Adobe Express to InDesign: Create Infographics Faster

Angelo Montilla
May 28
6 min read

If you’ve ever built infographics manually in Adobe InDesign, you know how quickly a simple design can turn into hours of work.

In this tutorial, learn a faster way to create polished infographics using Adobe Express, export them as PDFs, and place them directly into an InDesign layout.

As a bonus, learn how to open the same PDFs in InDesign for fully editable charts and graphs that can be reused for future projects.

To download the InDesign template and assets, click the link below to save the content and follow along step by step.

Before getting started in Express, let's quickly look at that InDesign doc we’ll be working on in this tutorial.

There is empty space on the right side of this social media post design, where we’ll add a bar chart, line graph and three progress donut charts at the top.

You can see that this template already has the placeholder frames on the page. This will make it easier when we place the infographics later.

Now that you have an idea of how the InDesign document looks like, let’s jump over to Adobe Express and start building out infographics for the project.

In Adobe Express, start by creating a new document. To do this, click the blue plus icon in the top left corner of the screen.
In the Create window, click on Custom size to add the dimensions of the placeholder frames in the InDesign document.
In the Width Field, set the value to 272 pixels and in the Height Field, set that to 244 pixels. Click Create New File to finalize the settings.

We now have a blank canvas to start creating our infographics for the InDesign layout. We’ll start with the Bar Graph.

From the left side menu, click on Add Content and then choose Charts and Grids. In the Charts section, click on View All to view all the charts and graphs available in Express.
In the Bar Charts section, click on the second option (it may be different in your case) and it will appear on the page. Use the corner handles to resize the chart and make it larger to fill out the space. You can also use the handles on the sides to adjust the width and height of the graph.

And finally, reposition the graph so it is centered horizontally and vertically on the page.

Next, let’s update the font, colors and data of the bar graph. Because the InDesign layout is using the font Basic Sans, let's use the same for the infographics.

With the bar chart selected, let’s change the font to Basic Sans. If you don’t have it installed, you can find it here.

The font color by default is black and that is just fine, but in this example, let's change the colors of the bar shapes in the chart.

Click the teal color on Item 1 and I’ll change the colors to match the branding of the post in InDesign.
Let’s set the first bar to the blue color. I’ve added the color codes in a separate text file if you would like to access them for this step. You can also access the colors here. Change the Item 1 text to 2023 and the Value text to 250.

Click the Item 2 color and change it to the green color included in the lesson files. Change the Item 2 text to 2024 and the Value to 200.
Click the Item 3 color and change it to the blue color. Change the Item 3 text to 2025 and the Value to 150.
Click the Item 4 color and change it to the green color once again. Change the Item 4 text to 2026 and the Value to 350.

The first bar graph is done; however, I’d like to make the background transparent as well.

To do this, click Edit page and then click on Custom. Set the Opacity to 0%, and you can see now that the background is transparent.

Great – now let’s move on and create the line graph.

In the bottom right corner, click Add Page and choose Same Size to add another page to the project.
From the left side menu, hover over Add Content and then choose Charts and Grids. Click View All under Charts and this time, let’s choose a line graph. For this tutorial, let’s select the fifth option (it may be in a different position in your case) and that will automatically drop on the empty page.
Before customizing the design and data, let’s resize the line graph, so it fills the space. Again, use the corner handles to make the line graph larger.
First, let’s change the font to Basic Sans Regular to match the branding of the InDesign layout.
Change the Value color of the line graph to the lighter blue we have in the branding. Click the Value color to update it.
Next change the Label name and Value for each data point. Change Item 1 to 2022 and set the value to 8. Change Item 2 to 2023 and value to 10. Change Item 3 to 2024 and set the value to 18. Change Item 4 to 2025 and the value to 11 and, finally, change Item 5 to 2026 and set the value to 22.

Much like we did in the first example, we’ll need to make the background transparent.

With nothing on the page selected, click Edit Page. Click the Background Color and then Custom. Slide the Opacity slider to 0% and just like that, the background again is transparent.

Great, we now have our bar chart and line graph set. Next, let’s focus on creating progress donut charts.

Once again, click the New Page button and add another page that is the same size. Hover over the Add Content button and then click on Charts and Grids. Scroll down a little bit, until you see Progress Donut, and in the example, let’s choose the fifth option which also has the percentage value in the middle.

Resize the progress donut and then change the font to Basic Sans Regular.
Next, let’s update the two colors to match the branding. Click on the first green default color and let’s make it the Blue color we’ve used to this point in the tutorial. I’ll click on the second color and change it to a dark blue. This color code is also included in the exercise files for this tutorial.
Slide the value to the right and watch as the figure as well as the progress increases in real time. Let’s set this first one to 46%.
Much like the previous pages, let’s make the background transparent by going to Edit Page, choosing background color, then Custom. Slide the Opacity slider to 0%.

To create the other two progress donuts, instead of adding new pages, let’s just duplicate this current version and then update the percentage values.

Click the three-dot icon on this page in the timeline and choose Duplicate. Click the progress donut and change the value to 57%. Duplicate the page one more time and change the value of the third progress donut to 74%.

Now that all the charts and graphs are finished, it’s time to export them for the InDesign project. Before we do that, let’s give the project a name here in Express, as currently, it’s saved as Untitled. Let’s name this E-Bike Infographics.

To download the infographics, click the Download button in the upper-right corner of the screen.
Under Page selection, choose All Pages as we want to export all the graphics for our project.
Under File Format, you have a few options, most notably saving the graphics as Transparent PNGs. However, you can also save the infographics as JPG or PDF files. For this tutorial, I’ll show you how to match export PDF files as single documents and import those in InDesign.
Let’s choose PDF Standard and then select the option to Download as Individual PDF files. As a final step, click download to save them to your computer.

Now we can jump back to InDesign and import them into the document.

Before placing the infographics in the InDesign layout, it’s important to note that when batch exporting PDFs from Express, the naming convention will not be honored. So, you will have to rename the PDFs.

To place them, click the first PDF, hold Shift and click the last. Now, drag them onto the page, but don’t click just yet as that will just drop them randomly on the page.
Instead, with the content loaded in the cursor, hover over the frames and click inside to drop them in individually.

Now, you could certainly place the transparent PNGs instead, but the reason I used PDFs is you can actually edit them inside of InDesign as well.

For example, if I right-click the first progress donut and choose Edit with > Adobe InDesign, it’ll upload and open as a new document in InDesign. This will open in another document as a CMYK project. You'll noticed the colors won't be as vibrant. That is because by default, it creates a document with Print intent.

To preserve the RGB colors from the initial infographic, simply go to File > Document Setup and change the intent from Print to Web.

If there was ever a case where you needed to edit the content without having to go back to Express, you can do that here in InDesign.