Need help quick- drawing curved arrows in indesign 1

[RideOn]

Hi... cool forum! I need to make a curved arrow and I can't figure it out. I tried making it in photoshop and placing it in Indesign but it causes problems. To make everything but the arrow transparent, I tried going to object> clipping path> alpha channel (and detect edges) but I can't make it work right. There are still white spaces around the arrows and the arrows are choppy. Here is what it looks like to give a better idea:

http://sounddevice002.com/sdwebsite2_files/arrowproblem.jpg

I really don't know too much about indesign. I am a beginer and I suck with the pen tool. There must be and easier way of doing this. It seems like it should take 2 seconds to do but I have spent hours trying to learn... grrrrrr. Any help would be awesome! Thanks.

 

[jimoblak]

Use the polygon tool to make your arrow if dropping down 3 points is too difficult with the pen tool.

Draw a circle with the ellipse tool, then use the erase tool to get rid of half of it.

 

[dimoj]

Hi RideOn, here is how to do it in InDesign without the pen.

Draw a circle with the ellipse tool (L). Make sure it has only a stroke colour and weight and no fill applied. Make sure the circle is selcted and the select the scissors tool (c). 4 little squares will appear around the edge of you circle. Carefully click on the left hand side square and then the right hand side square (zoom your image up first to make life easy). Now choose the selection tool (v) and click somewhere on the lower half of the circle to select it and press delete on your keyboard to get rid of it.

Now select the remaining top half of your circle. In the stroke options box there are options for what you want on the START and END of your stroke (you may need to open up the option by clicking the triangle in top right corner of the Stroke pallet and click SHOW OPTIONS. Anyway on either START or END option click on the drop down menu and choose TRIANGLE to create the arrowhead.

Hope you could follow this alright.

 

[RideOn]

Awesome! Thanks guys. Dimoj, your instruction worked perfectly. That was what I was hoping for!