Today’s Plan:
- WSINYE, Layouts
- Working in InDesign
WSINYE, Layouts
Things to highlight:
- How Do I Start a Design? [Content, Cost]
- Using a Graph as a Guide
- Setting a Bleed (1/8th an inch past trim)
- Column length for print publication? 2-5 inches. (From Wikipedia: “Traditional line length research, limited to print based text, resulted in a variety of results but generally for printed text it is widely accepted that line length fall between 45–75 characters per line (cpl), though the ideal is 66 cpl (including letters and spaces).”
- Symmetrical vs Asymmetrical designs (risk / reward)
- Focal Points (contrast, lines, color) / placement (see 52-53 on Golden Proportion and Rule of Thirds)
- Modular Layouts and Sidebars
- Cropping Photos
For a visualization:
This sentence of text contains 45 characters
This sentence of text contains slightly more characters, yup, 75!
Working in InDesign
Today we are going to start transforming our sketches into InDesign documents.
The first thing we need to do is to identify our paper size. This might be trickier than you think. Let’s consult a reference for paper size.
Make a new document and choose Letter Size. We need to change this to legal size. First, let’s change the units and increments in InDesign to inches. Go to Edit > Preferences > Units and Increments and select inches. Inside the document, let’s change the document height to match Legal-2 (standard legal size paper), so we’ve got 8.5 in X 14 in.
Now let’s work on a design that does not use a bleed (Friday we will work on a design that does use a bleed).
To make life easier, let’s
Let’s begin by creating a rather simple grid. We are going to create a 1/2 inch grid. This requires some math (if the width is 8.5 inches, then I need 17 1/2 inch squares; if the height is 14.inches, then I need 29 1/2 inch squares). Set the gutters to zero.
Now we are going to make sure we are printer safe by setting a modest margin. Go Layouts > Margins and set everything to .25 in.
Save this as “menu-template.” Now, using your sketch as a guide, begin creating frames for your content.
I’m going to start by working on the header. I’ll show how to use layers and place and modify text.
