Editorial Design with Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign

1. Introduction Editorial Design: Would you like to create professional and captivating magazine layouts? I have just the right course for you. I'm, Martin, I have over 20 years of experience as a graphic designer, illustrator, and ADB certified instructor. I have worked with companies like BBC, Disney, Google, Ikea, and I cannot wait to share my best practices with you. This is a streamlined hands on course focusing on a real life design project. I will be walking you through everything step by step, and you will get all the exercise files so you can follow along. In case you prefer not to copy me. You can also follow my workflow using alternative assets provided and create something completely unique that you can showcase in your creative portfolio. I am pretty sure this course will inspire you to create something amazing. We will start by analyzing great magazine spreads and learn about all the editorial design terms like headline, subhead, stand first, kicker, body copy, portfolio, running head, and their role in the composition. Our actual design work will start in AOB photoshop, where we will prepare the images for our magazine spread. We will be doing some adjustments, selections and masking to create interesting out of bounds effects and the creative job cap, the combination of a cool photo and the initial letter of our main story. Next, we will spend some time in Adobe Illustrator to create some cool vector icons, which we will use as visual entry points in our com. Finally, we will use AOB in design to put everything together with the help of features like text wrap, parent pages, styles, and so much more. Besides all the technical stuff, we will also cover some important graphic design theory that you will be able to apply in any of your future creative projects. You can join this course without any prior knowledge in graphic design illustration or Adobe applications. But to complete the project, you will need access to Adobe Creative Cloud and a desktop or laptop computer. But now it's time to start creating, so I will see you in the next lesson. 2. Magazine Full Spread: Let's just stop for a moment to appreciate how bad this gutter jump is. Avoid placing any important details or letters in the exact center of a facing page layout. Now, this is exactly why you should avoid doing that, especially when you are using these condense narrow characters, like in this case. So, first and foremost, you have to always think about the full spread when you are designing something for a magazine. So instead of paying attention to individual pages, you always considered full spread. So when a reader opens up the magazine, they will look at both pages roughly at the same time so their eye scans across very quickly. And even if the spread has an article on one side and an advert on the other side, there should still be some form of harmony or consistency between them. Now, of course, when it comes to an actual article, the first spread of the article is the invitation for the reader to start reading that, and you have to really make a good job in combining those two parts of the spread. So there's three main factors with which you can grab someone's attention for your spread. The first one is the layout or the composition of the spread. The second is the image that you use or the main image, and then the third one is the headline. These three are obviously very related to each other. So your composition relies on a good placement of the image and the headline or a good combination of them. But out of all the textual elements, the headline is definitely the most crucial one on your spread. It is quite common for headlines to use display type, which is not just a single font, but it's usually a custom designed font or hand lettering that really suits the theme of the article. The placement of the headline is usually on the top left side, but it can also be on the right, and some cases, it can also be at the bottom or on the far left or far right. The reason why it's good to place it on the left side is because naturally we are starting to scan the spread from left to right and starting from the top left through the bottom right. That obviously can be different when you have your magazine in Arabic. You would probably have it mirrored and have things starting from the right. Headlines are usually really big. So in terms of the hierarchy within the composition, they should be really the dominant element, definitely larger and more robust compared to the other textual elements within the spread. Now, in some cases, the headline itself can be using different formatting. Like here, the first word, yeah, is quite different even though it's using the same phone family to the rest of the headline, but this still forms a single unit when it's put together. When you have a short text above a headline, we normally refer to that as the kicker. So again, here, this would be the kicker. While below it, this is the headline. And in this example, you can see that a phone pairing can also work for a headline. So two very contrasting different phones combined together. Still forms a good solid unit that can work as the headline. Now, usually just below the headline. So in this case, this section here is what we call the intro, stand first or deck. And this is usually covering in a nutshell what you are going to read about within the article. So it really entices you to start reading. But it also acts as a bridge between the headline. And the body copy. So here's another example of the kicker the headline and below it, the intro stand first or deck. Now, remember when I said the two sides of your spread should be considered as one unit. Even though here we have a very distinct left and right side, there's still a lot of repetition that helps to unite them together, and unity in design is very important. So here we obviously see the color is used on the left and the right side. Then the same font is repeated again. And also, in general, the shapes here on the left side are quite blocky and squared, which again is repeated here on the right side. Now, usually there's one element that comes straight after or attached to the intral. That's what we call the by line. It's just simply by, and then the author's 3. Magazine Spread - Body Copy: Now, these elements that we already covered are very common, but that's not to say that sometimes you might have to leave one of them out. Like in this design, I would say that this is the kicker. This is the headline. There's our by line, but there is no actual intro. We can consider this section here the intro, but it feels more like part of the body copy. And since we are talking about body copy, that is the largest textual element within your article. And here, the readability is crucial. So you have to pay attention to the line length to make sure it's comfortable to read the text. So two long lines or two short ones are not ideal. You probably want to set it to around 45 to 80 characters in each line, and that's already with the spaces included. Now, when there is no intro, the first paragraph can be considered the lead. And notice how that is emphasized with the bold formating. So we want it flying cars that really leads you into reading the rest of the copy. Now, not the term that you might hear mentioned when it comes to the first paragraph or even the lead of an article is not graph or not graph, which is an editorial slang for a sentence that summarizes the rest of the article without giving out too much detail. So it's almost like the thesis of what you are going to read about. And some may argue that the lead and the graph is exactly the same thing. Some people would say it's different. But generally, within your first paragraph in the body copy, you can include something that's again, a little bit more elevated than the rest of the body copy. Another important thing that you need to keep in mind when you work with body copy is that you should have a standardized baseline throughout the whole spread, which means that the lines, even if they are in different columns should match the position, so they should be aligned to each other. So here is another example, even though we have a gap here in this first column. So there's the gap between the paragraphs. We still have the alignment. Between the lines on the left side and on the right side. So that alignment is thanks to the base line grid. This is a feature in in design that you can turn on within an individual text frame or even for the whole document. Now, the next textual element in terms of hierarchy, would be the subhead, which is usually within the body copy columns or frames, and these help to break up large chunks of blocks of text. So here, exercise, for example, diet, health tests. These would be considered subheads, but there can be many levels of subheads. So even your 20s could be one if the article then goes on and shows the 30s and 40s. But there can even be third and fourth level subheads, like these again serves the same purpose, dividing or breaking up large chunk of text, but again, creating smaller divisions within already a unit that was created by the second level subhead. Structure and hierarchy is extremely important with magazine design because there's so many elements, so much information. You really need to guide your reader through the spread to make sure that they can find the relevant information. Because believe me, most readers are not reading in the order that you want them to read. They jump around. But by having these subheads, for example, you really give them entry points into different areas where they can go. And they might actually read eventually the whole article, but maybe not in the order that it was set up to be read. Now, another very important distinct textual element within a spread is the poll cote, which we can see two examples of in the spread. These are usually picked from the body copy and highlighted as essential reads from the story and something that really is exciting and interesting. Once again, these are to draw attention to the article. So sometimes you might flip through the magazine and you see a poll cot that pulls you in to the article. They don't always have to be quotes, so it doesn't have to be that someone sad. It can be just a summary or like an interesting fact. So it's really up to you as a designer to decide what should be highlighted in pull coats. Here is another very elegant pull coat placed within the center of the page, and here is another very eye catching strong and bold pull coat within the spread. And of course, pull cost doesn't always have to break up the structure of the body copy. They can actually be independent so they can be on the side, like here, a very sophisticated, subtle way of placing the poll coat on the bottom left side. Now, another important part for giving structure to the magazine within a spread would be the header and foota. In the heather, you would normally place something about the article, whether it's a recurring part of the magazine, and that indicates that this current article falls in that category, or it can be something more specific like, let's say, the celebrity's name who is covered within that article. This is especially useful if you have multiple spreads, and you want to make sure the reader knows that they are still reading about the same thing. The footer normally holds a little bit more information. One of the crucial elements is the folio or page number, which normally you would want to place on both sides. But if you only place it on one side, it's better to use the right side within the spread. The footer can hold additional information like the URL website, or it can also be the date, and there can even be notes and references placed here. Now, in some instances, being playful with certain elements of your design can set the tone of the article or even the whole magazine. Short list is a really cool magazine here in the UK, and you can see how witty they are with the URL. So in this case, the footer is almost completely covered up. There's no page number visible, and also the URL, I can't read. However, this is an element that repeats on the other spreads, and it doesn't always have to be fully visible. But once again, that is about breaking the rules when you know the rules. Another term that you might sometimes hear is running head or running feet. Once again, this is an element that carries on throughout a couple of pages to indicate a chapter or section within the magazine. So here, in this case, that I could consider a running head because as we go along and go to the other page, we again have the same design there. 4. Magazine Spread - Placing Images: Whenever you place in images, there's two important things that you need to remember. First of all, is to have a caption for them and to credit the artist, whether it's a photographer or an illustrator. In some cases, you would see captions individually for each image. But the common practice would be also to combine them together and just simply refer to images as left, right, bottom. So in this text, we have everything written in one block of text. To simplify the credits in case all the pictures were taken for an article by the same photographer, you can also include the name at the beginning within the by line section. So here, for example, we have words, which is the article written by a person, but then immediately after that, there's the credit for the photographer. It is common that other contributors are also named in the by line section. So here, for instance, besides the author, we have the photographer again, but also the stylist on the right side. Now, there's many different ways of adding the captions. They can be boxes overlapping an image, or they can be written over the images. And in these cases, usually, it should be at the bottom, where it's written not on the top, because it can get confusing if you move captions around, it's again good to have a system for them. But this is again a rule that you can break if it makes sense. Like in this example, we have the text on the top left of that image. But that is mainly because the image on the far right corner of the spread where there's nothing else on top of it. It is obvious that this caption refers to this image. The reason why the text was placed there because that was the best negative space within the image, it would have been hard to read it anywhere else. That is just another good example of understanding the rules. Doesn't mean that you always have to follow all of them. It's about being flexible and adapt the rules to the actual situation that you have in a spread. If there was another image on top of this, I would probably avoid adding the caption here on the top left corner. There's another term quite important to learn in print design. It's the bleed, which is usually important when you place images on your spread. Whether they are smaller images or they are covering the whole spread, you would most likely want them to go all the way to the edge. So like this image here goes all the way to the edge on the top, or this image goes all the way edge on the right. And this is where you need to make sure that you have bleed. Now, the bleed is usually additionally 3 millimeters outside of the final print size, which then gets trimmed. And whenever you set up the images in in design, you just have to make sure that the actual boundary or the edge of the image goes all the way to the edge of the bleed. So that 3 millimeters will be sacrificed to make sure that you get a perfectly printed edge. And of course, bleed is not just for the images. It's also for the rest of the spread. Like, in this case, we have a very subtle blue color in the background, which means that you need bleed throughout the whole spread. Now, there's a big variety of images that you can use, whether they are illustrations, infographics or photography. And it can even be a combination of these. However, Once you pick a certain style, let's say, a style of illustration, like in this case, that should carry along in the whole article. So it is common if there is an illustrator commission to work on an article, they would be covering all of the graphical elements necessary. Once again, this is about to assure the repetition and unity within your design, which definitely is one of the most important things to make it look professional. Now, for images that run across a spread, so it covers both sides, we normally call them double truck or run around. And here is a good example for that. Or here is another one, which you can see, doesn't necessarily mean that it's an image in the background, and then you put text on top of it. There can be clever ways of integrating your type behind and in front and create a bit more perspective or depth within your spread. And that's, again, a very important goal for you as a designer, because if you can make a two dimensional plane, which is the magazine spread into something that feels more three dimensional, your readers will be more drawn into entering that space that you created. And there's one more term about images worth mentioning then there is photo package, which usually is referred to a cluster of images combined, whether into a column or even to a single row, or even van Dia overlap and stack on top of each other like here. Now, when we refer to the save zone within the design, we normally refer to everything within the margins, and the margins are those invisible outside edges that make sure that text doesn't get too close to the edge. Once again, there can be exceptions like the running head in this case and the footer at the bottom with the folios. But apart from the outside margins, you have to also pay attention to the inner margins, which we normally refer to as the creep, and this is where you would have the binding or the spine of the magazine. So, apart from keeping things away from the edges, it's probably even more important not to place anything important in the central section of the spread. And that applies to both the textual elements and also the imagery. So notice how here cleverly, the four characters within the illustration are placed on the left and the right sides, but no one is in the center. This is why planning is so important, and the editor should always communicate with the illustrator who is commissioned to work on the same article. Now, of course, you cannot always avoid to have no important detail around the spine or creep. So in this case, this double truck would have some details that falls into that spine section. But still, you can see that the designer paid attention not to have the text on the creep. It's both here on the left and the right side. So it's still going to be legible once the final print comes out. With this example again, because the image covers up the whole spread, it's impossible to avoid details ending up near the spine or within the creep. However, all the textual elements are still safe and far away from the creep. 5. Magazine Spread - Line Length: Now, you might recall that I mentioned in the first part of this video that the main textual element within your spread is always going to be the body copy, and this is where the readability is the most important aspect of your design. So you would end up usually using columns to divide up the text, making sure that your line length is not too long. And when it comes to creating columns, you would end up also having a gutter or, which is the negative space within the columns. The size for this really depends on the text size and the line length as well. But essentially what you want to assure is there's enough visual difference between the two sides. So your readers won't end up jumping from one side to the other accidentally. In some cases, you can push the limits a bit and use very narrow columns like these. It's not really comfortable to read once again. It's a little bit too short of a line length. But because there's justification used, which creates a very sharp edge on the right instead of having ragged lines. So in these cases, you might also be able to reduce the size of the gutter or between the columns. Remember, readability should be your number one priority and not the stylistic formating of text. When it comes to dividing columns, you could also use a down rule, which would be a graphical element dividing the columns. So in this case, these are just simple lines. But you can also be a bit more subtle with your down rules. Like here, we have these vague dotted lines running down at the end of each column, so to the right side of each column. Now, there's another very common element within a magazine spread, which has several different names. This is what I'm talking about when you have an additional little article within the article. It's like a side story that relates to the article itself. There's many names for this, so it can be called panel, box out, box copy, sidebar and also secondary coverage. There's slight differences between all of these, but essentially, they all relate to these additional separated or isolated details, which usually helps to tell a complete story beside the main body copy. Now, this should be visually separated and different from the rest of the body copy and the rest of the magazine spread. So that's just to make sure that the reader will know exactly when to read that. They can decide to read it first before they end up reading the body copy or afterwards. It's completely up to them. But you as a designer just have to make sure it's isolated. That can be by using a different font, a background color, and it can really vary in size. Sometimes it can even take up half of the page. However, the most common placement for these elements would be on the right edge of the spread. So this is an ideal placement for a sidebar. Panels can also be more graphic instead of just relying on text. Like here, we have more like a little infographic, but it still would be considered a panel. And although here on the left side, we don't have a distinct background color. This detail is still isolated enough by having those simple graphical elements here, creating a little frame and once again, helping or assuring that this is isolated enough to become a panel or box. And since we are talking about frames, lines, of course, are also important elements within a magazine spread, they can help to guide the reader and direct their attention to certain details. Here we have a rule, for example, just underneath the headline, or here we have an eye line, which we normally call when a line runs across the entire spread. This is another way to visually unify the two pages. And remember, when I talked about depth, here, there's a beautiful example of integrating the image that's in the background with that eye line that seems to be behind the image. So even though most of the text is placed on top of it, there's still another element that feels like it is running behind the image. So that's a clever way of using masking techniques to establish more depth and perspective in the layout. And last but not least, we need to talk about white space or negative space, which is all the empty areas within your magazine spread. These are just as crucial as all the other elements that we already talked about, because without a good balance between the negative and positive space, you would end up having a cluttered and closrophobic design. So even this massive drop cap we have here on the left, defines quite a big negative space. And by the way, drop cap is another term that's used for defining these large first characters that can work again as a good entry point or focal point in the design. And if you are interested to learn more about them, I have a separate video on the channel, how to use photoshop and design to create exciting and engaging drop caps. But coming back to negative space by having a lot of it really intensifies the rest of the elements, and it gives a little more breathing space. Usually, the more you use negative space, the more elegant and luxurious your magazine spread will feel like. And even though with this photograph, we have a color in the back because there's no actual details, I would also consider that negative space. 6. Running Header: The first thing I'm going to show you is how to set up a character style because this is what we will need to be able to use different formatting on every spread, but still be able to use the same running header definition. So character style panel, you will find in the window menu under styles. So that's where it is. Once it's open, all you have to do is to deselect everything on your current spread and then click on the Little plus sign. This is going to create just a completely empty character style. You can double click on this and rename it. I'm just going to call it running header so I can reference it later on as well. So, very important that it shouldn't be based on anything, and it should have none in the style settings. So it's a completely blank, empty character style. And before we accept the changes, I will also assign a shortcut to it just to make it easier to apply it. I'm going to use Option one as the shortcut. I will click. And it's cool that the shortcut is also showing here in the panel. So it's just a quicker and easier way to apply it. Now, I'm here on the first spread, and I would like the running header to show up here on the top left. And this is the text I would like for the running header to show. On the next spread, I would like creative adventures to show once again, there on the top. Now, if I zoom out a bit, you can see that these two text they are completely different in formatting, so I can't use the same paragraph style for them. Instead, what we are doing is to use this character style that we just defined. So I'm going to select this text frame and click on the running header character style. And since this was set up with anything in cite it, so it's a blank style. It's not going to make any changes to the text itself. However, if I go into the type tool and selected and I check it here under the character style. Now, it actually shows that this style has been applied. So why is that important? Because we are going to now place in a running header in our master page. But first, I wanted to show you that a running header needs to be specified as a text variable, which you can find under the type menu, and you already have a running header definition created by default in in design. This you can change by going into the define option, and under there, when you select running der, you can click on Edit. This way, you can decide whether it's going to work with a paragraph style or a character style. Now, since we already set up our character style, we can also select that from this drop down. So the style should be that blank running header and use the first instance of that style within this text variable that we are just setting up. We can also choose to change the case and set everything to upper case or title case. But for now, I'm just going to keep it like this and click Okay. So now we can click Done, and that tax variable is ready. We can now go to our Master page. So A Master in this case, which is probably the best place to work with tax variables and running headers in general. So I already have a tax frame created here. And all I have to do now is once I clicked inside it, to go into the type menu and choose Insert variable from the tax variables option and choose running header. It's going to show up like this. So it just simply says running heater in those brackets, but that means it is a variable, which is going to actually change on the pages. So if I go to page number two and three, we can see already it picked up that highlighted text where we use the character style, and it is just replicating that. So for instance, if I have to change the title, and let's say we just type in into the wild, Once I click away, it's going to refresh automatically. However, I found that if it doesn't update straight away, if you click away onto another page and you come back, then you will see the changes happening within the running header. So it just takes some time to refresh. But it is going to refresh eventually, and the most important thing it is connected, and you don't have to worry about it anymore. Now, to be able to use this on the rest of the magazine. All we have to do is to define the titles or the text that we would like to see in the running header. So you can see currently, it still says into the Wild because there's no instances of that character style on this page. So what I can do is to select this text frame. You can highlight the text if you want or just select the whole text frame and then click on Running Header. And once you do that. Once again, we just need to refresh the page. So I double click away, come back. And you can see now it says creative adventures. So even though these are two completely different formatting that we are using for the source of the running header, thanks to that bland character style, it's going to work perfectly. So let's just do another test. I will come to this page where I would like this designer potlight text to be used for our text variable, Once again, I just apply the character style and maybe come to another page here where I would like this big city life to be used once again, simply applying the running tor. By the way, there's also another quick way of applying styles. If you press command or Control Enter, that's the quick apply option where you would normally get the most recently used styles coming up straight away, or you can just type them in and then That's a fast way to get to it as well. Once you see the option that you need, just press enter again, and then it's going to be applying it. So now if we come up here, notice that it's already updated on this spread, and we can go back to this other spread, once again, designer spotlight showing up there. And that's all you really need to know about setting up a running header for in design. 7. Drawing Thumbnails: Here we are in in design, and we have those few elements that we will be able to use for these compositions that we put together. And you can argue that even what we can see on the screen right now could work in a magazine. So we have our headline here or title. It can also be called for this article. Then we have the stand first or intro copy, and then the body copy, which is the article itself. And then we have two graphical elements as well. We have our photo on the right, which is from Unsplash, and then we have also a simple icon, which is from noun project. The links for these sources are in the description below. These are both free. You can download them, and then you can recreate essentially what I'm doing here. The copy itself, I got from Wikipedia. Again, the link is in the description below. So if you want to follow along, you can easily do that. And what I'm going to attempt to do here is to show you that with a bit of creative thinking with the same exact elements and without changing anything in terms of the form thing on the text, we will be trying to put together three more creative layouts or compositions. Keeping in mind and respecting design principles like balance, hierarchy, and even pacing, which I will go into more detail later on, just to make sure you understand what it means. It's always best to learn how to utilize these theories when you can actually see them in action. Before we get started, though, here's a quick time lapse of the sketches that I've done. I use procreate, but you can do it on paper. It doesn't really matter, and it doesn't take long to do this. It's just important to get a rough idea of what you are going to create. And you can see this is really just simple thumbnails. It's not about making it pretty. It's about just thinking where you are going to place those few elements that we have on the screen. So it is usually minimum three thumbnails that I would start with before I actually start doing things in in design or the other DOB applications. And it is a good practice to not just stop at the first mockup because you never know you might have really good ideas which you will only find once you start exploring additional options. 8. Text Wrap: But now that we have our three concepts from the sketches, we can get started. First of all, I'm going to duplicate the spread because I would like to come back to it later just so we can compare the original starting point and what we create. Now, one of the first things I will have to do here is to increase the size of this light bulb. It's a vector object, which I placed into in design, and that means it's resolution independent, so we can easily increase the size. You do that by holding down command the control shift key and drag one of the corner points. Now, I need this to be white, so I'm going to select it and change the fill to paper. Next, we need text wrap, which you can find from the window menu, once you have the panel open. Just simply click on the third icon wrap around object shape. Here, we don't need to use offset because this is just shape. So it doesn't have any outline. So it's not going to clash with the text. But for the text, to make this look better, what I'm going to do is to change the alignment. So let's just move the text a little bit higher so we can see it better. So to create that cool, nice graphic edge on the right side, we will use justification on our copy. Shortcut for that is Commando Control Shift J. So there's justification enabled. But if you press T on the keyboard, having the type selected, you can also choose the option here. Justify the last line align left. Now, since the tex frame is really wide, we don't need hyphenation. So this is something I'm going to turn off. You can find this in the paragraph options and just simply turn off hyphenate. And the reason I mentioned the tex frames width is because if you have it narrower, then using justification without hyphenation will cause these very ugly gaps which we normally refer to as reverse. So it's definitely something you want to avoid. And that's why I'm going to just set it back the way it was. Now that we have this big white space or negative space created here, it would be worth using it for something that is important. So it will be like a focal point of the whole layout and composition, and that would be perfect for our intro copy. Now, for this to be able to work here, since we have a text wrap on that light bulb icon, we will have to use commando Control B on this text frame and choose ignored text wrap. That way, we will be able to move it on top of it, but we have to also make sure that it's aligned on top of everything else. So that's commando control shift, right square bracket. That way, it jumps up to the top. And now we just have to adjust the frame, make it smaller, something like that. I don't want any hyphenation here, so let's take that off. I will align this copy to the center because we have a nice symmetrical shape behind it. So let's keep the copy also symmetrical. That's Commando Control Shift C quickly. And I'm going to hold down command control shift and drag this up just to increase the size. Double click here just to snap the frame in. And I think that looks good. But now, there is one very important issue here. And that is we can't really have copy close to the center of the spread. This is what we would refer to as the gutter. And another term which is quite important, the creep, which again, helps us to make sure that we don't place copy too close to the center. Again, where the stitching is going to be or the binding. And if you have any text close to that, it's going to cause problems, so the viewers won't be able to read things properly. Even important parts of images shouldn't fall into the exact center. So what we need to do is to select both of these together, and let's keep moving them to the left. Until our copy is safe. I would say it needs to be a little bit further in, so I'm going to just drag this text frame in, something like that looks a little bit already better. Maybe let's just move it a little bit further in just to be on the safe side. So if we look at this, now we are within our margins, and by the way, I have several columns here. That's what you see now, and I just press W on the keyboard to switch between normal and the preview mode. I prefer to use preview mode for the tutorial just to keep it easier for you to follow what I'm doing. Now, what I think I'm going to do here is to have this last paragraph moved on the other page. So I'm going to cut this out, Commando Control X. And I'm going to place it in a separate text frame. You can use threading as well in in design for this. But for now, I actually would like to keep it completely independent, so I will create a separate text frame and just paste that copy in there. We will worry about this later. But this way, now we have a little bit more space to play around with here on the left side, and I feel like we can probably move these two together a bit more towards the left. Now you can also group them together, that's command or Control G, and that will just make it easier to select this whole thing in the future. Now that we have them roughly in place, it's time to also play a little bit around with the image. I feel like it would look better if we have an overlap between the two pages. So what I'm going to do is to drag the text frame to the left. I will drag it down. It's important that I would like to have this whole silhouette of the light bulb completely visible. So we have to make sure it has a definition on the top, on the bottom. And then to define the right side of it, I am going to use the image. So let's just drag it out and as I said, create that overlap between the left and the right side of the spread. It can probably come a little bit further, so I'm just going to hold down the command and shift keys or control and shift keys together and drag it out. Once again, I'm looking for that bottom part of the light bulb. This is quite important to define and make the silhouette visible. So I think now that looks better, we can adjust again our body copy and align it. It can come down a bit like that. Yeah, I think that looks quite nice now. Now, the image itself, we will adjust later, but already now, what we can do is to increase the size of the image inside the frame that you do by double clicking on it. And when you see those brown outlines, that means you are changing the size of the image inside the frame, so the frame stays the same, and we can probably drag it up to roughly around there. I think that will work. 9. Headline: Let's deal with the headline or the title. This can be much bigger. Again, commando control shift and drag it out. Probably something like that will work. Now, what I'm going to do is keep it aligned here on the left side so we can have our body copy and that text align. And also, of course, we can adjust this to make sure that it aligns to the margin. And to add a bit of interest here on the top, what I will also do is to increase the size a little bit further. Until we can perfectly align the edge of the image and the E or the edge of the E, where that first word ends. So I'm just going to align it like that. And then I am going to urn this text, holding down alter option key and then left arrow. I can drag it all the way in, so completely remove the space there by using this reduced urn in here, and then I will change the text color to white. I'm going to go in here and change it to white. So there's a nice inverted color there on the headline. I think that works quite nicely. However, I feel like now we have too much space at the bottom. So first of all, we move our body copy down, and I think that already feels a little bit more balanced. Maybe the text can also come down a bit. Now, don't forget the creep, again, the center of the spread. We have our headline running across the two pages. In these cases, what you need to make sure is that you add that space in there. Again, I can use kerning for this. So just click there and an alter option key right arrow pushing it out until it has enough space there. And it really depends on the binding, what kind of binding it is. You have to check with your printer, and also, obviously the size of the magazine, how long it is, how many pages will be stitched together or binded, and keeping that in mind, you will set up the spacing on both right and left side. So what I would have to do here is obviously do the same on the left side as well. And although it is important to consider that, for the visual example that I'm doing here, I'm just going to keep it as it was because it will be more like a preview of how it could look and print. But I just wanted to warn you that you have to consider these types of things if you run headlines or text over the center of the spread. 10. Nested Drop Cap: Now, let's create a cool drop cap that can tie together the headline and the body copy and also create a nice, interesting entry point for our body copy. For this, I'm going to use the same font as we have here in the title, I can very quickly just drag it down by holding down Alt or Option key and just type in t and double click on a corner point will reduce the size of the frame. So there we have our frame that we need. Now, the reason why I'm doing this is because if I just go straight in here and select this first paragraph, and then from the paragraph options, I introduce drop caps, Notice the problem with letters like t is that it creates a huge empty space around it. I don't really like how it fits into the text so that big negative space there doesn't work really well even when we look at it from a distance. I mean, it's not a huge problem. But in these cases, what I prefer to do is to create this separate text frame. So we have our t ready here, and I'm just going to move it maybe to the site just so you can see it better. So there, I'm going to change the color of this in the character formatting options to white. And I will switch to the container and color that black. Now, we have an inverted text here, and we can start changing the size of this frame. And then I will use our command control shift C shortcut to center the text horizontally. So no matter how big or narrow this frame is, it's always going to be in the middle, and to vertically align it, I will press commando Control B, which is the text frame options and then choose a line center. So this way, again, if I adjust the frame, it's always going to stay in the center. So this way, we have a nice setup already. I feel like something like that looks good. We can reduce the size of it by using commando Control shift drag and then maybe just add a little bit more vertical space. Okay, I feel like that looks good. Now, command or Control X to cut this out, and then place it here in the paragraph. So just put your cursor in at the beginning of the paragraph and then commando Control V to paste it into it. So this becomes a nested text frame inside that paragraph, and we can delete the original capital T from the body copy. And having that paragraph highlighted, we can go back and set up our drop cap, and probably we can use, yeah, maybe use six lines or seven, and then just adjust the size of this frame a little bit, again, using that scaling shortcut until it matches correctly and fits nicely in the text. Now we can just add the bit of kerning here between the drop cap and the body copy alter option right arrow. And I think that looks quite nice. So looking at this from a distance, we have a nice repetition of both the text formatting between the headline and the drop cap, but also repeating that inversion of black to white. Again, here within this little frame, we have that contrast of black and white. These visual cues or links between the elements in your layout are very important. They help to tie things together, but also establish the hierarchy or the importance of the elements. 11. Out of Bounds: Now, I feel like our image can come down a bit. I'm just going to drag it down, maybe somewhere around there. Maybe we can add a bit of contrast here in the text as well, and I feel like fresh perspective is the key word or the term here that we need to highlight. So for this, I'm going to use probably bold. Now, whenever you have multiple styling options for a font, don't go for just one step up if you want to highlight something. So instead of going to Demi which would look like this, go always two steps up. So I would go to Bold. That way, there is enough contrast between the regular text and the highlighted bold version of it. Using contrast is very, very important in every kind of design, whether it's just a simple highlight on text like that or having a big negative or empty space next to the body copy. So these all create visual interest, and most importantly, set the pacing. So you don't want to have too much busy things in one place. You want to have some breathing space next to a very dense area. So after this big block of text, we have that nice breathing space here and some visual interest. And then we move onto a nice pleasing image. And only after that, we have some additional text, which by the way, we just need to fix and work with a little bit to make it work. Since we are going to have a narrower text frame here, I'm going to use flush left or left line that's commando control shift L. And I'm going to drag it here and maybe also just make it a little bit more narrower, something like that. Now, here, I am going to highlight these names at the beginning. So this is a little bit of an intro into the paragraph. So I will just set these up as bold or semi bold, what we have available here. And next, I'm going to create an additional frame. For this, I'm just pressing F on the keyboard and draw this frame here on the edge and set the fill color to white or paper. Now we just need to move it back one step, that's commando control left square bracket. I think that works quite nicely. Maybe we can just increase it slightly bit further out. And by the way, notice that we have bleed already set up here. Again, that's something you can find in document setup. Just make sure that you use bleed for pretty much everything that you set for print, and three millimeter bleed is a good place to start. So all you have to make sure is that all of these details are going all the way to the bleed edge. It can go beyond it, but just make sure that you have, for instance, the image edge doesn't end here, right at the edge of the page, but it actually goes beyond that. And at least covers the bleed or goes beyond it, that's not an issue. This helps to make sure that once this is printed, there's no white gaps visible at the edges. And just like with the image, we have to make sure that this white frame again covers the bleed edge or goes beyond it. So if we look at this from a distance, it works quite nicely, but it would look much better if we have this hand coming over this white text frame. And the way we can achieve that is by using Photoshop. So I'm going to use Option or old double click on this image, which will open it straight into Photoshop. And here what we have to do is to use select subject, which is a brilliant way of very quickly finding a good selection for this image. And then all we have to do here is to duplicate this layer, and then we can call this layer mast. And then click on the Japanese flag here at the bottom, which is going to mask out that selection. Now, if we want to be more precise, we can also just manually paint over these little details here, the gaps by using the brush tool and painting on the mask thumbnail, that black and white thumbnail in the layers panel. That way we can get this right. But I already have this prepared, so I'm not going to waste time on it. All I would normally do is to save this as a separate file, a PSD, which I then will be able to use within in design. Since I already have this PSD file, what I'm going to do is to copy this image, paste it in, and notice it pastes on top of the original because I'm using the paste in place shortcut. So now, effectively, we have two versions of the same image on top of each other, one at the bottom and one on top of the text frame. But for this one, which is on top, I'm going to use the object layer options, which you can get to by right clicking. And then here, all you have to do is to turn off the background. So the subject layer is that mask layer that we created. And that way, now we can create this nice out of frame effect where the hand comes out. And if I wanted to, I can always move that away. But whenever I move it, I have to make sure both the image in the back and this image in the front are selected. So just to show you, if I move this around, there's the image in the background without the masking, and this is the mast version on top. So very simple technique, but very effective. 12. One is Not Enough: Now, at this point, you might already feel like you've done the job, you nailed it. It can be sent to the client, and then it's job done. However, I would always recommend to do at least one more or if possible, two more versions. Again, we had three sketches, so why not recreate those as well in design. Doesn't take long and do this before you do the final small adjustments on the copy and putting in additional elements that's needed. But having three almost finalized versions presented to the client, will always feel more professional and give you also a bit more time to explore and experiment with the elements that you had to work with. Now, of course, it always depends on how much time you have. But by getting good at using the tools and learning the shortcuts and practicing, essentially being confident in creating things quickly, eventually, you will be able to do three versions in the same time as someone else is doing just a single version. As a designer, especially if you work in an agency environment, there's two very important skills you are relying on. One is your technical ability, how fast you can recreate things in these applications, and the other one is the understanding of theories, which mainly comes from looking at great examples and trying to analyze them and understand why they work. 13. Second Layout: But now it's time to jump back to in design and look at the other two alternatives for this layout. I'm going to just show you the finalized versions because it would just take long to again recreate it from scratch. However, these are using the same exact techniques as before. Here, instead of using the light bulb icon to create negative space or white space, we actually used it for the text frame, a little bit of reverse showing up here on the top because of the justification. But in general, I feel like it is still easy to read and the silhouette of the light bulb is very nicely defined. To balance things out. What I've done here is that I have the title turned sideways and placed there on the left, and I used a gradient, which is based on the photo on the right. So it almost feels like the photo is continuing that However, this is just simply a gradient applied on the text. So when I select the text, you can see that's the color. All you need to do is to create two swatches based on the top and the bottom colors in the photo and then drag them onto the gradient to define it. I'm just going to drag this out and just show you that I can also quickly reverse it if it was in the wrong direction. Technically, the only issue here that you might argue is not working that well, is that we have our intro copy all the way at the bottom, so it's coming after the body copy. But because we have a huge contrast in terms of the size of the text, even though it's at the bottom of the page, viewers might still start reading this before they jump here and start reading the copy itself. Now the reason I didn't use a drop cap here is because it wouldn't really work well, and it would just disrupt the silhouette. And finally, another thing that I decided to do here is to use white text or inverted text because I felt like having black and I can show this to you very quickly is just a little bit too dark there at the bottom. I feel like white again keeps a visual balance between the left and the right side of the spread. Now, if you feel like the left and the right side of your spread is still not integrated or connected well enough, you can do another quick technique. And that is something that you can do with the image frame. Simply select the bottom edge of the frame by using the direct selection tool, that's the wide arrow, press A on the keyboard, and then just quickly select that point. I normally do this marquee selection, so making sure that none of the other corners are selected, and then just simply drag this out. And with that, I can create a diagonal line. And if I hold down the Shift key, I can select both the corner on the top and the bottom, and maybe I can just drag them further back in to the right, something like that. Yes. And then maybe just drag this further back. Again. So even a simple diagonal line like that can add more visual interest in the composition and also, again, help to tie the two sides together. 14. Third Layout: And last but not least here is our third composition, again, based on the original sketch, where the light bulb now is used to hold the headline or the title. And I played around with the title, made sure that the two characters are nicely connected there. And here's just a little visual trick. I use the rectangle to increase the size of the t to match the vertical and horizontal parts. So from a distance, it looks like a perfect continuous shape. And don't be afraid to place text on the edge of shapes like here, the C and the E and also the G is disappearing into the white space, because as long as it is clearly legible and it's big enough, everyone will be able to read it easily. But giving that little visual challenge to your viewers will always make the whole composition more intriguing and engaging. Now you can see, again, a nice way of linking things together and applying repetition in the design. I used this color on the drop cap and also on the highlight on the intro copy here on the right. To emphasize that fresh perspective in the copy, I turned the image upside down. And without making the text wrap too intrusive or annoying, it is only affecting a small part of the text here. So being subtle is always a good thing. But I also paid attention to keep things aligned so you can see that this text is right aligned to the same edge that we have here for the body copy. Last but not least, I added this simple block here on the left side, using the other color that we had in the other designs because I felt like without it, we have a bit too much empty space on the left. Again, it's a simple technique to balance the two sides of the spread. Again, it is also helping to establish a bit of rhythm where we have these colors alternating. Starting with this color, then using the other one, and then in the image, it's mainly that bluish tone that comes back. Rhythm, just like repetition is a great way to set the visual pacing in your compositions. 15. Final thoughts: So here are the four different versions, starting with the first original fairly boring and bland take, and then the other three, which are a bit more creative, but still using exactly the same elements and even the same text formatting. So the biggest takeaway of this tutorial that I would like you to really remember is that don't ever stop at a single design. Even if you feel like it turned out great, always push yourself to experiment and create a couple of different versions. And also, don't forget to do some sketches at the beginning because it can save you so much time, and you will be struggling less coming up with ideas once you are in in design or any other creative applications. 16. Typographic Rules - Dropcap: First and foremost, you need entry points on your spreads. These will help readers to be engaged and start reading the content. Now, these can be all kinds of different things from drop caps to headings to titles to pull codes. And on this page, for example, I have most of these things that I mentioned, and I can hide them just so you can see without it. It still looks nice, the spread itself, but having these additional details really helped to draw you into reading the article. So we have a title, we have a heading. We also have this little arrow here, so you can use graphical elements as well as entry points that directs the view to the text. And then we also have the pool code here on the right, which usually is extracted from the article, and it's just something that's more interesting, but it can also be an additional information. Now, let me show you something. If we zoom closer here on the left, Notice that I have indents on all the paragraphs, and that's a very good way to separate the block of copy that we have here. For the body copy of the article, you should normally use either indent or space between paragraphs. But what you should avoid is to have the indent used on the first paragraph. That's a common mistake with a lot of designers. So I would set this back to zero here in the paragraph options first line left indent removed. The whole point of using these first line indent is to create a visual separation. But here we already have a big gap between the heading and the body copy, so there's no need for the indentation. Instead, what we could use is a drop cap, and that's very easy to set up. Once again, just double click on the paragraph and then go into paragraph controls. And here you will find the option drop cap number of lines. Just start increasing that and that will create that nice entry point. Now, it's good to know that sometimes you might feel like the text is too close to the drop cap. In these cases, you can use the shortcut old or option right arrow to push it a bit further away. That's the same shortcut for kerning and tracking, and it works here as well with the drop cap. 17. Typographic Rules - Measure: In length or measure, as it's also referred to in typography is another crucial thing you should always pay attention to. Essentially, what it means is that each of your lines should always be 45-90 characters, and that's including spaces as well. Now, the way you can check this is by triple clicking on the text, which will select a single line. And then from the window menu, you can go into the info panel. And there you will see exactly how many characters you have. As you can see, this is 42 characters and this is already including spaces. So if we want to keep it 45-90, that means we have to widen our columns or text frames. That is very easy to do. I'm just going to select the whole tax frame, and I will type in 65 for the width value. I'm going to use the same value here on the right. And I'm going to just drag them apart a bit, something like that. Now, of course, if you're working with grids, you would have to align this to your grid as well. But now if I select one of these lines, let's just say this one here. I can see now we are within that range that I mentioned earlier. So why is it so important to pay attention to measure? It's mainly to improve the readability of your text. So readability, you normally means that the convenience of reading. And for example, if I make this text frame much wider, something like this, and I select one of these lines. I can see it's already over 90. So it's a little bit too long, and that makes it uncomfortable to read because you have to jump a very long distance from the end back to the beginning, and likewise, if it's too narrow, then it's just going to be constantly jumping back and forth between the two sides of the column while reading. 18. Typographic Rules - Alignment: You can be creative with the alignment of the text, but there's again, a couple of rules that you should keep in mind. First of all, a line left or flush left, is the most common way of setting type. And also, justification is very commonly used. Now, the main difference between these two is that with justification, you get completely straight edges on both sides, but you have to be very careful with justification. What can happen is that you end up creating rivers in your text. Let me show you this, especially when you have a narrower text frame. Let's say something like this. If I apply justification on this text, by pressing command or control shift J, I can already see a couple of bigger gaps appearing within the text. But it gets even worse if I make my text frame smaller or especially if I remove hyphenation. So from the paragraph settings, if I remove hyphenation. Now it's even more visible that there are some bigger gaps within the text. And sometimes you might not notice them, so a good technique to double check your text is to turn it upside down. So if you just turn it upside down, it's much easier to find them. So what I'm referring to is this section here or this section here and so on and so forth. So the way you can avoid these reverse appearing in your text is to only use justification on line length higher than 60 characters, and also make sure that you allow hyphenation, because that will also reduce these unwanted gaps. Since we are talking about alignment, you probably know about the flush right or align right option, but you should only use this again when there is a reason for it. So in this case, I aligned the pull code to the left, and with that, I created a visual negative space here to which I can align the text on the left. So this text is flush right or aligned right, which means that we have a straight edge here. But the problem with it is that because we have the ragged edge on the left, It makes it quite difficult to again jump back and start reading the lines. That's why left aligned or flush left is usually a bit more readable or convenient for your readers. And one last tip about alignment, whenever you're using flush left or flush right, you can also apply the balance gged lines option, which can also be saved as a paragraph style feature. So this you can find in the additional options up here when you're using the type tool. And there is balanced regged lines. So keep an eye on the selected text frame. This is without the option, and this is with the option enabled. So essentially, the regged line on the left in this case is getting a little bit more organized when this feature is enabled. So this was before and this is after. 19. Typographic Rules - Blocks: Now, we've already seen that first line in then shouldn't be used on the first paragraph of a block of text, but still it is very important to break up these blocks to make it more easy to read. Now, let's take a closer look at this block of text here. Now, at the moment, it's not that great because some of the paragraphs are not even noticeable. Here, for example, we have a paragraph start, which I can only see if I click a couple of times and select the whole paragraph. So there is actually a paragraph starting here. Now, of course, if we are in the normal view and I go into the type menu and show hidden characters, we can also see that there is a paragraph ending here. But this should be visible to a viewer without obviously having all these guidelines and hidden characters. The paragraph break was edited there intentionally by the author or writer, and you are responsible as a designer to make this visually apparent So there's two very simple techniques. One is to use the first line intent, which we already know that we shouldn't use on the first paragraph. But here on the second one, if I go into the paragraph settings, I can find this option and increase it. Let's say 7 millimeters is already noticeable, and we could apply this on these other two paragraphs as well. So just to make sure it's the same, I'm going to type in seven. So that already looks better. The other technique that we could use is to have all of these paragraphs selected and use the space between paragraphs feature, which we can find here. Now, let's just choose 4 millimeters for this one. And when I click away, you can see that once again, that creates an even more apparent visual break between the paragraphs. Now, you might get carried away and use both of these features together, but that's not a good idea. You should use one or the other. Otherwise, it is an overkill, which hopefully you can already see. So what I'm going to do is on the second paragraph, I'm going to remove completely the left indent. And between these three paragraphs, I'm going to remove the space. Once again, it's either space between paragraphs or the first line left in 20. Typographic Rules - Pairing Fonts: Using two separate type faces of fonts within the same block of text can be useful to separate the text and create a visual difference between them. But whenever you do this, what you should pay attention to is to keep the x height the same. So it's good to have contrast visual contrast between the two fonts, which helps the reader to immediately identify that there is a difference. So in this case, we have a ser font on the first paragraph and sun serif on the rest. But the problem is that the x height is not the same. So if you're not familiar with x height, it's essentially the height of the lower case characters in a typeface. The closer you can match this value between the two funds that you are pairing, the better. Let's take a closer look at this example here. I have intentionally the same text size used on both of the funds, and I also have the same first word in these paragraphs. If I copy this one and place it next to this other one and I zoom closer, we will see exactly how different the site is on them. When pairing funds pay attention to having contrast between them, but also to align their size. 21. Typographic Rules - Margin Alignment: Now, you might have heard that it's good to stay away from hyphenation. But that's actually not the case, especially when you are using justification. We already discussed that when you use justified text, hyphenation could help to eliminate verse. However, when you're using hyphenation, you should also apply optical margin alignment or Roman hanging punctuation, which will keep the hyphens outside the edge of your tax frame. So let me show you this. Here, we have a few hyphens on the right side. And if I select this text frame, I can get to this option by going to the window menu and under type and tables, choose story. Within that, there's literally one setting, and that is the feature which I was talking about, optical margin alignment. You can adjust this further if you feel like it's not accurate, but most of the time, this is enough, just simply turn it off and you can already see how much better this looks. This is out and optical margin alignment. Now, this feature is not only to correct the hy phonations alignment, but also for things like quotation marks. Notice when I put this quotation mark up here, it automatically goes a bit further to the left, so keeps it almost outside of the text frame. I highly recommend to use this feature most of the time on your body copy. And you can actually save it into object styles, not into a paragraph style directly, but into an object style. So if I go to the object ties panel and create a new style, when I go inside here, you will find a separate category de story options. And as long as it's saved there and this object style is applied on your tax frame, then it's going to automatically fix these issues. 22. Typographic Rules - All Caps: Last but not least, let's talk a bit about using all caps or all capital letters. This can be a great thing to use on titles, headings, but you should avoid using it on longer blocks of text because it makes reading again uncomfortable. And also, it can feel a bit like shouting. So even for highlighting a word. Let's just say this one here. If I double click on it, I can use commando Control Shift K to quickly switch to all caps. That feels a bit of an overkill. Instead of setting it to all caps, we can just highlight it by changing the forming a bit, maybe to medium. By the way, whenever you have multiple weights for a typeface, you should always increase the weight in two levels for the highlighted text. Because if I go back, let's say to regular, then the difference is not as obvious as when I went all the way up to medium. That's just a sign node. But going back to all capitals, you can see that it works really well on this text here on the right because it's only a few words, and it really emphasizes that pull code. But here on the left side in the body copy, I'm using the normal sentence case formatting. It is a proven fact that it's easier to read when you have normal sentence case because you can see exactly where a sentence starts. Also with lower case characters, you get the ascending and descending stems, which is almost like a visual shortcut for faster reading or scanning the text while you're reading. Once again, feel free to use all caps on titles and headings, but avoid it on longer blocks of text. 23. Editing and Masking Photos: This beautiful shot of the fjords in Norway is going to be used at the bottom part of our first page in the spread. So what will be important here is to remove the sky so the image can blend beautifully into the rest of the page. But also, I want to alter the color slightly and increase the contrast of the mountains. I want it to be very impactful and dramatic. We won't be using the bottom half of the image, so we will really just concentrate on this section here. So the first thing I'm going to do is to go to the select menu and choose the amazing sky selection option, which is going to do a very good job selecting the sky, and we can already turn this into a mask. So let's just click on the Ed mask icon here on the right. But this is going to keep the sky visible because that was selected, and we actually need the opposite of that. We need to hide the sky. So the shortcut to invert our mask is command or control. And we still haven't talked about mosque in great detail. But don't Morry, in next week's content, that's something that we will dive much deeper into. And it will make much more sense how mosques work and why it is always recommended to turn your selections into mosques and not delete any details from images. Like, in this case, I feel like this mountain here on the left is just half visible because it was covered by a cloud. I'm just going to actually use the brush tool and paint over it with black. So this is going to quickly hide those details. But all of this is done non destructively. So if I shift click on the mask, I can still reveal those details. Shift clicking again on it will again hide them. Now that I have the masking ready, I am going to turn this layer into a smart object. Another topic. We'll go into much more detail next week. And once my smart object is ready, I am going to apply the camera rule fiilter on it, which will help me to increase the drama, as I mentioned at the beginning. So first, I'm going to increase clarity and texture that's already looking great. We can also increase the haze a bit, and then we can reduce the blacks and shadows. This makes everything slightly darker. And then I also want to reduce the vibrance. So I want to make things look a little bit darker, less saturated. Now, this doesn't look as good at the bottom as on the top. But as I said, we are only concentrating on the mountains. And if you press P on the keyboard in the camera rule workspace, you can quickly switch back and forth between the before and after versions. And I really like this. So I'm just going to click. And as you can see, the camera rule filter is added non destructively as a smart filter. So again, we can turn it on and off. We can double click on it to go back and make some additional changes if we need to. But now we just have to save this as a photoshop file, which we will be able to then place into in design. 24. Images Out of Bounds: This shot will end up being on the right side of our spread, and I would like to create an out of bounds effects. Having the horns coming outside the frame. So for this, we first need again a selection. This time, I'm using the subject selection option, which makes a very, very good selection for us, and we can just turn this into a mask. And I'm not even going to worry about these imperfections around the hair and this part here of the skull because we only need to have a good selection around the horns, because those will be the only details coming outside the image frame. So we can now just save this as a photoshop file. And I'm going to show you now in need design how to set this up, so it looks like the version that you can see here. So all you have to do is to first place in the original image. So that is the J peg, which you can place in at the bottom right corner of your spread, align it to it to make sure it fits well. And then once you have that ready, just crop into it and have the horns missing at the top. Once you have your frame ready like this, simply copy that and edit paste in place. This is going to paste in another version of the same image frame on top of the original. And while having this frame selected, use the file place option, commando Control D, and find your masked out version. So I'm going to get that photoshop file. Open it. And at first, it won't look like anything has changed, but we have this as a separate image now. You can see this is the mass version, and underneath, there's the original. And now just putting it back where it was, all I have to do is to double tap on the center anchor point to extend the frame back to the original edges. The cool thing about this method is that I can command or control click to switch between the mass and the original version of the image. And I can always control how much of the details I want to come outside of the original edges. So I can drag it further down. And if I refine my selection, I could even create a more dramatic out of bounds effect. But in this case, I just want to keep things more subtle, and I think it's enough to have the horns coming out like that. Again, feel free to be creative. You can even add an angle on this frame, again, by having the image in the back selected and then using the direct selection tool, clicking on one of these anchor points or just highlighting them, and then using shift down arrows, you can move that anchor point down. That way, you can create an angle for your image frame instead of keeping it completely horizontal. 25. Creative Drop Cap: I have an awesome photo from the series Vikings, and this character in the series was called porin. I'm going to select her by using the select subject feature, which does a very quick selection using AOB Sense, the artificial intelligence selection. So it's a really cool selection already. We can turn this into a mask by clicking on the Japanese flag on the bottom right, and then double click on the mask icon, which will open the select and mask work area. Within there, let's select the refine edge brush tool, shortcut is R. And let's just zoom a little bit closer and paint over all of this fur detail. So it's a brilliant tool to get these details back and also maybe refine the hair here on the right side, and there. I think that looks quite nice also here, we get that gap. I think that's all good. That's all we needed, so we can click on. Now, we can refine the mask a little bit further by alter option clicking on the thumbnail for the mask. And then if you select the burn tool and set the range to shadows, you can very quickly eliminate any halo around the edges that was created with the refine edge. And then similarly to that, if you select the Dutch tool and set the range to highlights and start painting around the edges, you can make sure that there are no transparent details, especially around the hair. If that's still not enough and you feel like this should be white, just use the brush tool and paint over with white. Something like that. Let's just see how this looks. If I author option click back on the mask, I think that looks quite nice. All right. Now it's time to combine the photo and the text and make it look like the character is coming out of this letter. In a way, the text is going to be like a holding device. Let's just select the image and place it on top of the text, first of all. The text layer, I'm going to set 200% opacity. And what we will do is to add another mask on this layer by creating a group for it that's commando Control G. And on that group, I will add the mask. I like to keep my mask separate. So the first one was just simply for isolating it from the background. The second one is specifically to align it with the composition. I'm going to use the brush tool, and I'm just going to very quickly brush over these details here, which I definitely don't want to see, something like that. Then I'm going to create a quick selection of my text layer by command the control clicking on the thumbnail of the text layer. This way, I can delete those details that overlap the text. Something like this and go around here, probably hide these details as well. Okay. All I need is to show the hand on the left side and also here on the right side to create an interesting overlap or depth effect. Now I can use Commando Control D to D select this, zoom a little bit closer, and then using the same mass that I used before, I am going to switch to It by pressing x on the keyboard and just very quickly paint over the hand. Something like that, and all I have to do now is to refine this selection. I normally would create a path as well with the pen tool and then draw around that. But here on this side, I'm just going to use the brush tool and just very quickly paint over it, something like that. I'm not spending too much time refining it because you will get the idea. So I think that looks quite nice. So without the masking, obviously, it was like this and with that additional mask, now it looks like that. But we need to fix the other arm here. So once again, I'm going to use the brush tool, switch to wide by pressing X and reveal the hand. Okay, so there's the hand. And then the fur probably can also come out of bounds and be somewhere around there. I think that will work quite nicely. And see, that's why it's good to have two separate masks because when I reveal these details, I'm not revealing the original background. I am only revealing the already masked out details. So now that we have this selection. Again, we can refine it. This time, I'm going to use the pen tool just to be a bit more precise set to path mode. I am going to start drawing the selection here and zoom a little bit closer so we can see what I'm doing. Essentially, I'm just drawing around these details very quickly, and then let's move down. I'm creating curves and holding down space bar, you can reposition your anchor points. So you can see how quickly and effectively we can make this selection. Something like that. Again, I'm not doing a perfect job because I'm trying to show you this very quickly, but hopefully you get the idea, how it works. Here we have this one more detail and then it can be a little bit more faster on these details. No one will notice how it was originally, something like that. I think that works nicely. Then we just have to make a big selection around this. And then press commando control return or enter, which will turn this into a selection, and all the details inside this needs to be kept, but all the details outside of it can be hidden. So we will invert the selection by pressing commando Control Shift. Then using black as our four ground color, we can very quickly paint over all of these details that we don't need. Then commando Control D to D select and then Zoom closer just fixing a few more things here. I think this can be hidden away, make that edge a little bit more believable and also around here. I think something like that tidies it up nicely. Okay, so let's zoom out and take a look. I think it looks quite nice. That was before and after. And once again, like before, I'm going to save this as a photoshop file without the background. So keep the background completely transparent. And then let's place this into our in design composition. Here it is, and it already looks bad ***. But what I'm going to do is to increase the size of bit and we can combine the techniques we've learned. So we can also use the text wrap, probably around here. If we go to window tax wrap, and then turn on the same feature we used before. And in this case because it's a photoshop file, we have to also make sure it uses the Alpha channel, which is based on the masks that we created. And then let's not forget about the offset, which we used before as well, something like that. So let's take a look at this in full screen. I think that looks awesome. Maybe one last thing that I would add is a drop shadow on the letter. So if you are in in design and you want to go back and make changes to your photoshop composition, you can just hold down the alter option key and double click on it that goes back into Photoshop. And there, what we can do is to add an additional layer above the text. Clip it onto it by holding down again, or option and click that creates the clipping mask and then use the brush tool and maybe select the same color that you used on the text, but set the blend mode of this layer to multiply. And that way, when you are drawing with a soft, big brush and probably a low opacity like 20%, you can start building up a nice shadow. So here around this part, I'm going to make it darker, maybe even reduce the brightness of the color. Adding a little bit more shading there and the same thing here on this side. I'm just building up this effect nicely. Something like that. Here I'm going to make it even darker, and by the way, I'm using the Hud color picker shortcut that's command control option, click and drag on Mac. I think it's old shift right click on PC, but I'm not 100% sure about the PC version. So it's called Hud color display shortcut, there it is. I'm going to reduce it even more in that corner. Okay. So now let's save these changes, Commando Control S and go back into in deesign and we can see our shadows are showing up nicely here as well. 26. Using Icons in InDesign: For the project, I already prepared three icons that you can work with, or again, feel free to draw or create your own icons or find alternative ones. In this video, however, instead of talking about how to create them, we will discuss how you can place them into in design because there's actually a couple of different ways or methods you can do this. And there's pros and cons for each of the methods. So first is probably the easiest. Simply selecting something in illustrator. You can just choose copy and then jumping into in design. Just simply paste it in that's commando control V or edit paste. It's always worth checking which layer these icons will end up on, and I always recommend keeping them on a separate layer just so it's easy to find them. And the advantage of doing this, the simple copy paste method is that these elements will stay vector based, so you will be able to increase their size without losing quality. By holding down commando control shift and drag the corner points, and you will also be able to change the color of your vector elements simply by going to the field color option. In case it's a simple single color vector artwork, then it is very quick and easy to do. Like here, I have that red swatch already prepared, which I can very quickly apply, and I don't even have to go back to illustrator to do it. If I need to make any changes, I can even double click on this illustration and select anchor points inside it. So, for instance, I can use the direct selection tool, highlight this part of the illustration using up and down arrows, I can increase or decrease the length of this flag pole. When you just simply paste in a vector illustration into in design, it is not going to end up being a link. So it won't even be relying on the original illustrator file. That is the reason why I wouldn't recommend this method if you are working with complex illustrations. In case of small icons like these that are fairly simple, it is not a problem to simply paste them in. But for more complex illustrations and larger vector files, it is always recommended to link them. And that is the way we've done previously with images, simply using the place command. Now, let me show you what happens if I place that icons illustrator file, which has all three icons in it. As soon as I place them in, it will appear in the links. So in this case, they are not embedded. They are still using the original source file. But because these icons were on a single artboard, they don't come separately. They come together. However, in in design, it is fairly simple to separate them. Simply just cropping the image frame closer to the icon that you need. And then if you want to use another one, you just duplicate the icon by holding that auto option key, and then using the content grabber, you can click and drag and transition to the other icon. It's basically just revealing parts of the art board. But both of these elements still rely on that original linked illustrator document. Now, in this case, we won't be able to change the colors directly here in in design, nor can we make changes or alterations to the actual line art. For this, we will need to hold down the alter option key and double click on either of these frames, which will take us back to the source file. Here, we will be able to do all the amends that we wanted and don't forget to save your illustrator file to then be able to see the changes updating in in design. And finally, there is also another way that you can export your icons, and that is to save them as assets in illustrator first. This you can do with the window asset export panel. Here, you can select all three icons and just drag and drop them into this part of the panel. If you already had each of them set up as groups, then they automatically will be added as separate assets. And here you can even give them names. Let's say, calling this Ik, which will affect the file names once we generate the files from these assets. For which the options you can find here at the bottom now, you can choose to save PNGs or JPGs. But what I would normally recommend that we work with is the SVG format because that keeps them steel vector based, so they can be steel resolution independent, and you can easily increase or decrease their size without again losing quality. So once you selected SVG, you just have to select all of them, holding down commando control or the Shift key, you can select multiple icons from the asset panel. And then clicking on port. You just have to define the location where you want to save them. I'm going to choose this folder. And now in in design, again, I will be able to use the file place command. But this time, I'm going to select these three SVG files hit open, and then I will be able to place them in one by one. I just click and click and click. And as I said, these are fully vector based elements, and they work exactly the same way as if you were placing in the illustrator document, the original one. So they will also be linked. But now thanks to the fact that they are saved as separate assets, it is a little bit easier to handle them, so they are not connected to one single file. They are three separate files. So all three methods that I showed you can be useful. It really depends on the workflow and the type of design that you're working on. Just remember, whenever you want to work with vector based assets in an design document, try to avoid rasterizing those assets so make sure that you can keep them still vector based. 27. Conclusion: Well done for finishing this course. I hope you had just as much fun going through it as I had recording it. And of course, don't forget about the class project. Because remember, practice makes perfect. I can't wait to see your work, so make sure to submit it. And in case you like this course, and you would like to learn more from me, then there's plenty of other courses that you can find here. Go and check them out now. I can't wait to meet you in the next one.