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Frames in InDesign are an essential part of page layout. Aside from holding graphics and text, frames can act as graphic elements. In this video you'll create a frame using the Frame tools, round the corners and also apply a color fill. You can open his practice file from the downloadable practice files for this tutorial if you want to follow along. Now to see the different types of shapes you can create in the Tools panel on the left, press and hold down on the Rectangle tool. These tools are great for creating unassigned frames or frames that are also graphic design elements like a color box behind text that improves readability. If you create a frame and later change your mind about how you want to use it in other words add text or graphic, you can always add text or graphic to it. Select the Rectangle tool and come out into the page. You'll create a frame of the color that will go behind this text. So, starting here press and drag to create a frame. As with any frame if you press the Shift key while drawing you constrain the proportions, so the width and height are the same. When the frame is roughly this size release the mouse. Now if you need to resize a frame to a specific size, with the frame selected in the Properties panel to the right you'll see the properties for it including its position relative to the upper left corner of the document, its size and a lot more. To change the width, click the W to select the value in the Width field. This way of selecting a value works for almost all of your fields. Change the value to 3.3 then click the H to select the Height value and type in 1.6. Press Return or Enter to accept the change. Now you add a fill color since frames created with these tools have no fill by default. So, click the Fill color in the Properties panel. Make sure you can see the default color swatches by selecting the Swatches option and select the color to apply it. You could then press Escape to hide the colors. Notice that the stroke or border has a color and also a stroke weight or size. Frames drawn with the Shape tools have a stroke by default. In the Properties panel click the down arrow to remove the stroke making sure the stroke weight is set to 0 pt. Now this frame needs to be behind the text. You can arrange content to change its stacking order on the page. With the shape selected click the Arrange button in the Quick Actions section of the Properties panel and choose Send Backward. The shape is sent behind the next object in the stacking order which is the text. To move the frame into position, select the Selection tool in the Tools panel and drag the frame so it's roughly centered on the text here. Finally, you'll round the corners of the shape. With the shape still selected click the yellow box on the right side here to begin adjusting the corners. Move the pointer over a yellow corner and a tooltip with instructions will appear. Drag the yellow corner to the left to round the corners a little. If you ever need to remove the rounded corners you can drag any of these yellow anchors all the way back to a corner. You can also adjust options for the rounded corners. In the Properties panel on the right, if you need the corner radius values to be an exact value or consistent across shapes you can enter a value. Change the Corner radius to 0.25 in. All four corners are changing, but you can also click the word Corner here to see the Corner Options dialog box. You can deselect the Make all settings the same option to change the corner values independently. We don't need to do that, so click Cancel. You can also click the Corner shape option and choose one to see the effect on the corners. Before you continue make sure the corners are actually Rounded. Then click away from the shape to be select it. Now that you know how to create a frame that's useful as a graphic element or one that holds other content you can use them for different purposes in your own layouts. 

After creating frames in InDesign you'll most likely need to transform them in different ways to fit them into your designs. Now in order to finish this flyer you'll explore rotating and flipping frames as well as locking and hiding content within them. You can open this file from the practice files for this tutorial if you want to follow along. Transformations you apply to content can be found in the Properties panel to the right of the document and also in the Transform panel found under Window, Object and Layout, Transform. You'll focus on working with the Properties panel. With the Selection tool selected, click to select this image in the background. Make sure not to click in the content grabber in the center because then you'll select the image and not the frame. In the Properties panel you'll see a few options for transforming the content. To see more options for transforming click More Options in this transform section here. Each of the points you see here in this box represents a point on the selected frame. For instance, the upper left point here is the upper left point on the frame over here. Now you need to flip the image around the center since it's already in position. So, click the center point here if it's not already selected. Going forward any transformations you make which could be flipping, rotating or other will be around the center of the selected content. Then click the Flip Horizontal option here to flip the image horizontally across the center. Now you'll explore rotating content like this text. Click away from the image to deselect it then click to select the text. Move the pointer just off a corner of the text frame and a rotate arrow appears. Drag to rotate around the center by default. Rotation angle should show as you drag and while you're dragging press the Shift key and you can constrain the angle to 45 degrees. When you see minus 90 degrees in the label next to the pointer release the mouse button and then the Shift key. After rotating the text look in the Properties panel. If you click More Options in the Transform section again you can see the rotation angle. You could change that value here as well, even resetting it to 0 to remove the rotation. The rotation options you see here would have also worked since they rotate content 90 degrees either clockwise or counterclockwise. To move the text into position drag it over here. Now that the text is where it needs to be you can lock its position to avoid accidentally moving or selecting it. With it selected choose Object, Lock. The text now has a lock icon in the corner and you can't select it. Later if you need to select it again maybe to edit the text you can unlock it by choosing Object, Unlock All on Spread which unlocks everything on this page. If you just wanted to unlock this text frame you could also click the lock icon to unlock just this object. Leave it locked for now. When working with a lot of page content or content that's close together it can actually be useful to temporarily hide content, so you can focus on other things. Suppose that you need to edit the black frame we beneath this text. To make it a bit easier to select you could hide the text. With the Selection tool click the text to select it. Then to hide choose Object, Hide, to temporarily hide the text. Click the black frame and drag the upper left corner from the center to make it larger. Now to show the text again choose Object, Show All on Spread. Now you know the basics of transforming content in InDesign. The more you explore in here the more tools and methods you'll discover for transforming content in your own projects. 

In InDesign you may need to align objects through each other. Maybe to create a row of aligned images or you may want to keep objects together by creating a group of all the content on your page header for example. In order to complete this flyer, you'll learn how to align content with smart guides, group content and work with groups and align content with the Align options. To follow along you can open this practice file from the downloadable practice files for this tutorial. To make sure that you can see the entire page choose View, Fit Page in Window. Then to zoom in over here, select the Zoom tool in the Tools panel and drag from left to right to zoom in here. As you move content smart guides can help align content and appear as temporary snap to guides. Smart guides are turned on by default and with nothing selected they can be found in the Properties panel on the right here. With them on to see how they work, select the Selection tool in Tools panel, then press and drag this text frame to the right. As you drag you should see a series of green horizontal lines telling you it's in line with its original position. When it's aligned with the left edge of the object above, release the mouse button. With the text aligned to this line, it'd be helpful to keep this content together, so they can be moved as one object which is where grouping comes in. Starting off the left edge of the document press and drag across to select this content. You'll also select the image behind. Now to deselect the image and not the other objects, press the Shift key and click the image to remove it from the selection. Shift-clicking lets you add or remove content from a selection. To keep the objects together you'll group them. So, click the Group button at the bottom of the Properties panel on the right. They're now grouped and treated like a single object. Click away from the content and click on any part to select the group. You can tell it's a group because both objects are now selected and there's a dashed bounding box around it. Now if you need to be able to select one of the objects and not the entire group, to do that you can either ungroup the objects by clicking the Ungroup button here, but then you'll have to group them again or you can do it another way. Double click the red line to select it. Double clicking content in a group allows you to select just that object. In the Properties panel to the right of the document, click the Stroke color and choose [Black]. You can press Escape to hide this panel. Now you'll align some of the content using Align options. Starting off the left edge of the document, drag across to select all of this content. By dragging you also selected the image behind again. To deselect the image and not the other objects, press the Shift key and click the image to remove it from the selection. Now on the Properties panel on the right click Align left edges. Notice that the rightmost object aligned to the leftmost object. So that you can see everything out here, choose View, Fit Page in Window. Now the image in the background needs to be aligned to the center of the page. So, click to select the image. In the Properties panel click the Align to menu and choose Align to Page so that the image aligns to the page and not to other objects, then click the Align horizontal centers button to align the image to the horizontal center of the page. Now that you have a basic understanding of aligning and grouping content you can more easily organize and position your own content. Experiment with grouping objects and aligning to see how they can help you work faster and smarter. 

When adding content to your InDesign projects you can create non-printing guides to help you align content easily. In order to align this content a set distance from the edge of the page you'll create what's called a ruler guide. So, you can follow along, you can open this practice file from the downloadable practice files for this tutorial. Now in order to create a guide you need to show the page rulers. So, with nothing selected, in the Properties panel click the Rulers option here. Rulers appear at the top of the document window and along the left edge. They reflect the units you initially set. In this case it was inches. To change the units, you can actually right click either ruler and choose a new unit. You'd need to do that for both rulers to change them both. Now rulers are a great way to visually see the position of content relative to the upper left corner of the page. You can see the 0 on both rulers. Horizontal and vertical starts here. To create a horizontal guide, you drag from the horizontal ruler up here. To create a vertical guide, you drag from the vertical ruler on the left. This and other content that will be added later needs to align a set distance from the right edge of the page. So, a vertical guide is necessary. Move the pointer over the vertical ruler, press and drag from the ruler into the document. As you drag a measurement label is showing the distance from the left edge of the page also called the X value appears. Drag until you see about 7 in in the label and then release to place the guide. With the Selection tool selected click away from the guide to deselect it. Move the pointer over the guide and when the pointer shows a little box next to it click to select the guide. Guides are like objects you draw. They can be selected easily and deleted by pressing Backspace or Delete. You can also easily reposition guides by dragging or in the Properties panel to the right of the document you can position a guide by entering or choosing a value. The X here means the X or horizontal axis. Basically, how far the guide is from the left edge of the page. To fit with our design this guide needs to be an inch from the right edge of the page. To measure from the right edge of the page and not the left you can reset where the zero on the rulers begins. To do that drag from the corner of the rulers where they meet. This is called the 0,0 point to the upper right corner of the page. The pointer should snap to the edge of the page. If you now look at the horizontal ruler, the 0 on the ruler starts on the right edge of the page. The guides should still be selected, but if you look in the Properties panel the X is a negative number or to the left of the zero-starting point. Change the X value to -1 in so it's 1 inch from the right edge of the page. Press Enter or Return. Now to reset that 0,0 point which you should do so later measurements and positioning start in the upper left corner of the page, double click back in the corner where the rulers meet. The 0 on the horizontal and vertical rulers should be back in the upper left corner of the page. Not you'll position this content. So, drag this group to the right and as you drag press the Shift key to drag the group straight across. When the right edge comes close enough to the guide and the pointer changes to a white arrow release the mouse and then the key to snap the group to the guide. So that you don't accidentally move a guide or delete them, you can lock them temporarily. Click away from the content to deselect it and in the Properties panel to the right click the Lock Guides option. To hide the guides temporarily you can click to Hide Guides option here. Click it again to show the guides. Setting guides can be a great way to align content. Now that you know the basics of working with them you can add guides to your own projects. You can even add them to master pages to apply them to multiple pages at once. You'll learn more about Master pages in another video in the tutorial on multi-page documents.