Today’s Plan:
- Threading a Book in InDesign
- Lifestories Media Kit Project
- Homework: What is a Media Kit?
Threading a Book in InDesign
This class used to contain a book production project, but I’ve scrapped that in favor of The Crucible design project, which we will start after break. I did want to spend some time covering the basics of threading a long document into InDesign. To do this, I am hoping that the same Adobe Stock templates that I used on my Mac (running InDesign 21) will work on our PCs here in the lab. Fingers crossed!
To get started, we are going to use an Adobe Stock template. Typically, a nice Adobe Stock template will cost you $80-100 dollars. I wasn’t spending that on a class tutorial, so we are going to use a free one. To find this, I simply searched Adobe Stock for “book free.” The results included a minimalist design by an entity named Themzy.
Upon opening the template, you will be prompted to download additional fonts from Adobe Fonts (this worked on my laptop without issue). It should be noted that, unlike most book projects, this book does not use Master Pages. Master pages in Adobe are like semi-locked templates that allow you to update many pages all at once. The only master in the Themzy template controls page margins.
Now we will need some content to thread into our book. Let’s go over to Project Gutenberg, an open-access project committed to creating as many free eBooks as possible. Let’s go find Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven. This will work well for our template since we have an editor’s introduction (prose) and then the body of the poem. We will have to go into the “More Files” option and download the .txt file. This means, unfortunately, that we will produce the poem without its illustrations.
Disclaimer: Okay, we might have to play a game of “WTF is going on?” Fun times.
Creating a Media Kit for LifeStories
Between now and when we leave for spring break, we’ll work on developing a multi-page media kit of Life Stories.
Let’s do a bit of our homework and research what a media kit looks like.
Let’s take a look at some of the resources that we have to work with:
Homework
Our first task is to research a bit more on what a Media/Press Kit for a non-profit looks like. Can we find examples? Are there content areas we are missing [in which case we can input some dummy text as a place holder]
[Note: I did this stuff last semester and have a sense of what this might look like, but I want you to go through that process too].
I’ve created a Google Doc to share materials and links. For Friday’s class, make an entry in this document. Try and work with a source not already included in the document. Feel free to try different search options, to upload images, etc.
Make sure you change the style of your entry to a Heading 1 so it shows up in the side navigation bar (Apply Heading One).
