Subtitles of the Movie

Helper is a generic term that I use to refer to different parts of a program that help you with different things; guides, rulers, grids, that type of thing. The cool thing about helpers in Adobe products is that they are very similar across the board especially when taking the main design applications InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator. Now if you want to have something show such as rulers or a grid and it's not showing typically you would go to the view menu at the top of the screen and you can find those items there. Now they might be in a different spot depending on the application but almost always you will find it under the View menu. Now I'm going to start our little lesson on Helpers here by talking about rulers. I'm starting out here in InDesign under the View menu you can have your rulers show by selecting Show Rulers. If your rulers are already showing such as you can see mine here are already showing - then Show Rulers will become Hide Rulers and you would click here or Ctrl R to hide the Rulers. Rulers are especially helpful in page layout applications. If you want to know how far away something is from another object using the rulers is an essential tool for that. What's really cool about Adobe Rulers is you'll notice as I move my mouse curser around that there's a little curser here and a little curser here on the left ruler and as I move around you'll see that these indicate where my mouse is according to the ruler. Now this obviously isn't in inches so I can simply right click and select the unit of measurement that I prefer. Right now it's set to points. I can set it to picas or inches or whatever I feel like. Now just a side note about InDesign. Because InDesign's main feature is page layout, with these helpers it usually does a little bit more than Photoshop or Illustrator. For example, we can right click on the rulers in Photoshop or Illustrator to change the unit of measurement - no big deal. However, in InDesign if I right clicked on this and selected inches, notice that the top changes to inches but the side ruler is still set to points. But with InDesign we can have two separate units of measurement on each ruler. That's very cool. I'm going to right click and select points again just to reset this - we're on the same page. Sometimes you might want to use a different point here as the starting point. By default the upper left hand corner is the origin point, the 0 0 mark. But if I click this little corner point I get this little icon here and as I let go notice that it will reset the rulers to be 0 0 at that point. To get your rulers back to the way they were just double click that little icon and it resets itself. Now once we have rulers showing we can simply click and drag in that area and drag down to create guides. Guides are very helpful for page layout. Also very helpful for web layout. You might go and drag a few of these guides and space them out perfectly so that you'll know basically what your page is going to look like. It might then help to adjust accordingly before you bring content in. Now just as with Rulers, InDesign is a little bit more powerful here. For one as you can see here we have a page spread here. We have two separate pages as I drag down a guide, if I go to the left or right it will make a guide that only applies to the left or right page. To make a guide that goes across pages, drag down a guide and hold down the Ctrl key on the PC or the Command key on the Mac. And although this is a little bit advance for this stage in the game, guides in InDesign can be put on their own layer. You see in Photoshop and Illustrator guides are just guides. They are just there. But in InDesign you can make them layer specific which means that you can turn them off when you want them off. This is a very powerful feature of InDesign and again it will make much more sense when we get into InDesign and talk about the layers and stacking order there and in Illustrator as well. Finally if we go to the View menu under Grids and Guides in InDesign we have a couple different grids. A Baseline grid and a Document grid. The Document grid is more a kin to the grid you will find in Photoshop and in Illustrator. And you can change the units of measurement for these grids - the spacing of the grids in other places of the programs. And basically here I just want you to be aware that grids exist as your drawing, making shapes, laying out your page, grids can also be a great asset. And again you'll find the same thing in Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign all across the board.