9 Best Adobe InDesign Courses

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Are you looking for the best online Adobe InDesign tutorials? We’ve put together a list of the best classes and courses available on the web, below. We’ve included both free and paid courses to give you a variety of options.

But first, let’s answer an important question – what is Adobe InDesign? Adobe InDesign is an industry-leading layout and design software for print and digital media. Generally, InDesign is used by graphic designers, though it is no uncommon for marketers to use this tool too.

Adobe InDesign allows graphic designers to create beautiful designs in a highly accessible manner. The software is so popular because has everything you need to create and publish books, digital magazines, eBooks, brochures, newspapers, presentation, posters, interactive PDFs and much more.

Many designers don’t know this, but here’s a top-secret bit of information: InDesign is the most important software out there for graphic designers. Essentially, InDesign brings together everything you’ve created in any other Adobe software’s, so it is a skill that you should definitely consider learning.

To learn InDesign, you don’t need to spend hours at University. Although it is a big topic to learn about, there are plenty of online classes and courses that cover everything you need to know. Suitable for those of all levels, I have spent the time researching the best InDesign courses out there. If you’re looking to progress your InDesign skills, either for a graphic design career or to just enhance your creative skill set, there will definitely be one for you.

 

1. Adobe InDesign CC – Essentials Training Course (Skillshare)

  • Level: Beginner
  • Completion time: 6h 40m
  • Cost: 14-day free trial
  • Certification: No
  • Number of people who have completed the course: 27,264
  • Course rating: N/A

Instructed by Daniel Scott, a top Skillshare teacher and an Adobe Certified trainer, this InDesgin course is perfect for those with no previous InDesign experience. Through Daniels expert teaching, you’ll learn all the fundamentals of InDesign, from cropping images to color schemes.

There are 78 lessons on this course, making it excellent value for money. During the course, Daniel will cover how to use color in InDesign. You will also learn how to resize images, how to import test from other platforms, how to group images, how to save files in different formats and how to share your InDesign files. You will also go over things such as: inspirations, replacing images, how to make an image transparent, how to copyright images, how to use gradient and layers, and much more.

 

2. Adobe InDesign CC: Your Complete Guide to InDesign (Udemy)

  • Level: Beginner

  • Completion time: 6h 4m
  • Cost: $139.99
  • Certification: No
  • Number of people who have completed the course: 240,558
  • Course rating: 4/5 (out of 2,859 ratings)

This Udemy course is designed with one aim: to help you become an Adobe InDesign master in just 6 hours!

You don’t need any prior InDesign experience to take this class as Phil Ebiner and Kurt Anderson will explain every InDesign step to you. This course is designed for those who are looking to learn InDesign from scratch and is best suited for designers, businesses, entrepreneurs, photographers and authors.

During this course, you will learn how to design professional publications and graphics in InDesign. You will also become comfortable using all of the important InDesign tools and how to follow a proper workflow, from starting a project to exporting it.

After completing this course, you should be able to create beautiful and tasteful PDFs, eBooks, pamphlets and more.

 

3. InDesign 2020 Essential Training (LinkedIn Learning)

  • Level: Beginner
  • Completion time: 5h 5m
  • Cost: Free
  • Certification: Yes
  • Number of people who have completed the course: 15,179
  • Course rating: 4/5 (out of 2,859 ratings)

This LinkedIn Learning course is free to take and should, therefore, be an absolute essential for every aspiring graphic designer! Taught by David Blatner, the Author and Cohost of InDesignSecrets.com, your learning could not be in better hands!

This up-to-date course teaches you all the essentials of InDesign. Firstly, David gets you up to speed and teaches you the basics of InDesign in just 30 minutes! After this, the fun really begins. In a great amount of depth and detail, David Blatner then explores more advanced InDesign features. For the next four hours, you will learn how to manage documents and pages, edit text and graphics, create interactive documents, adjust color and transparency, control layers and print your design projects.

Each minute you spend taking this free class, is a minute closer you become to becoming an InDesign guru!

 

4. InDesign 2021 MasterClass (Udemy)

  • Level: All levels
  • Completion time: 10h 34m
  • Cost: $159.99
  • Certification: Yes
  • Number of people who have completed the course: 15,179
  • Course rating: 4/5 (out of 2,859 ratings)

This class is designed to help beginners to intermediates conquer InDesign and be able to use it like a professional! Taught by Martin Perhiniak, a graphic designer and an Adobe Certified Instructor, this 10hour tutorial wants you to feel 100% confident in using InDesign for all your creative needs.

Through a humungous 81 videos and plenty of interactive quizzes, you will learn how to create everything from printed books to brochures, magazines, eBooks and interactive PDFs. Lessons cover topics such as working with frames, formatting text, designing the layout, compositional techniques and how to master different styles. To top this off, you get a certificate once you have completed the entire course. You can show this certificate to all future employers to demonstrate your confidence with InDesign!

 

5. Learn Adobe InDesign from Scratch (Eduonix)

  • Level: Beginner
  • Completion time: 5h
  • Cost: Free
  • Certification: No
  • Number of people who have completed the course: N/A
  • Course rating: 3 (out of 984 ratings)

 

Designed for those with little InDesign experience, this course is packed with everything you need to know to master the InDesign software…. All for free!

Perfect for enthusiastic creatives, this course covers a wider range of topics. In this course, you will learn: the ins and outs of InDesign, the various features of InDesign (e.g., tools panels, menus, workspaces), how to create documents, the various shortcuts that will save you a lot of time, where and how to use different tools, how to work with different fonts, how to incorporate graphics within the document and how to style and format text.

After completing this course, you should feel confident using InDesign. Whether you’re looking to create posters, brochures, newsletters, leaflets, e-books or magazines, this course will help you create a beautiful product… for not a single penny!

 

6. Introducing InDesign (LinkedIn Learning)

  • Level: Beginner
  • Completion time: 5h 42m
  • Cost: $42.99
  • Certification: Yes
  • Number of people who have completed the course: 13,000
  • Course rating: N/A

 

Instructed by Deke McClelland, an author, educator and Image editing and InDesign Expert, this LinkedIn Learning course is suitable for those with none, or minimal, InDesign experience. In the five hours that this course takes, you will cover all the core elements that make up any InDesign Project, however simple or complex they are.

The class will start by giving you a series of short videos that go over documentation and set up. You will discover how to start a new document, how to save a document, how to open a document and how to get around a document. The next lesson is in ‘rulers and guides’, where you learn how to work with guides and adjust them. You then discover text and formatting and how to work with automated formatting. In the photos and graphics lesson, you will understand how to work with the Links panel, how to adjust display performance, how to work with color swatches and how to work with cropping and scaling. You will also learn about combining type and graphics and publishing your document.

What makes this tutorial so spectacular is that at the end of every lesson, you will have a chapter quiz that typically consists of five questions. These quizzes are great ways to reinforce your knowledge and really understand the topic.

 

7. InDesign CC Creating AEM Mobile Apps (Pluralsight)

  • Level: Advanced
  • Completion time: 1h26m
  • Cost: Free 10 day trial
  • Certification: No
  • Number of people who have completed the course: N/A
  • Course rating: N/A

Taught by Pariah Burke, who has over 20 years-experience as a graphic designer, this advanced class is for those who are wanting to progress their skills to create Mobile Apps in InDesign CC.

In order to take this course, you should have plenty of experience using InDesign. This course will help you further progress your skills to a very advanced InDesign level. Throughout this short course, you will learn how to administer projects and personnel, which includes creating a project, connecting to app stores, editing project settings and defining and applying roles. You will also learn how to work with content and collections, which includes defining social media appearances, building a collection and filtering content while adding to a collection. Finally, you will learn how to design cards and layouts and how to build apps for IOS, Android and Windows.

 

8. InDesign CC 2019 Essential Training (LinkedIn Learning)

  • Level: Beginner
  • Completion time: 5h 23m
  • Cost: $35.00
  • Certification: Yes
  • Number of people who have completed the course: 1,691
  • Course rating: N/A

Instructed by David Blatner, who is the author and co-host of InDesignsecrets.com, this LinkedIn learning course will teach you everything you need to know about InDesign. You will learn how to navigate InDesign like a professional. In this five-hour class, you will learn how to create a document. You will also learn how to manage pages, input text and how to create graphic. You will then finally cover color, transparency, frames, styles and tables.

By the end of this course, you should be up to date with everything that was put on InDesign in 2019. To take your learning one-step further, why not take the InDesign 2020 course?

 

9. Book Design Basics: Styling Novel Interiors with InDesign (Skillshare)

  • Level: Intermediate
  • Completion time: 1h 21m
  • Cost: 14-day free trial
  • Certification: No
  • Number of people who have completed the course: 3,475
  • Course rating: N/A

Instructed by Neil Swabb, a freelance illustrator, art director and cartoonist based in New York, this SkillShare class is quick, effective and interesting.

Created specifically for those who want to create beautiful designs for books, this tutorial will teach you how to transform a basic word document into a fully formatted and distinctively designed print-ready PDF.

This class is split into five logical sections. Firstly, in the introduction section you will learn the context for how design happens at publishers. Then, you will learn key settings and style conventions. The third section looks at how to use InDesign to get the wow factor in your design and the fourth section looks at how to fine-tune details to create a professional final product. Finally, you will learn how to deliver files for a print-ready book.

This course it towards the bottom of our list as, although it does show you many of the fundamentals of InDesign, it will only be of use to those who specifically want to create graphics for books.

 

Conclusion

So, there you have it… the nine best Adobe InDesign online tutorials.

There are a huge variety of online classes available to teach you everything you need to know about InDesign. Some of the classes are quick and free. Others are more expensive and take more time to complete – but they offer a more in-depth exploration of the Adobe InDesign software. Similarly, some are better suited to complete beginners with no design experience. Whereas others are far better suited to experienced graphic designers.

All of the above online classes are excellent. They are the best of the best. Each is taught by an experienced and dedicated teacher and they all have lots of satisfied and happy customers.

So, which course you decide take depends on you experience, funds and spare time. Are you a complete design newbie? Or have you got years of experience in the graphic design industry and just want to refresh your knowledge? Do you have a huge amount of money to spend on your skill development? Do you have a lot of spare time, or are you just looking for a quick, but effective, skill top up?

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