How to Create Design Systems in InDesign Tutorial

These are just a few not-so-secret tricks I've picked up working with InDesign for the past ten years. Hopefully, you'll be able to use these to save time the next time you're working on a multi-page document. Here's what we're going to cover in a nutshell:

00:00 - Overview
02:35 - Grids and Masters
06:25 - Type Styles
11:09 - Color Swatches

Side note: if you're one of those people who love using Illustrator, but haven't broken into InDesign yet (or don't see the point of it), this video is perfect for you.

But first: design systems. We're not going to go too deep here, but a design system outlines the rules, patterns, and elements that are used to make something look like it should. At its most simple level, a design system outlines basic patterns like color use, typography, and the way you use the space available.

When these patterns are established, it's really tedious to keep entering in the right settings in our design software. When I was using illustrator for most of my layouts, I'd always copy and paste blocks of type just to keep the formatting in place - who does that now?

Lucky for us, InDesign has fantastic features that help us automate the process of creating, using, and updating design systems.

Today we're going to be working on the Pebble Coffee Style Guide - Pebble is a fictional brand that I created (I love coffee). I've already established the bones of a design system here in this document that we're going to edit today.

I'm going to walk you through the process of adapting this style guide to a new brand or reformatting it to fit a pretty significant brand shift. This template file is over 100 pages long, and every page has actual copy on it (not filler text). So if we were going to update the design without a design system and reusable elements in place, it would take forever: it'd be like creating a new document.

Whenever I start something new, I always begin with the bones: the grid. Lets' go ahead and make the grids and guides visible in our template. I have that set to one of the buttons on my mouse, but you can use Command + ? to show them on your keyboard. Notice how our type area is nicely off-center to accommodate the page number? Well, let's say we want to get rid of that and have equal margins all the way around.

Now, pages can have their own grid systems in InDesign, but I prefer to work with masters for grids because you can apply masters to any page, and make big changes to multiple pages at once. Once you drag a master onto a page, all of its elements are applied on-page, and overrides the page content. You can tell if a page has a master assigned because it'll have a little letter flag on its thumbnail. That letter corresponds with the right master above.

So if I go up to our masters pane, you can see that I have a few dedicated to grids. I like nesting my masters as well, so you can see I've applied the A-Grids master to the ones with mouse type headers. It's a master... applied to a master... that gets applied to pages. Welcome to the matrix.

Obviously, we want to edit our grid, so let's double click into the XX master. You can see it's a blank page, with a solid color background, and it has our embedded grid.

As you can see, we have completely transformed the overall look and feel of this document by using the design system features built right into InDesign. 103 pages completely done in just a few hours. If you didn't love InDesign before, you'd love it after this project.

I hope this has been helpful for all you people who are staring down the barrel of a long document project. If you have any other tips about working with design systems in InDesign, I'd love to hear them. Put them in the comment section below - or just say hi! I'll be stalking the comments, as always.

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[wendycervera]

25 years in the biz here....been using InDesign since v.1 and before that...QuarkXpress and PageMaker. These are the types of shortcuts and tools I am always shocked that young designers arent learning! So glad you are showing this. You can be the most kick ass designer on the planet but if you don't have streamlined processes and procedures like the ones shown here that increase efficiency I fully believe you will not make it very far in this field.

[Deckard]

Been using InDesign to create client style guides and design systems for over 10 years too. Other designers kept telling me to use other software... then when I showed them a full brand reference manual with exported digital assets in html and css for online use, they begged me to show them how to create one!

InDesign is LIFE!

[sinuo]

This 15min video just taught me more than my 3-year degree

[msmit]

7:37 this is a really cool tip, having an overview of all the different styles makes it so much easier to edit them.

[eklerrr]

Indesign was and still is one of the weapon of choice to rule them all. Before sketch and figma cool guys used to use it for complex web design systems too.

[RuezgaDaniel]

I'm one of those people who only used Illustrator for layouts and was afraid of using InDesign, but I've been using InDesign for my post-grad job since we are working on a 100+ page report. Man, I've been missing out! InDesign makes creating layouts very easy once you get the hang of it. To anyone hesitant to try InDesign, it's really not hard to get used to it once you put some time into it. Great video! Very useful tips!

[PhenMas]

I love InDesign - glad to see someone talk about it since so many designers hate it.

[NineOneOneFx]

LONG LIVE InDesign! Masterful software! Thanks for sharing these superb and useful techniques Ben!

[charles]

Damn! I've used inDesign for years, and I usually do it per page, which is frustrating. You, Sir Ben Burns, have helped me a lot in these master grids and color swatches. I sincerely thank you for that.

[odukoyajesuseyitan]

I think this is my first time seeing Ben without a cap
Great video, my InDesign skills just got a lot better

[xenoaurora]

As always you and The Futur continue to put out some of the best content available for creatives on youtube, and sell some of the best resources available on the market!

[TheCreatives]

Adobe InDesign is my favorite CC program. I love what you said about Illustrator and how much more efficient InDesign is! That’s what I’ve been telling other designers 😀It’s funny because I see designers using Photoshop as well for type but then it looks pixelated. Thanks for the tutorial!

[veroniqueleduc]

video! I may just need that style guide kit!!! Thanks for this beauty!

[imdiaanne]

I love Ben's humor so much. It makes learning the technical stuff bearable and worthwhile. Thank you for this Ben Burns! :)

[guillermoc.]

Wish I had this tutorial 10 years ago... just amazing!

[OscarObians]

I got into InDesign over the past year now and while it was a bit of learning curve, I can say InDesign is bae.

[abnerphilipe]

This video is awesome, specially for those who likes to do everything on Photoshop. There are wonderful tools out there, InDesign is one of them.

[joelmacleod]

THIS IS THE EXACT VIDEO I NEEDED TO SEE TODAY 😆
The Futur to the rescue once again! Thanks Ben! 🙌

[BBI-Brandboost]

We have just started to get to grips with using InDesign and are finding it very intuitive. These tips on style and formatting will come in handy for some of our future projects. Being able to view all of your typography styles on one page is a great way to see what you are working with. Your advice around this will save a lot of time and will help with our design process.

[EthanRom]

I learned this in my first job doing annual reports. Those paragraph styles are magic, but I loved how this video explained the more in detail and how exactly they work. Definitely picking up the guide.