In this lesson, you are going to learn about the types of frames available in Adobe InDesign and how to create them. In particular, we're going to talk about type frames, graphic frames, and unassigned frames. I currently have the advanced workspace selected for my panel placement. If you would like to see your panels where mine are, you can go to the window menu to workspace and choose the advanced workspace. We're going to talk about three different types of frames. The first frame we're going to talk about is the text frame. We create a text frame using the type tool, so I'm gonna go over to the toolbar on the left and I'm gonna select my type tool, that letter T, then I'm gonna go over to my page and click hold and drag to create a type frame. You know that you've created a type frame when you see a flashing cursor that indicates that you can start to type in that frame. Now, I'm gonna go back over to my toolbar to the selection tool because when we have a type frame selected with the selection tool, we can see two indicators that this is a type frame. If we look up in the top left, this is the import. Down here in the bottom right, that's the outport. These are two visual indicators that this is a type frame. The import and the outports are used for linking or threading type frames. Also, when we have too much text in a type frame and not all of it is visible, you will see a red plus sign down in the outport. The second type of frame we're going to talk about is the graphic frame. We create graphic frames or placeholders using our rectangle frame tool. So again, over in our toolbar about halfway down, we're going to select the rectangle frame tool. This is the rectangle with the X through it. If we select that tool and go over to our page, we can click hold and drag to create a rectangle frame. When we do that, even before selecting it with the selection tool, we can see that this is a graphic frame because there is an X through it. That's letting us know that this is taking the place of where our graphic will be once we place it into this frame. Now, the third type of frame is an unassigned frame. What does it mean to be unassigned? Well, if you don't wanna put text into a frame and you don't need a graphic placeholder, but you just need a frame to have color, then the unassigned frame is the frame that you want to have. We create our unassigned frames by using the rectangle tool. So just below the rectangle frame tool, we have our rectangle tool. If we click hold and drag out on our page, we can draw a frame with our rectangle tool. Now, I'm gonna go back to my selection tool in my toolbar. And when looking at these three frames, it is kinda difficult to tell when nothing is selected whether that top frame is a type frame or not and the same for our unassigned frame. The graphic frame is pretty obvious because of the X through it. But if we click on our frame of our unassigned frame, we can see that we don't have an import or an outport on this frame, so that's a visual indicator that this is an unassigned frame. Another thing to be aware of with the unassigned frames, I'm just gonna click off to de-select that, if I try to select this frame when there is no color, I'm clicking in this frame, but nothing is happening. It is not selecting anything and that's because there's nothing to select. If you have nothing in there and no color, then you have to click right on the edge of the frame because otherwise you're clicking on nothing. Now, with this selected, if I go up to my control panel up across the top and click on this swatch area and choose a color to fill my frame with and I click off, now that there is a color, I can click on the frame inside of it and I can select it. Now, another really nice thing about frames in InDesign is that if your frame has no content, you can switch the type of frame that it is. So with this unassigned frame selected down here at the bottom, I can go to my object menu to content and I can easily change this to a graphic frame. It now has an X through it. I can go back to my object menu to content and change it to a text frame. I now have my import and my outport. I can also go back to the object menu and change it back to an unassigned frame. It is very important when working in InDesign that you create the correct type of frame for output. The reason for it is that when you go to print a document, if you have created a graphic frame and just filled it with color, when it goes to print, the printer is gonna look for the graphic that should be inside that frame and that can slow you down during the printing process. So if you just want to have a frame with color, make sure that it has the unassigned content applied to it. So in this lesson, you learned about the three different types of frames that are available in InDesign: the text frame, the graphic frame, and the unassigned frame.
