Creative Mentor

A quick way to get rid of the distractions and view bleed on the page…

If you’ve ever wanted to get a clear look at your design without all the distracting ruler guides and margins, then you need to go into Preview mode. There are four preview modes available when viewing your document page, Normal, Preview, Bleed and Slug. “Normal” is how you’ve always previewed your document pages, with all the ruler guides and margins visible. “Preview” removes all the ruler guides and margins from view giving you a clear look at your design so you can accurately conceptualize how the design is looking. “Bleed” and “Slug” do the same as “Preview’ with the addition of the document bleed or slug now being visible.

To access your preview mode simply press “W” on your keyboard. By default when you press “W” you will toggle between “Normal” and “Preview” modes. If you want to access the other preview modes you need to locate the preview icon at the very bottom of the tool panel. If you click and hold for a second, a menu will appear where you can specify which mode you want. Once you select that mode from the tool panel, it will be set as the default preview mode when you use the keyboard shortcut “W”.

If you have trouble remembering to check for bleed within a document, you really should set “Bleed” as your default preview mode (as well as using InDesign CS4’s new Preflight feature). With bleed as your preview mode you can quickly scan over the page edges and drag out any images for frames that should be bleeding off the page.

For more information on this topic via Adobe help click here.

[Click play to watch video tutorial, will commence once downloaded in full]

Posted by Neil Oliver in Interface