InDesign How-To: Make Arrows (Video Tutorial)

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Hi! This is Anne-Marie Concepción from InDesignSecrets.com. A lot of people
ask me, "Where is the arrow tool in InDesign?" I don't see it here at all. It's
not hiding in some sort of popup menu. It doesn't appear anywhere up here - -
[oh I made a dot there, let me delete that] It doesn't appear in any of the menus. The
answer is the arrow tools are hiding in the Strokes panel…actually Stroke panel.
Doesn't that make a lot of sense? Well, kind of when you realize that an arrowhead
goes at the end of a stroke. So the first thing you need to do is make a stroke.
And you do that with either the Line tool or the Pen tool. Let's start with
the Line tool. I'm just gonna drag a line just like this, pointing at this guy and…
What's happening? Oh. You can't see the line. Well that's because when you make a
stroke you have to make sure in your Swatches panel that the fill is "None" and
the stroke (clicking on the stroke icon) is "Black." There we go. Now we can see it.
You use the Swatches panel to color the lines and the…and the arrowheads because
the arrowheads will be the same color as the lines. Now we go to the Stroke panel
and here we can change things like the weight and so on. But what we want to do
is come right down here to Start and End. Let's start with a square and end with a
curved arrowhead. Let me zoom in here with Command or Control-+ so you can
see what I'm doing a little better. That's it! You can change the color of
the stroke if you'd like. You can change the type of the stroke. We could make it
thick-thin, for example, which doesn't look really great at 2 points but
maybe at 4 points it looks kind of interesting. You can swap the starting
and ending, so I can just click this little guy and it points the other way,
in case you dragged it in the wrong direction. I hope you didn't do that, did you?
And finally you have the Scale tool down here.
So let me go back to a normal solid line and down here in the scale like I
think this box is a little big. So I'm gonna scale it down.
Let me try 10%. Well, maybe that was a little small. Okay, let's try 50%. Ah!
That's much better. You can scale the start and the end
separately in these two fields or you can keep them the same by clicking this
to link the start and end arrowhead scales. And that's about it. That's how
you add arrows to the beginning or ending of any stroke that you create in InDesign.
Hey, I hope you found this tip helpful. Be sure to check out InDesignSecrets.com
for thousands of InDesign articles, to listen to our podcast, and to
download a free sample issue of our monthly magazine called "InDesign Magazine."
Thanks for learning with us
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InDesign How-To: Make Arrows (Video Tutorial)

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