Today’s Plan:
- watch a few tutorials
- do some math
- create a master page in InDesign for your poetry
Golden Section and Rule of Thirds
Up first, a short video on using the Golden Section and Rule of Thirds to design a birthday invitation. We can apply the principles here to your cover designs (and back cover designs).
Up next, a short tutorial on how to set up a grid in InDesign. Our Abode tutorials have all involved working from templates, so I wanted to talk about creating a document from scratch.
One more short tutorial for setting up a grid that can help place texts and objects.
Finally, a simple calculator that can help us with some Golden Section math. At some point, we might want to convert inches into points (pt).
Using these tools, your research into book design (measurements), our Adobe Classroom in a Book, and other resources you might search on the Internet, I want you to spend today’s class creating a master page for your poem layout. Your master page should have a design grid. You should calculate the size of your textbox, the page margins, etc. Fill your master with some dummy text (think about Poem Title vs. body text). Remember that if you are doing a long poem, then you will have to put in line numbers!
Here is a very short tutorial that suggests you center a poem on the page based on its longest line. I would say that I don’t recommend putting more than one poem on a page unless they are very short.
Here is Adobe’s tutorial for getting started with Master pages.
Remember that you probably want your document size to be 9 inches by 6 inches.
Here is another page that gives some basic advice for setting up a book of poetry. Note that it recommends a base font size of 12pt.
We can feed that basic font size into the typography calculator I found last class. First, we will have to convert 12pt into pixels, and remember to use this chart to convert all pixel sizes back into pt.
Hand Back Posters
I want to hand back your posters and check for any missing grades.
Homework
For homework, I will ask that you use the master page you made in class today
