Learn InDesign: 15 Best Free Tutorials & Guides for Beginners

Adobe InDesign is the industry-leading layout and page design software for print and digital media. You can use it to create publications, books, and types of print and layout projects as well as PDFs, slideshows, banner ads, social media images, or YouTube preview tiles. It’s a truly versatile piece of kit to have in your design arsenal!

If you need some help getting started with learning Adobe InDesign, we’ve collected 15 great tutorials and guides that are perfect for beginners.

Plus, every one of these options is free, so you can give each of them a try and see which fits the bill for you. Whether you prefer video or written guides, we’ve got something for everyone.

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Explore InDesign Templates

With more than 2 million views, this seems to be the “it” course for beginner InDesign training. With almost 2 hours and 30 minutes of video, it is a comprehensive look at the tool. You’ll walk through creating a four-page brochure, learn the tools and techniques necessary to design it and print it professionally. You’ll work with color, explore how to choose and use fonts like a pro, and find, resize, and crop images. This video comes with practice files to guide your learning path.

One of the best-known Adobe trainers might be Terry White. He hosts guest Dave Clayton in this hour-long talk that features some great things you can do including swapping to presentation mode, changing the default font, and auto-sizing text boxes.

This guide has all the basics in one place. Learn how to create a new document, save, navigate the interface, zoom and pan, and add text in InDesign. Plus you know the information is accurate because it comes directly from Adobe.

Since typography is a key element of working with InDesign, good typography is vital. This video is short but walks you through everything you need to know about leading, kerning, tracking, font size, and font family variations. You’ll connect these visual elements to using the type tool so that you can create stellar text in InDesign.

This video tutorial for beginners is fun and includes 26 tricks – one for every letter of the alphabet – that beginners can use in Adobe InDesign. Some of the basic skills include saving and exporting in InDesign; margins, columns, and bleeds; digital content in InDesign; and paragraphs, kerning, and text wrap.

Work faster with keyboard shortcuts. This video takes you through some helpful, but lesser-known shortcuts that can help speed up Adobe InDesign workflows.

Another inspirational overview, this video explains the types of projects you can do with Adobe InDesign and how to use it with other Creative Cloud applications. (Native files work between Adobe tools – a huge bonus).

If you want more of a hands-on tutorial with exercise files, this is a good place to start. This beginner tutorial includes nearly four hours of training that you can work along with. The guide has timed areas for the video as well so you can skip around if you already understand some of the material. The video goes through everything from how to customize your workspace to creating new documents to spellcheck to exporting and packing for printers.

If you are ready to start with InDesign but don’t really know what to do, this guide showcases things you can make using the software. It links to a few more tutorials but is also a good bit of inspiration for getting started with new projects.

Projects with a lot of text are at the core of InDesign functionality. This tutorial helps walk you through how to set up and design a book using the software. It provides understanding for using guides, pages, and linking.

Make the most of images in InDesign with these tips. The video is less than 30 minutes and will help ensure that you use images the right way every time.

Made for college students, this is a comprehensive guide to InDesign that outlines everything from the names and locations of tools to using panels to creating and working with documents. The 10-page PDF is easy to understand and is a great guide to print and sit next to your while you work through InDesign the first few times.

In just 13 minutes, you can learn 10 tips that will help you navigate Adobe InDesign with this video tutorial. Tips include things such as how to enable or disable hyphenation, how to change text case, and how to add drop shadows or other effects. This video has more than 1 million views.

While this tutorial is directed at designing a real estate flyer, it works for any type of content. It has direct, step-by-step instructions in a written format that will take you through creating a flyer that has a professional look and feel.

Adobe help guides are a great place to start with some of the basics. Adobe has nine beginner tutorials on the website to walk you through an introduction to the tool, quick start guides for digital or print design, understanding workspaces, and more. These are short and easy-to-follow guides that are a great starting point for any Adobe InDesign beginner.