Designers or other creative professionals who create digital documents are always looking for ways to make their products more appealing to the user. One way of doing that is to increase reader engagement by building interactive animated effects into their designs. Creating Animations in Adobe InDesign One Step at a Time teaches the reader not only how to add animation to their InDesign documents (via step-by-step exercises) but also helps the reader to choose among the various digital format options for export– ePub (concentrating on the new Fixed-Layout variety), DPS , and PDF. Clear explanations and plenty of full-color graphics will guide the reader through the potentially confusing digital publishing landscape.
Adding animated effects in InDesign documents is a field set to grow. The practice was given a big push in the 2014 release of the Adobe Creative Cloud, when InDesign introduced the new Fixed-Layout EPUB export format. EPUBS exported in this format preserve the layout of the InDesign document, and can include animated effects as well as media, such as audio and video.
Fixed-Layout EPUB has gathered a large following in a short time for a number of reasons. They allow ePubs such as children’s books to display fun animations to enhance the child’s reading experience. They provide businesses a way to create all the interactivity of PDF documents PLUS animations not supported by PDFs. They are a viable replacement for Single Edition DPS folios which Adobe longer supports.
The book will cover over two hundred different effects you can create using the animation features of InDesign. These include animations that don’t appear in the regular animation controls. Each chapter will have four or more exercises that the reader can follow along. The chapter exercises will start very basic and then work up. So the last exercise in each chapter will take more time than the first. This means someone can go through the book doing only the easy exercises in each chapter and come back later to get more involved.
Some of the exercises will use basic shapes. Other exercises will use more advanced artwork. All the artwork, including the basic shapes, will be available for download by the reader so they can follow along with the exercises. In addition, the finished artwork for each exercise will also be provided to allow the readers to see how the animation is supposed to work.
Written a longtime publishing expert, the book thoroughly covers the theory and best practices for creating animations in InDesign CC.
Sandee Cohen has taught for numerous private computer graphics schools as well as New York University, Parson’s School of Design, New School University, University of Hawaii, and Cooper Union, as well as at many publishing houses and design studios all over the United States. She is the senior contributing editor to InDesign Magazine. She has also contributed to InDesign Secrets and CreativePro.com. In addition to the basics of InDesign, she teaches classes on creating interactive documents and ePubs from InDesign.
