- Crucible Final Deliverables
- Crucible Inspection
- Crucible Design Checklist
- Saving Files
- Pages / Parent Pages
My hope is that you can start this project this week. I can give you a link to last year’s copy, if you want to start by setting your page styles. You might also start by thinking about cover design. Several past issues use a piece of art as the cover (Bittersweet, Notice, Refrain), but not all do. Take, for instance, Space or Unearthed. There is a template from Lulu printing that you can use for your cover design.
Final Deliverables
You will share a link to a .zip folder that contains:
- .indd and .pdf files of your Fall 2023 Crucible layout
- Assets folder containing any custom fonts and/or images you used in your issue. NOTE: this includes all of the art images in the Crucible issue. You can drag the Crucible folder I provide you (once I have it) into your project folder.
- .psd and .pdf files of your Fall 2023 Crucible cover (front and back using Lulu template)
Note on saving files: remember to start a folder on the machine you will be using to design your Crucible issue. As you download fonts, save them in that folder. Save images in that folder BEFORE you place them in InDesign. Remember that InDesign does not create copies of the media you place in, but rather creates links to that media’s location on your computer. We need all of those assets to be saved properly for your .indd file to work.
You are welcome to do this project on your own or in pairs. It is quite a bit of work–so teaming up with someone can help, provided you have a way of sharing your project folder and files. That can be tricky.
Design Parameters and Checklist
Remember that this semester’s theme is “mirage.” There’s obviously a lot of different ways to think about what that means as a designer. How literal do you want to be? How playful? What colors does that suggest to you? Please, I beg you, no papyrus.
General Requirements:
- Formatting a Table of Contents [I will dedicate class time to this once I get back]
- Page Numbers
- Image Credits / Artist Name
- Crucible logo has to appear on the back cover. It should also appear inside on the “production” page.
- Title Page (typically we use one of the art submissions for this, although it is usually okay to modify / edit the piece. This requires artist permission. Due to lower submissions this year, you are welcome to design your own title from scratch.) Remember that the cover is a separate file, created in Photoshop, using the Lulu template as a guide.
Spring 2024 Concerns:
- “Concrete” spacing
- Misreflection has paragraph indents (mostly)
- Ill Thoughts on a Sunday Night: indents, italics
- Throwing Shit at the Wall–concrete poem with very specific spacing
- Dysmorphia – column-like spacing alignment
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; we will work on this once I get back]
- 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). General rule: 45 characters for columns, 70 max characters across a page (and 70 is a lot).
- Dealing with Orphans. We will cover this when I get back.
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. Think about developing a motif that can be spread across pages.
Below are old notes that I will revisit / update as we go through the project.
Working with Parent 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).
Parent 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 Parent. The benefit of Parent 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.
- Title of Work
- Author Name
- 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
