Today’s Plan:
- Design Inspiration Revisited
- Link to Materials
- Project Timeline
- Design Deliverables and Expectations
- Resources / Saving Files
- Working With Master Pages
Design Inspiration
Mea Culpa on the end of last class.
Link to Materials
Project Timeline
Here’s the plan:
- Monday, Mar 20: Project Intro
- Wednesday, Mar 22: Copy and Materials, setting up a template and Master Page
- Friday, Mar 24: Team Work Day
- Monday, Mar 27: Team Work Day
- Wednesday, Mar 29: Developing a Table of Content [Note: most text should be flowed by this point]
- Friday, Mar 31: Crit
- Monday, April 3rd: Team Work Day. Projects due Monday April 3rd at midnight
Crucible Design Project Expectations
For this project you will submit a Google Drive link to a folder that contains the following:
- .indd and .pdf files of your Fall 2023 Crucible layout
- .psd and .pdf files of your Fall 2023 Crucible cover (front and back using Lulu template)
Final due date absolutely no late exceptions: Monday, April 3rd at midnight by 1:15pm
Design Checklist:
- Content (particularly tricky things: NOTE THIS HAS NOT BEEN UPDATED)
- Formatting a Table of Contents [look at 2019 and 2020 examples for layout]
- Page Numbers
- Image Credits
- Crucible logo (back cover)
- Title Page (follow comment instructions. sigh)
- Dodd-Pheromone Trails-concrete poem
- The Current- Dylisia Jae: two column layout (we can adjust line height)
- Cellular Death- Katrina Johns-concrete poem
- Baggage: do NOT use an ugly image, write it/space it out
- Typography
- Font selection and balance [mix at least two different fonts / title / author / body copy / footer]
- Should you justify your text?
- Font size [likely 10-11pt depending on style]/ kerning-tracking-leading / Use a modular scale [I’ll be paying attention to how your typography scales]
- Leading/Line spacing [note: the higher your x-height, the more you should try bumping your leading up; generally leading is set between 1.2 and 1.5–also, the more leading, the more pages, the higher the cost of production]
- Line length (how many characters per line? Be sure for print not web)
- Dealing with Orphans–I hope to cover this in class next Wednesday
- Other Design Stuff:
- Backgrounds and bleeds (zine format: we’re paying for color printing with [crucible folk?] full bleeds–make sure your design takes advantage of this throughout the document)
- Strategic use of color / Developing a color scheme [more than just images should be in color, and we have free reign to do a bleed.]
Resources / Saving Files
Of central importance: how to handle your image files. There’s two ways to approach this.
- Method 1: “Place” Images Using a Flash Drive. You can simply download the resources folder I have provided you. Place your InDesign and Photoshop file in that folder. You can now simply Place images that are in the Resources folder into the InDesign document. You will upload your entire folder (as a .zip) at the project’s conclusion. The advantage of this method is that you can edit an image in Photoshop and any changes will automatically update in InDesign, since you are working with a “linked” file.
- Method 2: “Embed” Images. You can also choose to Embed images rather than Place them. This method has the advantage of creating a copy of the image in the InDesign file. Potential downsides: this will make your InDesign file considerably larger, which may or may not become a problem with a project of this size (this depends on things like the size/resolution of the images). This method also breaks the link with Photoshop.
Professionally, you are much more likely to work on projects that use Method #1.
Working with Master Pages
To help kick start this project, I’ve set up a template to get you started. To do this, I created a new document with the following settings:
I then set up a very simple Parent Page for the document (these used to be called Master pages). This page only has a reserved space for the Footer (which will be the page number and the contributor’s name).
Master pages can be incredibly powerful in InDesign, but also frustrating and confusing. Often I have found students prefer simply copy and pasting existing pages to tinkering with a Master. The benefit of Master pages is that if you make a change to one page it will effect every page of that type.
One thing I learned from last time we did this was to pay special attention to paragraph styles as we are developing the document. Paragraph styles are an essential part of professional editing and technical documentation, since you are basically “tagging” (coding) information so that it can be processed en masse. For our project, we will be using paragraph styles to automate making a table of contents.
We will have a decision to make down the line:
- A very simple ToC simply has the title of the work and the page number. There’s a number of straight-forward tutorials for this. Basic carpentry.
- A more complicated ToC has the title of the work and the author’s name. This might require sorcery.
Everyone will prepare for sorcery. What does this mean. It means that you need to create two special paragraph styles:
- Title of Work
- Author Name
You will apply those two styles to every piece in the edition. This might be a bit disorienting, so let’s walk this through this together.
- Create a Title field
- Open the Paragraph Styles box; add it to your workspace
- Name Paragraph Style
- Set a Paragraph Shade
- Set Indent to Away from Spine
- Turn off Baseline Grid
- Create an Author field
- Set Indent to “Towards Spine”
- Text Box Option > Align > Center
- Create Text Box
- Adjust Tracking
- Space After Paragraph Option
- Justification
- Hack For Master Pages–using some guide lines
