using the free Tuts+ Business eBook,, to demonstrate the exporting process. It’s based on the lessons from this tutorial: •. Laura Spencer Whether you have created a long book document in InDesign or a short multi-page document like this one, the process will be largely the same, with some small variations depending on the version of InDesign software you are using (here I am using InDesign CS6). You’ll also find a selection of on to help you get started if you’re new to ePublishing. How to Export Your InDesign Document as an Interactive PDF eBook I’m a big fan of Interactive PDFs—they allow you to retain the original layout of your InDesign document, along with your choice of fonts, text formatting, and master content. You can also add a dash of interactivity, such as hyperlinks, cross-references to other pages, movies, and page transition effects. Let’s walk through the steps of adding one example of interactivity to your InDesign document, before we go ahead and export. Step 1 On this page (Page 6), I want to add a clickable cross-reference link, which will take the reader straight over to Page 10 of the eBook. I’ve already added a simple hyperlink to a couple of text phrases above (see highlighted in orange in the image below) by Right-Clicking (Windows) or Control-Clicking (Mac) and choosing Interactive > New Hyperlink. We can use a similar process to apply a cross-reference. Highlight the text you want to use as your cross-reference link. You may want to pull this out in a different color (Window > Color > Swatches) to make it clear to the reader that this is clickable text. With the text still highlighted, Right-Click (Windows) or Control-Click (Mac) > Interactive > New Hyperlink Destination. In the window that opens, choose Page from the Type menu at the top. Under Page, choose the page you would like the eBook to skip forward to, in this case 10. You can also specify the zoom settings of the destination page. Fixed is usually a sensible pick, but you can adapt the zoom specifically depending on your preference. Click OK to apply the cross-reference and return to the InDesign document. Step 2 Once you’ve prepared your interactive elements, like hyperlinks and cross-references, you’re ready to export your document as an interactive PDF. Head up to File > Export. Give your eBook a suitable name and save to a folder you can easily find. From the Format menu, choose Adobe PDF (Interactive) and click Save. Step 3 In the Export to Interactive PDF window that opens, ensure that Pages is set to All (unless you want to export only a selection of pages from your document). If your document is set up to single-page spreads, as is my Inbox Zero eBook, you can check Pages. If you’ve created a document made up of facing pages, like a conventional print book, you have the option of choosing whether to export the document as pairs of facing Spreads, retaining the look of your original design. This can look very nice, but note that smaller devices like eReaders, tablets and phones will make the layout appear even smaller, which can make for an uncomfortable reading experience. Check View After Exporting to preview your design after export. You also have the option to Open in Full Screen Mode, which allows the focus to be completely on your eBook. Note that this can be inconvenient for users of multi-media devices like laptops and computers, who may want to browse other things and open other programs while the eBook is open. It’s often worth turning on Create Tagged PDF if you’re planning to allow readers to copy and paste sections of your book’s text perfectly. By doing this, your eBook will tell the PDF viewer that sections of text are arranged as a paragraph or whole word, and not simply units of disorganized text, so when text is pasted from your PDF it will retain its original structure. In the Image Handling section you can adjust the quality of images in your PDF, to either maximize image quality for a polished result or compress image quality to save on file size. For eBooks to be circulated online, a High JPEG Quality and 72 ppi Resolution should be sufficient, but you can increase either or both of these if you want to minimize blurring or pixelation. Step 4 You can also add optional security settings to your eBook. This won’t be appropriate for all scenarios, but can be useful if you’re sharing your eBook with a limited pool of people or wish to retain confidentiality. Click on the Security button at the bottom-left of the window to set a password for opening the document, or a password to restrict editing (a handy little feature if you want to share a draft document with others). Click OK to exit the Security window. Finally, click OK to create your eBook. Your interactive PDF will open up in Adobe Acrobat with your interactivity settings preserved. Make sure to test your hyperlinks and cross-references to make sure everything has been set up correctly, before sharing your eBook with others. How to Export Your InDesign Document as a Reflowable EPUB Reflowable EPUBs are just that—the text isn’t fixed to the page, allowing the content to adapt to different devices. The reader also has the flexibility of enlarging font size to improve legibility, as well as being able to highlight and copy sections of text and insert bookmarks. If you’ve set up your book as a standard text-only layout, this will be easily adapted to EPUB format. If, like my Inbox Zero book, your layout is more detailed, with images, irregular text-flow, columns and color, the final EPUB result will be more predictable if you take the time to simplify your book design. Another option is to export your book as a fixed layout EPUB. I won’t cover how to do that in this tutorial, as it’s an ever-changing process at the moment. Adobe InDesign CC has capabilities to export to fixed layout, but the results can be a bit unpredictable. If you want to preserve the formatting of your design-heavy book, I would recommend exporting your design as an interactive PDF or investing in an InDesign plug-in or specialist fixed layout conversion app. There are more of these appearing on the market, and they’re improving all the time, so that’s well worth looking into if you want to create an EPUB file with the design benefits of a PDF. For now, let’s look at how we can adapt a mixed media book, like the Inbox Zero layout, to a simpler design that’s perfectly prepped for exporting to a reflowable EPUB format. Step 1 I’m going to redesign the Inbox Zero document to make it suitable for EPUB export. If you’ve created a simple book design with text only, the only thing you need to make sure to do is apply Paragraph Styles (which we’ll look at in more detail in Step 2, below) to all of your text, and set up a ToC (Table of Contents), which we cover in Step 4. Let’s start by creating a new InDesign document for our eBook redesign. In InDesign, go to File > New > Document. In the window that opens, set the Intent to Digital Publishing (or Web if your InDesign version doesn’t have DP available). Deselect Facing Pages to create a single-page layout. For the Page Size, set the Width to 612 px (8.5 in) and Height to 792 px (11 in). Different devices will require slight variations in size, but this 8.5 by 11 inch setup is a pretty failsafe option. Click OK to create your new document. Step 2 Now we can start moving some of the original book’s text over into our new layout. EPUBs are designed to be flexible, with readers able to set their own font choices if they wish. So don’t worry about preserving the perfect text formatting in your design. What’s more important is to retain a sense of hierarchy in your text, with headers, subheadings and body text differentiated in size and/or weight. It will make your life much easier if you define these different portions of text as Paragraph Styles, allowing you to create a ToC without a headache. Highlight or place your cursor into a paragraph you want to define as the body text style, and then head up to Window > Styles > Paragraph Styles. Click on the Create New Style button at the bottom of the panel, and double-click on the new style to open the Options window. Name the style ‘Body Text’, and click OK. Repeat the process for sub-heading text, creating a new Paragraph Style and naming this ‘Sub-heading’. Do the same for the headers in your document, creating a new style and naming it ‘Header’. Ensure that all the text in your book has a Paragraph Style applied to it—you can do this by highlighting text and clicking once on the style name in the Paragraph Styles panel. Step 3 If you want to insert images into your layout, you will need to ensure they are anchored in place on the page. If, for example, you want to sandwich an image between two paragraphs of text, you will have to fix the image to this spot to avoid InDesign pushing the image to the end of the section by default when the EPUB is exported. Place your Type Tool (T) cursor between two paragraphs where you would like the image to be anchored. Then go to File > Place, choose your image, and Open it. InDesign will drop the image into the text frame and anchor it in the process, symbolized by a small anchor symbol at the top right of the image. You can shuffle the text around the image to give it some breathing space and adjust the image size without affecting the position of the image in the final EPUB. Step 4 You will need to set up a ToC for your book, even if you have already created a contents page. The EPUB will navigate through your document using a Style-based ToC. Go to Layout > Table of Contents. In the window that opens, you can set the Title of your ToC. Here I’ve used the default ‘Contents’ name. You can also set the Style of your title; here I’ve opted for the Header style I use throughout the book. You want the ToC to automatically create a full list of contents based on the headers in your book. So click on Header in the Other Styles list and click Add to drag it into the Include Paragraph Styles list. You can also adjust the settings for the Entry Style. Here I’ve chosen my Body Text Paragraph Style to keep the text sizing consistent throughout the book. When you click OK, InDesign will load your cursor with the prepared table of contents. Create a blank page at the start of your document using the Pages panel (Window > Pages) and click once onto the page to drop the ToC onto the page. If you want to update your contents page after this, you can do this easily by going to Layout > Update Table of Contents. Step 5 You’re now ready to export your document as an EPUB. Go to File > Export, name your eBook, and choose EPUB from the Format menu. Step 6 In the Export Options window, you can set the EPUB Version from the top of the General section. EPUB 2.0.1 is suitable for older eReaders and devices, while EPUB 3.0 is the more recent version (this is also the version now preferred by most large eBook stores). You can also choose a Cover for your EPUB under the Setup options. Choose to rasterize an image from your first page, or click on Choose Image to add a separate cover image file. • How to Design an Effective eBook Cover Using Adobe InDesign. Step 7 You’ll find more options for your EPUB under the Image and Advanced tabs in the left-hand menu. You can adjust the Resolution of your images. Pulling them down to 72 ppi will help to reduce the size of your EPUB and will be perfectly fine for most reading devices. When you’ve tweaked the options, go ahead and click OK. If you checked the View EPUB after Exporting button, the EPUB will open in a default program (as I use a Mac, it opens in iBooks). Otherwise, you can navigate to the folder where the EPUB is saved and open it from there. You might want to test the settings you have specified on an eReader or tablet before uploading the file to an eBook store. Conclusion You can now kick back and admire your shiny new eBook. Awesome work! Perhaps you’ve opted for an interactive PDF to maintain the layout of your original book design, or a reflowable EPUB format to adapt to current eBook selling standards. Either way, you’ll have a file that’s perfectly tuned for viewing on digital devices. If you want to check your work against the original, check out the free ThemeKeeper Tuts+ eBook,. EBooks are a great way to get your content out to a wide audience quickly and cheaply, and the process of designing, exporting and selling can be really fun. In this tutorial we’ve looked at two main ways of creating an eBook using InDesign. Let’s take a quick recap: • Interactive PDF—this format preserves the layout of your original design, which makes it great for books with non-traditional designs, like handbooks, picture books, portfolios or magazines. You can also insert interactive elements, like cross-referencing and hyperlinks, to add a special touch to your design. • EPUB—here we’ve looked at how you can create a reflowable EPUB, which is suitable for eReaders and tablets. Readers have the flexibility to enlarge text, bookmark pages and highlight text, which makes it a sought-after format for avid eBook readers. Looking for a little more help with your eBook designs? Check out these tips for creating your own digital magazines and books: • 10 Top Tips for Creating Your Own EPUBs and eMagazines.
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