Magazine Cover Design in Adobe InDesign

3.1 Setting Up an InDesign File

Hi and welcome to this magazine, cover design in InDesign course, in this lesson, we will take a look at how to set up a basic InDesign file for a magazine cover design. So let's head over to InDesign create new and for this magazine, I want to set it up as an A4 magazine. I want to change the units to millimeters just because it is easier to measure, so the orientation to portrait. For this we can uncheck facing pages because we will only be designing the cover, set their margins to 12 millimeters. And let's add a bleed of three millimeters, so click on create, so the bleed is just a buffer outside of the magazine and this is where the background image is going to extend to. So when the magazine goes to print, and it's time to trim, we'll make sure that the image will bleed off the page, avoiding any white lines from the actual paper and over to the layers panel. And I just want to set myself up for success, I want to add a couple of layers that will help me divide parts of the cover. So I can freely edit without worrying if I am going to accidentally delete something, so add a new layer, let's name layer number one as our background. This is where the image will be added where your number two will be text or we can change it to cover line and the last layer will be magazine name or masthead and that's it. So now we have the base for our magazine cover, in the next lesson we will apply everything we've learned from the different components of a magazine. And our images and fonts and bring it all together, so we'll see you there.