Revamp the Newsletter Tutorial Indesign
#INSTRUCTIONS:
Using the finished tutorial as a template, consider how the pages hold style continuity within a particular grid system (as explained in class) and improve upon it. Use the tutorial newsletter as a template but use your own images and headlines to give it a fresh look and tweak the design to be more professional.
The finished piece should serve as a full-size mock-up in InDesign for a 4-page newsletter with your own stamp on it. You are copying the layout but introducing your own subject matter, art, photos (which may be borrowed from the Internet), and display text choices to give it your own “signature.”
In summary, improve on the design and demonstrate your understanding (as explained in class) of good design.
Your final layout should look like a published article E-newsletter or magazine spread. You may use place marker text for body copy in your mock-up but write your own headlines.
Export the finished article as PDF format AND also give me the original indesign file, and the fonts you used.
TUTorial By chad neuman in InDesign,Tutorial AT Vishal Dawdy
Download the support files first from Mod 3 Guidelines!
Begin…
INSTRUCTIONS:
Step 1
Open InDesign and go to File>New>Document or click the Create New File icon on the welcome screen. Set the settings shown here (these are all default settings except you’ll set it to 4 pages and click “facing pages”).
Step 2
Let’s set up the master pages. That way we can add a header and page numbers automatically. Make sure your “Pages” window is open from the Window Menu. DOUBLE-Click on the A-Master icon on the top of the Pages pull-out palette to work in the master pages shown here in yellow).
Step 3
In the lower-left hand corner of the left master page, click-and-drag with the Text tool to drag out a text box for the page number.
Step 4
Go to Type>Insert Special Character> Markers>Current Page Number.
Step 5
This will insert an automated page number so you don’t have to number each page. Change the size (and style if you want) of the font to an appropriate one for your publication.
[Note: Additionally, you could also place text (like the word ‘page’ or ‘#’ symbol) in front of the page number and it would be continued throughout all pages using the master page template.]
Step 6
Select the Selection tool (black arrow). Hold down Option and click-and-drag the text box that has the automatic page number in it over to the right page to create another instance of the Auto Page Number. I placed the text box on the right side page on the lower right hand corner.
Step 7
If you put the text boxes for the page numbers in the same locations as I chose to, it should look something like this.
Step 8
Page numbers are not the only objects to put onto the master pages. And all the objects don’t have to be automatically updated objects, either. You can add photos, text, or shapes and they’ll be on every page. For this tutorial, add just a simple title at the top of each page by clicking-and-dragging out a text box along the top.
Step 9
Open the Paragraph palette under Window>Type & Tables>Paragraph and click the center or justify icon to center the text after highlighting it. Up in the Control options menu, change the tracking to 600 to increase the spacing of the text to spread out the title. The Tracking setting icon is an uppercase AV with directional arrows underneath it.
Step 10
Open Adobe Illustrator, create a New Document and go to File>Place to place the japanese_flag.gif file located in the downloadable support files for this tutorial (see Module 3 on our website).
Step 11
After clicking on the placed file with a Selection tool, open the Image Trace Control palette (under Window) to view the options for live tracing. Make sure the settings are set to the ones shown here; pretty much a basic black and white trace.
Step 12 Select Trace and then Go to the OBJECT menu and Expand (object+fill) to apply the trace to the selected artwork.
Step 13 Next, Deselect the image. Then, using the Direct Selection tool, select the white areas of the placed image. Press Delete to remove the white areas. Be sure you are using the Direct Selection tool, the white arrowed one, and not the Selection tool, the black arrowed one, which would select then entire object instead of the clicked object (the white area) of the greater expanded object.
Step 14 With the Direct Selection tool (white arrow), click now on the black object and select the black and white gradient in the Tool box or Swatches palette (Windows>Swatches).
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Step 15
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Change the direction of the gradient to a diagonal slant by selecting the Gradient tool and then clicking-and-dragging form the bottom right to the upper left of the object.
Step 16 Next, click-and-drag a color from the Swatches palette (or Color Guide window) to one end of the gradient on the Gradient palette (see below)/ Open the gradient tab if the palette isn’t already open. If you cannot change from black to color check that the upper far right drop down menu arrow on the gradient palette is set to CMYK). Click-and-drag another color to the opposite side of the gradient slider to add the other end of the gradient. I changed this one to red and white to keep with the Japanese theme.
Step 17
The object should look something like this. For the publication, we want more white area, so use the Gradient palette slider to have more white area.
Save it as an Illustrator.ai file for the next part of this tutorial. Save the InDesign file as well. With the second part, we’ll use this as a nice background for two pages of the publication. We’ll also add some new graphics and unique title text and complete the publication with the third part.
Part 2/Step 1
Open Adobe Illustrator and open the Japanese vector file with the gradient we created in the first part. Open the publication we created in Adobe InDesign. In Illustrator, choose a Selection tool and click on the Japanese gradient flag and go to Edit>Copy. In InDesign, double-click on page 2 icon on the Pages palette. Go to Edit>Paste and resize the object to go across the spread of pages 2 and 3.
Note: In InDesign, you need to hold Cmd when you resize the object. If you just click-and-drag the corner without holding Cmd (PC: Ctrl), it will crop out that section instead of resizing it.
Step 2 Next, let’s place the photo we want for page 4, the back cover, and you’ll see what I mean. Go to page 4 by scrolling or double-clicking on its icon in the Pages palette. Go to File>Place and place the bubbles.jpg file. With a Selection tool, click-and-drag it to move it so the photo is flush with the bottom of the page and towards the right. To crop out parts of the photo that are unneeded, click-and-drag a corner. If you want to resize it, hold down Cmd (PC: Ctrl).
Step 3 Now let’s add the cover images and titles of the articles to pg. 1. This is where you should consider a bleed (for future reference.) To set bleed guides go to FILE>DOCUMENT SET-UP. Click on “More Options” and your bleed set-up appears. Type in “.25in” for a ¼ inch bleed in the first box (the other 3 should change automatically) and click OKAY. A red line should appear on all of your pages all the way around the edge. As you place the lines.jpg image, it should at least reach the red lines left, and right. It can overlap the red line at any point as long as it provides at least that ¼ inch bleed for the printers’ trim. (Leave white space at the bottom of the page for text when placing/see below).
Demonstrates an appropriate left & right bleed
Add text for headlines with page numbers on top of the photo. You could add the text into the image file in Photoshop, but if we want to change the text later it’s a hassle. It’s preferable to add the text in InDesign as text boxes over the image. Instead of just typing in horizontal text, try coordinating it with the photo behind it, such as we do here. There are 2 ways to do this. 1) Draw paths using the pen tool in InDesign then select “Type on a path.” 2) Drag out a text box and type then choose the text as an object with the black arrow. As you move your cursor outside the area at one of the corners of the bounding box the little rotate tool will appear.
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Step 4
Next, let’s create a nice title header for the bottom part of the cover. Use the Ellipsis tool to draw a perfect circle (hold down Shift to maintain ratio for a perfect circle). Note: you can draw this outside the page and move it later. Use the Rectangle tool to draw a shape on top of the circle like shown here. (THE RECTANGLE DOES NOT HAVE TO HAVE ROUNDED CORNERS)
Step 5
Click on each of the objects and change the Fill color to a color from the Tool Box “Fill”. Set the Stroke to None if it isn’t already. With the Text tool, click to add some text. Click again to create another text box for the page number. Resize the fonts with the Control palette. Alternatively, if you just clicked instead of clicking-and-dragging, you can click-and-drag the text to resize the text size. Move it over the objects as shown here.
Step 6 Click-and-drag around all the shapes and text to place them where you want them, Go to File>Place to place a smaller version of the same photo we have on the back (page 4), named bubbles.jpg. The cover should look something like this so far.
Step 7 Let’s add a title and an “about us” section of text on the cover. On page 1, click-and-drag with the Text tool to create a title at the top. I used Impact for a strong font. In the bottom right-hand corner, click-and-drag a text box and type out what your publication is about.
Step 8
Now let’s insert the articles. Go to page 2 (the left hand side of the inside spread) and go to File>Place and place the Word document file, Kimonos and Video Games.doc. Once you select the file and click OK, the cursor will turn into a paragraph mouse icon. There’s more than one way to place the text. You can just click somewhere and the entire article will be placed and then you can resize the resulting text box. Or click-and-drag out where you want the paragraphs to be as you would an image. You can also go to Layout>Margins and Columns and set up even columns. For this tutorial, let’s use the second technique but start by placing in some column guides: go to Layout>Create Guides and type in “3” columns (per page) with a 1 pica between them and to”fit to Margins.
Click-and-drag in the left hand side of page 2, from near the top to the bottom to create a column of text within your guidelines. Most of the article will still not be placed, so there will still be text to be placed. Click once on the red plus sign at the bottom of the text box and click-and-drag from the top to the bottom again in the middle column. Repeat this for a third (right) column, and then repeat it for the rest of the text to go along the bottom like shown here. Make sure the baseline of the first line of each column of type aligns and even out the columns! (You can pull down a guide from your top ruler to help align the type/see Step 10.)
Step 9 The text is flush left, which is what text usually is if you’re using Word or some other word processor. But we want it to fill the columns like they do in newspapers. So select the text in the article and click the Justify icon on the Paragraph palette. If you see weird spaces, you need to hyphenate or use kerning and adjust accordingly by hand. Beware of widows and orphans (one line paragraphs/one word lines).
Step 10 One of the biggest problems of beginning layout editors, at least in my experience from advising a university newspaper, is uneven paragraphs (besides copy editing, which is a different subject). There’s an easy way to vertically align the paragraphs. Click-and-drag from the top Ruler down to the text boxes to move it right below the first line of text. Then click-and-drag the text boxes to align them using this guide. Add a title and a subhead by adding new text boxes.
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Step 11
Let’s place two articles on page 3. Go to page 3 and go to File>Place and place the Word document, Top Ten Places to Travel.doc. Use the same techniques from the previous steps to create the columns in a customized way. Add a title above it. I used the Rosewood font. Place this article on the bottom half of page 3.
Step 12
Next, go to File>Place and place the Word document, Thoughts on Travel.doc. Add a title above it in the same font as the other article. (You don’t want too many fonts in a publication; perhaps 2 or 3 at most for body text and titles).
Step 13 Most of you may just manually add indents when typing in a word processor such as Word by using the tab key. There’s another way to indent the first line in paragraphs so you can add the indent after placing the text without having to manually go through and tab every indent. After selecting the text of the article we just placed, go to the Paragraph palette and change the value in the second-from-top field on the left to 1 pica (1p0).
Step 14
This will indent the first line in each paragraph automatically.
Step 15
If you’re following along exactly as opposed to customizing the articles to your project, your page 2 and 3 spread should look something like this. It looks kind of weird having the sun just stop at the margins however. Consider bleeding it off the page now that you have your red bleed guidelines or draw a 1 pt. rule/stroke as a box that bounds it. (You can use the frame tool to place it and then designate a stroke color and weight.)
Save the InDesign publication to finish up this publication in the next and final section of this tutorial.
Part 3/Step 1
Go to the back cover (page 4) and use the Text tool to add a title using the same font we used for the titles on page 3. I used Rosewood. Creating two separate text boxes enables us to move each line to where we want with a Selection tool, instead of having to move it word-processor style.
Step 2
Go to File>Place and select the Word document, Spreading Joy.doc. Instead of clicking-and-dragging a text box, just click somewhere outside the column guides and the entire article will be placed. Move it so it’s over the photo like shown here.
Step 3
Select the photo of the woman blowing the bubbles. Open the Text Wrap palette (Window>Text Wrap). Click the third-from-left option at the top so the text will wrap around our photo. Normally the text will wrap around the entire photo. But since this photo is overexposed and has a lot of white area in it we can have text, let’s have the text wrap more specifically around the subject in the photo instead of the entire photo. Change the Contour Options to Detect Edges.
Step 4
This causes the text to wrap around the woman. If your text breaks up in spots over her face or the active image, hang on. We’ll address that problem below.
Step 5
Draw two circles using the Ellipse tool (hold Shift to make perfect circles). Select them with the Selection tool and add a text wrap on the Text Wrap palette. Select the third-from-left option at the top. Don’t forget to designate a stroke weight and color to your ellipse if you want them to really show as more than just negative space.
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Step 6
One downside of using the Detect Edges County Option on the Text Wrap palette is that it may allow text into areas you don’t want it to be. For the photo of the woman blowing bubbles, the white area shown here has let an “a” letter on the woman’s face. Let’s fix that. One way to do that is to create an object-such as a circle here-and add a text wrap to it on top of the area we don’t want text.
We also want to get rid of the lines where only a word or two is, on the right side of the woman (and anywhere else in the photo’s active area). Try moving the photo over to the right a little bit to push the text out of that area into a more readable block of type. If that doesn’t work you may need to use the pen tool to draw a shape (with no stroke) around her form and tell the type to wrap around this as an object.
Step 7
Using the pen tool to mask the photo’s active area: The InDesign pen tool works just as it would in Illustrator. Click the pen tool in the tool box and trace around the form of the woman. Then select the shape with your black arrow tool and tell the text again to wrap. You may want to select no stroke so your outline doesn’t show. Note though how difficult it is to read sentences that run over the bubble in the middle. Consider moving it to the edge.
Step 8
Let’s add a pull quote to one of the articles. Go to page 2 and use the Text tool to add a quote. Copy a sentence from an article and paste it outside the page edges on the pasteboard. Change the font size of the actual quote and have the source of the quote be a smaller font size. Play with placing a decorative border around it using the object tool (the rectangle with the X thru it).
Step 9
Add a text wrap to this text box, using the same option as the other text wraps.
Step 10
Next, click-and-drag the text box with the Selection tool over an area of text. Placing it on the edge somewhere prevents it from creating awkward short text sections such as would happen with placing it slightly off the side of the page.
If there’s too much white space between the pull quote and the article, you can fix that by clicking-and-dragging the sides of the text wrap. You can move the line or just a corner. This enables the text to get closer to the pull quote. If there’s not enough white space adjust it as you did for the bubbles on page 4.
Now we’ve created a four-page publication and learned a few techniques in the process. You’re ready to tackle your magazine spread with the same tools we’ve used here.
