[Music] [Bart Van de Wiele] Hi everyone, and thank you so much for joining my Multi-app Super Session here at Adobe MAX. My name is Bart Van de Wiele. I lead a team of Solutions Consultants at Adobe, but I've spent my entire lifetime in the world of design and I love combining applications like Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign together. I'm hoping for the next 15 minutes or so, that I have with you that I'm able to share a couple of my favorite techniques, and that they're going to prove valuable in your day-to-day activities, combined these three apps together. I'm just going to just dive in here and explain to you what my very first scenario actually looks like. In this scenario, I would like to take content from Adobe Illustrator and then bring that into Adobe InDesign. However, the scale at which I'm trying to do this is actually a bit bigger than what I'm normally used to. Let me show you what's going to happen here. What I'm doing is, I'm actually just designing two individual text elements, one is the word welcome, the other one is my name. And this is basic Illustrator text, as you can see here, it has a few effects applied to it. And what I would like to do is I would like to change the names here of this welcome message. So, I can then individually export all of these names here directly into Adobe InDesign. The idea is that I have a type of a kids' club, and I would like to invite all the children to join that club, and I want to give them a personalized invitation, or a brochure, or whatever it is that I want to do. And so, basically, here in InDesign, I have one graphics frame that's going to hold that name graphic, and every kid is going to have their own personalized name. And the other graphic here is going to hold an illustrated version of their avatar, like a little cartoon version of themselves. How do you bulk generate a lot of this content? How do you bulk export and bulk import that into Adobe InDesign? That is the subject. That's the question I'm trying to answer here today with all of you together. Now, I'm going to go back into Adobe Illustrator and let's take a look here at the text itself. I have about 40 to 50 names I would like to do this with. And what I've done is I've actually typed in all of the names here in Excel. I have the category names, which is just the top category in my column, and I've got all of these different names here as part of the list. I've already gone ahead and I've saved these as a CSV document from Excel. And the idea is then to link that into Adobe Illustrator, because I need to retype this in Illustrator and not in InDesign. Because remember I have these various text effects, which is Illustrator's super power. It can apply these really cool design effects. How do you do this? What I'm going to do is I'm going to use an option that's been around for probably 25, maybe 30 years, and it's called Variables. So, what you do is you go up to the Window menu and you go all the way down, and you choose Variables. And that is going to open up this little panel here. Inside the Variables panel you choose Import. And then you just go ahead and you select that CSV document. And it shows me the category of information I had an Excel - remember, the names category. The next step for me is to take this live text document, again I can change the name - it's all live, and I need to link this text element to those variables. To do that, simply highlight this option here, simply highlight this here, select the variable and then click this option that says Make Text Dynamic. Once you do that, it's going to map it to the actual data set. If you take a look here, it has now imported all of the different names. So, if I go to number one, it says Adam, I can actually go through all different names now, it's going to reapply those critical text effects. This is just basically going through the motions one by one. But what is it that you can do now to actually come in and to change the look and feel of all these text elements together at the same time? What you have to do is you have to go through the Actions panel. Now it's a bit obscure, but you have to go through the Actions panel. And what I've done beforehand, is I have actually created a brand-new action that simply saves the document as an AI file. So, basically I'm teaching Illustrator how to save a document. Now what you do next is the following, you click the Context menu here, you go to Batch... And now, you simply say that you want to apply this Save as AI Action. And you want to apply that not to a folder of images, but simply to a data set, which is the exact same thing that I have here on the right-hand side. And then you simply choose a Destination. Again, this could be anything you want. I made a quick folder called test - like everything on my hard drive is called test these days - and then simply you just click OK, and it's going to basically run through all these different names and then save them as separate files onto your hard drive - which is pretty darn amazing. If I take a look here, as you can see here, it's actually now just preparing all these different graphics for me automatically. I've already gone ahead and done that here in the past, so I've actually saved them as different files, they're here. The names folder is stored there. They are like this. I actually also changed the cropping a little bit, so I automatically changed the size of the artboard based on the actual size of the name itself. And that is the way to get all the different designs dynamically outside of Adobe Illustrator. The second bit is actually way easier. If I go to this file that has all the different avatars, again, I need a way to select every individual avatar, and then just bulk export every one of those as individual files that I can then place into Adobe InDesign. Again, it's really easy to do this. You go to the Window menu and then you basically come in here and you choose Asset Export. Once you're here, it's just a matter of selecting all of them. And by the way, just so you know, if I look at the Layers panel here, I did group them, I named them appropriately because obviously I know what Bobby looks like or what Sarah looks like, so I have to make sure they all have the right names. And the only thing I simply do here is if I look at the Asset Export panel, which I seem to have closed already - there we go - is I just click this icon here that says Generate multiple assets from the selection. When you click that, it is going to add every single individual element into this checklist. It's like a manifest, that is what I would like to export. And it even retains the names of the characters themselves. Now it's just a matter of saying, I'm going to save this as an AI file, and then you go ahead here, and then once you've got that, you can now select all of them, Shift-click the last one, choose Export, choose this option here, and then you will see an export of all of these individual designs as you see here. In this case, I used SVG formats here. Which is fine. And then the moment you've got that, you can actually use something like Data Merge inside of InDesign just to bring everything together. Just to give you an idea, it looks like this. I basically have a list of not just the names of the kids, but also the actual files I would like to target for both the names and the faces. And now, it's just a matter of going into InDesign choosing that data source - again, if you want to learn more, try and find more information about Data Merge on the Help pages - and now I just say that the name graphic should go here, and the image itself should go here. I'm going to place them back on my page. If you hit the Preview button, you're going to see that it says welcome, well, everyone basically. you can go through all these different examples. As you can see, a quick way just to dynamically generate more content when you're working with Illustrator and InDesign. Let's keep going. Another example here, it's Photoshop. This is about nesting and placing Photoshop documents in other Photoshop documents, which I absolutely love. What you can do is the following. If you take a file - this is a normal PSD file - and it just has some live text, when you do something like this and you basically create a new document, let's say this file format, then you can actually place and link the file I had now to, for example, that PSD. I can take that file and place that anywhere I want on my canvas. As you can see it has a Link icon, so this is linked content. And the cool thing is, that if you duplicate this a couple of times, it's all linking to the same original file. Which means if you start to add different things, like let's say different effects, then you can actually start to combine this to have a pretty cool visualization. So, I'm going to just apply a few of the effects I saved as part of my library. And maybe let's just make another copy. Let's do this, for example. As you can see, it's actually quite easy just to combine effects and other things together, all based on the same file to which it has been linked. The cool thing is that if you double-click that file, you're going to go back to that single source of truth, which is this. Which means if you could come in here and say, Coool FX!, and you save that file, this is going to basically update every single reference it has. It's going to reapply those effects. This is just a quick example of how Smart Objects work. Maybe you're already familiar with those. Now the cool thing is, that if you go absolutely crazy with this, then you can actually come in and you can start to work on larger files like this one. This is a quick design, which is something I want to use here for simply just applying a million effects at the same time. This is a pretty complex looking, pretty cool Synthwave Text Effect. And it looks like this. It's basically just a million copies of the same file, of the same reference, with different styles applied to it, resulting in a little bit grainy, neon-like style that you see here. If you would just double-click the original file, it's going to open up like this. I'm just going to look at the text, and it's just a single line of text. If I just come in here and change the type to ADOBE MAX, and then save that, you're going to see that if I look at the file that has been returned, it's going to update all of those layers now with the same content and now it says ADOBE MAX. You can dynamically update a million layers at the same time this way. Let's change the Synthwave graphic and let's do the exact same thing. Let's just open up this one. It says Synthwave. Let's do London, like so, 2025.
There we go. Let's save this. Let's go back. And now you can see that it has now saved that graphic as you see it here. And this is a really cool Photoshop document that I can now reuse anywhere I want. It keeps all the effects live. What we do now is the following, I'm going to go to Adobe InDesign, and I'm going to use that here to help me out with my cover image. This is a different version of the same cover. This is a vinyl cover, for example. And what I need to do now, is I need to simply place a couple of images of the artists here, making this really cool Synthwave album. And what I've done is, I've basically just come in and, I have just generated a few profiles using Adobe Firefly. This is what they look like. They all look cool and mysterious, like all these different cool portrait closeups. And so, what I need to do is I need to place all four of them in here, and then I would like to dynamically recolor them in colors that match the design a bit more. To do that, I'm doing the following here, I'm going to come in here, I'm just going to draw a new rectangle frame, and I'm just going to click and drag the frame, but I'm going to hold down the mouse - I'm not going to let go of the mouse - and while I have a hand free, I'm going to press the right-pointing arrow on my keyboard, once, twice, three times. So, I have now created four frames at the same time. I'm still holding down my mouse key using my hand, and based on that, I'm just going to come in here, I'm going to let go, and I have now created four graphic frames at the same time. I'll just go ahead and I'll give this a white outline. Maybe I'm going to move them a little bit, like so, that's up to me. And there we have it. So this is going to be the placeholder for my four images. The problem with these four images is that they're currently in natural colors, and I need a more natural way to recolor them. The trick to do this inside of Adobe InDesign - and not in Photoshop - is by converting them to grayscale. If you look at some of these other versions I have here, like this one, this is the exact same image, but I converted this to grayscale using Adobe Photoshop. What you can do is, you can actually take version one, two, three, four, and you can now just drag these and just place them wherever you want them to be. I can change the Fitting options for all of them together, like so. And now it's up to me to start to recolor these here. And I've actually created a few different colors here. There're spot colors. There could be any color, if you want to use CMYK or RGB colors or Hex colors, that is completely up to you. But for now I'm using spot colors. And the only thing you need to do is just drag and drop those colors directly onto the design, like this, just to recolor them. And the cool thing is, if you take a look at some of these images here, that if you select the contents, you can now see that this color was really applied as the Fill color for this particular frame. You can come in, you can actually make those changes yourself if you want to. What you can also do is, you can even have a type of a duotone effect as well. I can even come in and select this, de-select, and just reselect the frame, apply another type of color, let's say the orange one again, and then just select the content and select a different color to have this type of effect. That is completely up to you. But just know that if you have grayscale images here, imported as a JPEG file for example, then you do have ways to dynamically recolor these assets as you see fit. And the cool thing is, that once you actually have something you like, you can just take the graphic that you have here, even go into your CC Libraries, and you can actually take a look here at this library. You can add this to the library from InDesign. And you can actually come in here and you can take that design and you can actually reuse that in different locations. One of the locations that I really like to use this with is actually using Adobe Photoshop. One of the things you can actually do, just to show you one more option here, is that you can actually take Photoshop designs, like this mock-up of my vinyl cover, and you can actually just update these types of designs with InDesign art. You can create live print mock-ups using the original InDesign document. And that's really cool, because if you look at the previews about what it is you want to send to print versus the same file, and having that as a mockup, you need to have some sort of a preview or like a mock up fidelity. You have to be absolutely sure that whatever InDesign produces is the same version as how you mock it up in Photoshop, without having to export to PDF all the time. What you can do here is you can actually go back into the Libraries. I'm not sure why it's giving me an error, but I'm going to ignore that for now. It's like a little warning sign if you're driving your car. Let's just ignore that for a second here. You can actually take that and you can place these graphics from InDesign back into Photoshop if you want to. If I just do that here and just refresh, you can see that this is what this actually looks like. I might actually just maybe come in here and remove some of that plastic wrap just a little bit here, and you can just come in and just play around with the design of these different Smart Objects by just, again, live linking your designs directly from within Adobe InDesign and then going back to Photoshop. It's a bit more obscure. You can do it. Yes, you can go back and open up that file by right-clicking and choosing Edit original, go back to InDesign, make more edits, and just keep on linking and keep on embedding. Now there's a lot more to unpack here, obviously. Hopefully we have the chance to run into each other at a live MAX event, maybe in London, maybe in Los Angeles. If you have any questions, find me online and just ask away. For now, I want to thank you for being here. I know this was really fast, but this was a recording, so you can always pause, go back and experiment and have fun. Thank you. Until the next one. Bye-bye.
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