Learn Layout Design: Create A Cookbook!

1. Learn Layout Design: Create a Cookbook!: Hi, my name is Abby and I am a graphic designer who loves layout design. I've worked on everything from catalogs to cook books. Designing large documents can be overwhelming. Where do I start? What do I do with all this content? What if I don't have any content? I'll walk you through my exact process of doing multi-page documents in [inaudible] , including some of my top tips for working with clients on projects like this. I'll teach you how to balance clear communication with clever design. For the class project, I've provided content for a mini cookbook along with resources to help you along the way, so you can follow along with me or create something totally unique. By the end of the class, I want you to be more confident in your layout skills, have a deeper understanding of InDesign , and have fun, and you might be a little hungry too. 2. Gather Your "Ingredients": Just like a good cook will gather all of their ingredients before they start cooking, the first step is to make sure you have all the pieces and parts ready to go before you jump into designing layouts. There are three parts to this step, figuring out your document specs, gathering your content and defining project goals. To determine your document specs, here are some questions to ask, will this be printed? Just a PDF or e-book or both? What is the page size and number of pages, not including the cover? What will the paper weight, color, and finish be? This can affect the way your color show up as well and it can also give you a good idea of whether the readers experience is going to be high end or more economical. What about the cover, hardcover or soft cover? Will there be a dust jacket? If there's room in your budget and your manufacturer has options, you might look at special details like adding a pantone color, a cloth binding or even foil. I'm printing my book through blurb, which primarily offers digital printing in a wide variety of formats. I'm going to go with this six by nine trade book with 36 pages and a hardcover. I'll choose their standard color printing option, which is on white uncoated 70 pound paper. Through blurb,you can also publish your book and sell it through Amazon and other retailers and your books can actually be printed one at a time as people order them, which is pretty awesome. Next, you need to gather your content. This should start with a proof read text document, ideally with a little bit of direction for how the document will flow. For example, the recipes I'm basing this book of are all in a Word document with some notes about which spread each recipe should go on, and which images should also be on that spread. There are also section titles which starts to give me an idea of how this content will flow. Starting with copy should be absolutely mandatory, but what if you don't have images? That's actually okay as long as you know what each image will feature. Sometimes the layout ideas determine your photography. For example, when I'm working on projects, a lot of the time I'm art directing the photography in addition to the layout because the image style really impacts the way the whole book feels. For this project, to make things easy, I've included all the photos to go along with each recipe. Finally, make sure you have at least one well-defined goal you can use to guide yourself through the project. Here's a formula I use or ask clients to use for determining project goals. I want to project action so that I can result. I have the best chance of hitting that goal if the design appeals to audience and feels 2-3 adjectives. I know this is a little bit weird, but let me show you how it looks when it's filled in with my real goals for this project. I want to design a mini cookbook with some of my mom's famous recipes so that I can give my family members a copy of the book for Christmas. I have the best chance of hitting my goal if the design appeals to my family members and feels fun and nostalgic. Having these really clearly defined goals helps you do your absolute best work. In the next video, we'll see how all the ingredients start to come together. 3. The Flat Plan: Before I go placing the actual content throughout the document, I use a flat plan to figure out where my content will go and determine the pacing the book will have. It's really easy to get confused about page counts and how content fits into a book format. But when done correctly, this step helps to eliminate that confusion. My flat plan represents my book with 36 pages and a four page cover, which I have labeled front cover, back cover, inside front cover, and inside back cover. According to the specs from Blurb, the inside covers in the very last page have to be blank, so I have noted that as well. Next, I'll go to my copy document and start mapping out where everything should go. Starting with my title page and copyright, followed by a spread for the table of contents and dedication. Then I'll go through and place each recipe on the correct spread and little gray boxes to indicate where the photos will go. Especially if you don't have photography yet, it can be really helpful to label these placeholders with what they will be showing. Try to think about how your content will fit in the space you're providing for it. A couple of my recipes are pretty short, so I think I can fit two of them onto a spread instead of just one. My content also has sections. After everything is in place, I like to color code where those sections begin and end. If you have content but haven't decided on a page count, going through this process will help you decide on a page count confidently. The content I've provided for this project is super well organized, but most of the time, there will be a little bit of a puzzle to solve for how everything works together. I've included a blank InDesign flat plan along with the PDF of the final flat plan, I used to create my mini cookbook under the "Your Project" Tab on the desktop version of the SkillShare site. 4. Document Setup: We're ready to place content into our actual document. I am printing through Blurb and they have a really great plugin that will automatically set up my document for me. Just Google Blurb InDesign plugin to download it. I'll click on File, Blurb Book Creator, and select all the specs I have already chosen for my book. I'm just going to create the pages file for now and come back later to create the cover. If you want to just use the InDesign document set up and skip this whole Blurb thing, click Create new, then click on Print and fill out the document specs, six by nine inches, 36 pages, quarter-inch margins, and an eighth inch bleed. Blurb also includes an instructional layer, so I'll turn that off and then to keep things organized, I'll label each spread to match my flat plan. It's super annoying when you accidentally skip a spread and then have to shift everything around. Then I'll just copy and paste from my Word document into my InDesign document. I'm going to copy and paste the ingredients and directions into separate text boxes so they'll be easier to work with in the future, and after that, I'll go through and place photography. I'm not even worried about aligning anything or making sure the photos are cropped perfectly, none of that matters at this point. I just need to get everything in the book. If you make a mistake here and have to shift things around, it's a lot easier if you haven't already aligned things and gotten them to look great. Once everything is in place, you can see there are a few different layouts already starting to emerge. We have Section openers, spreads with one big photo and one recipe, spreads with one photo and two recipes, and spreads with two short recipes and two photos. Instead of jumping right in and designing the whole book from beginning to end, I'm going to just create a few layouts I really love and then apply that styling to the rest of the book. 5. Principles of Good Layout Design: To design a great layout, you need to do two things with your content. First, make it clear, then make it clever. We want to make the design really easy to understand and after that, we can add elements that will delight the reader. Here are a few principles you can use to make sure that your design is easy to understand. I'll show a good example and a bad example of each principle. First is legibility. Make sure things are easy to read, especially if they're instructional. In a cookbook, I want to prevent mistakes. The difference between one teaspoon of salt and one tablespoon of salt isn't very big on paper, but it's a big difference in taste. Having a legible font will help reduce mistakes. Hierarchy is a super useful tool for making sure that nothing gets missed because you can call attention to things in a particular order. Next is contrast. When elements on your page are really different from each other, our eyes are drawn to explore more. Contrast can be used with hierarchy to organize information and help people know where to focus. Then we have alignment. Left on line type is easiest to read for larger blocks of type, it can be tempting to use justified texts because it just seems like it'll be perfect with these beautiful even right and left edges, but it's usually not the best choice. Alignment also helps to minimize distractions and make sure there are no visual inconsistencies for your reader to get hung up on. Finally, grids. Dividing your page or spread up into a grid can help you create balanced layouts, especially when you're first starting out. However, I think relying on grids too much can make your work boring. So don't be afraid to start with a grid and then turn it off. Another part of making your layout easy to understand is adding content if you think it will help with the reader's experience. For example, I know I'll need page numbers and then I also want to add the section title to the Folio on the right page and then the title of the book on the left page. Depending on your content, there could be all kinds of helpful additions you could make. Maybe your audience has dietary restrictions or maybe they want to know how long each recipe takes to make. After we've thought about how to make it easy to understand, we can think about ways to make the content more interesting, make it clever. We have so many tools we can use to do this: typography, color, illustration, call-outs, and more. A little goes a long way, so don't overdo it but don't pass up the opportunity to delight your reader. This is where we take the feeling adjectives from our original goal and make our design match that feeling. Again, take a step back and ask yourself a question from the reader's point of view, "How does this design feel?" For my design I want to make sure it feels fun and nostalgic. So I have a vibrant '70s inspired color palette. My typography has a fun, slightly retro vibe to it, I have a few illustrations that have this '70s cookbook vibe to them. There will be little bits of my mom's handwriting peppered throughout the book, so that it's most meaningful for my family. So go ahead, download the content folder under the, Your project tab on the desktop version of the skill share site, design a spreader too, create a project and share. I can't wait to see what you guys come up with. In the next video, I'll design my concept spreads step-by-step so you can see more detail in how I work in in design. 6. Design-along: Concept Spreads: Welcome to the concept spread design long video. Most of the time I script my videos a little bit so that I can have coherent thoughts basically because, designing on the fly takes a lot of brain power for me, I'm not quite to the point where I can design and talk a lot about it in a super coherent way. I am going to attempt to do something like that though, so that you can actually see how I go from this super basic boring, basically unfinished layout, to some real concept spreads. I'm going to take this section title, spread, this spread where we've got one big photo and one recipe, and then I'm also going to do this spread right here where we've got two recipes and two photos. Just bring all of that into a concept spread document. I like to have my concept spread document separate from my regular document, because I think it just allows me to be a little bit messier, and by messier I mean, more exploratory. That means that if I like the direction that a spread is going in but I want to create a copy of it, I can just duplicate that spread and not be erasing work. Just because I don't like that particular direction because if I were to do that in this document, then I might be adding spreads, taking away spreads, and then I can only increase the confusion, basically when it comes to page count. Do all of your art exploration in a separate document. Starting with this initial section title page, I want it to feel a little bit grander than a lot of the other pages, and so I think I want to find a way to make this photo stand across, a third of the way into this page, if I'm creating a grid within the margin area here, I want to make sure that I'm reaching about a third of the way in there. One thing I'll do is go into Margins and Columns and then take this gutter down to zero. Click on your Rectangle tool, I'm going to hit backslash so that that is not filled in, and then I'm going come over and within my margin area, create a box, and then you can use your arrow keys to create a grid. Then I tend to like using this more than the guide's, just because it's a little bit easier. I can see where one-third is, I'm going to increase the size of my image box to match that, and then I just want to make sure that I'm covered on my bleeds, and then I'm going to increase the image size within that box, and it's going to crop out my fun flowers. Well, I want to create some design elements that help people know where they are within the book, and so I think I'm going to do that with a top bar that has a color, and then I'll create a page number situation that includes the section, and then, the book title over in this side. To insert a page number, I'm going to go to Type, Insert Special Character, Markers, and Current Page Number. This is a good start on the structure of the page. I like to bounce between different views. Normal is where we can see the bleeds, margins, everything, and then I jump into preview sometimes to see how it will actually print. This feels maybe a little bit thick, especially when we're talking about contrast, I think that if we had this bottom section which is a little bit thicker, and if it was just as thick up at the top, it might be a little bit overwhelming, so I like that and let's get into typography. When I'm looking at the hierarchy here, I want this breakfast section title to be the largest element on the page and then the next most important thing is this Amish Oatmeal title, to give context for what this is, and then beyond that, the ingredients and directions should be similar, since they are somewhat similar information types. Then these down here can be quite a bit smaller, but I don't want them to disappear entirely. Let's start with this section title, I have this awesome font that has a fun retro vibe, but it's not too silly, you can get pretty weird with 70s type very quickly. I'm just going to center that within this page. I want it to be directly centered over the oatmeal here, because I'm going to do an interesting effect where I'm going hide a little bit of this text behind the strawberry and whip cream here. I want to make sure again that that is centered, and then I'm going to increase the size of this image just a little bit and then move the oatmeal within that. I want to just make sure that I leave plenty of space for this bleed, and I also don't want to get too close to this gutter. That might have been a little bit too big, but I can always just reduce the size a bit and I'm holding down Shift and Option to make sure that it reduces evenly around all the borders. That looks good and then I'm going to mess with colors after I have established more of the structure of the typography. Next is going to be our recipe title, I want to copy this font, Windsor D. Let's try 34, one thing I also will do is just take all of my text boxes and remove hyphenation. When we get into paragraphs styles, I'll show you how to just make sure that's automatically happening no matter what, but for now, I just like to manually do it and then this little note about how many servings it makes will make it all caps, and I'd like to increase the spacing, that seems a little bit big, so we'll go for 10 point. Then since these two will be paired together throughout the rest of my document, I want to make sure that I've got even spacing between those. I'm going to go to this little space above and just increase it. I think that is nice. Then we'll move on to the ingredients and directions and I actually think the ingredients and directions are a little bit more important than how much it makes, and so I'm going to draw for this to base it on that, but I want it to be quite a bit bigger. Still not competing with my title, but a decent size, and then directions, I want that to be the same. Then we have the body text and I"m going to use a lighter weight of the same 70 style font, I love how that looks. These numbers are awesome. If recipe ingredients go on multiple lines, like this optional toppings, peaches, ice cream, the ingredients can run together a little bit. Because we don't have any extra space in between the individual elements, it can make for a little bit of confusion, especially if you're accidentally, you going to mix up one-quarter cup and one-half cup because they're pretty close. What I want to do is just increase the space after. On my ingredients, I want to have a little bit of extra space, and I'm actually going to reduce the lighting, so that within a section they're a little bit closer together by increasing the space in between. This is what it's about, going back and forth, exploring different options until you find what you like. The other part that's feeling a little bit cramped is this ingredients and directions, and I think I do want even spacing, and then this actually doesn't need any space before, and the reason that it had that space before is because I copied it from this originally. Beware of that stuff, but I'm going to increase the space below by quite a bit, and then, copy that with my directions, feels like a tiny bit much, so I'm going to reduce it a little bit. To avoid having too many styles of texts throughout this page, I'm going to select my footer information here and copy this, makes six servings, right justify it again and remove the space above. I'll do the same, copy that styling with eyedropper, but left justify it. I'm going to turn back on my normal view, and make sure that this corner is matched up exactly, same here, and I'm going to reduce the size of this so that it is pretty much even on both sides. Now I can add color and any other design elements that I feel like will help this look great. I'm going to replicate this gold color for the title, basically for each section have two colors that really compliment each other, that are used to create a little bit of hierarchy. Pretty sure these were the colors in my parents wedding, very 70 slash 80s I'm also going to make this a little bit more evenly spaced on the top and bottom, I bold it, and then I think that this text could be a bit smaller, we'll go for a 10 point, same thing here. To create a little bit of separation between my ingredients and my directions, I want to add just something back behind the ingredients and just create a little background color block. I use the Shift arrow keys a lot to create even spacing. I will make sure that my directions line up directly with the bottom of this text box or this color block, and just move it down one or two clicks, and I use that as a way to create consistency within my documents. That looks good. All of these need to line up, so I will use my Align Tool. Click that again on one of these to create a key object, and then align the left edges it looks like they are already aligned. Then I'm not loving this, full a 100 percent black. I'm going to select this text and just make it 85 percent black, and then just going to add a little line to add just a bit more separation between the ingredients title and the ingredients themselves. Finally, I want to make this white, and this left photo white as well. Now I need to copy the basic elements here onto the next page. The nice thing about a six by nine book is that photos are automatically at this ratio, most photos are anyways, so it makes it easy to frame and crop according to your original intentions when you took the photo. By the way, some of these photos I took with my iPhone, and that's another benefit working in this six by nine size is that you are actually fine when it comes to resolution, they won't print grainy at this size. I'm just going to copy some of that off to the side, and then I'll use my eyedropper tool to copy text, and I want that to transfer over to the title here, and I'll just do the same thing throughout the document. It's very slight, but you can see that there is a little bit of extra space between, quarter cup, apricot jam, and powdered sugar, compared to this two teaspoons of vanilla extract, and if I just remove that hard return, it will line up correctly again. I'll copy this little background box over. I'm going to copy my footer info, and you will notice that because I have that special character, it's automatically filling in the correct page number. Then this top old bar here, and then I've got this subtitle. I think that what I'm going to do is copy my footer style, left justify it, and then I will turn that 85 percent black. I've prepared a few illustration, so I'm going to go into my content file, illustrations. Hey, I'm going to click on this little icon to flip the illustration, and just have it coming in on the side. I hope you can start to see how this has a slightly 70s but still modern vibe going on. I want to match this a little bit more so I'm actually go down to 30 percent there. Finally, I'm going to apply all of this styling to this page where we've got two recipes and two photos, and then I will use the eyedropper tool to get all of my text to be formatted correctly. Now that I have this in here, I might actually swap the fluffy waffles and the German pancake so that this photo has a little bit of extra space. Then I think that this looks pretty fun and that is it. Now I'm ready to take these styles and apply them to the rest of the book. 7. Applying Styles: I like to design my concept spreads in a separate document so that I feel more free to explore and get a little messy. But now that these few pages look the way that I want them to, I will take that styling and apply it to the rest of the book. I'll start with Master Pages. I'm going to take things that are consistent across all pages and spreads, like the top bar and footer info and copy them into the A-Master of my real document. Since I want all this information to be sitting on top of the rest of the design rather than behind it, I need to create a new layer to paste these elements into. In case you didn't watch the full concept spread design video, you can go to type, insert special character, marker, current page number to setup page numbers that will automatically generate throughout your document. Next, I'll set up the master pages for the other two sections of my cookbook. I'll duplicate my A-Master to create a B-Master and change the text and colors. Then I'll duplicate my B-Master to create a C-Master and again, change the text and colors. If you jump out of the master spreads, you can see that it's just applied that A-Master to everything. For the first couple of pages, I'll use this "None-Master" page to remove styling. Then since the black style is already applied, I can skip that. For the main dishes section, I'll select all those pages, and then in the Pages Menu, I'll select "Apply Master to Pages" and hit "Okay". Then I'll do the same for the dessert section. Your master page elements will be locked by default, but if you need to change one of them, you can unlock it by hitting "Shift, "Command" or "Control" and clicking on it. Next I'll create paragraph styles and Character styles for the text. Paragraph and character styles confused me for a really long time. But now I think of it this way, paragraph styles are for structure, the sizes and spacing within any block of text and then Character styles are for aesthetics; colors, font weights, and special characters. Paragraph styles are for consistency and character styles are for variety. I'll go back to my concept document and turn all of the texts black. I'll start with the section title and add that as a paragraph style, then add the recipe title and just go down the list. Keep in mind that the recipe in section titles will be used to form our table of contents. I have this little line about how much the recipe makes and then the ingredients and directions headers, the ingredients subtitle and finally, the ingredients and directions themselves. The easiest way to get these clean paragraph styles into your other document is just to copy and paste. Then I'm going to grab this one since it includes the ingredient subtitle. Now I can apply that styling throughout my document. I'll apply it to the first page and then use the eyedropper tool to pick up that style and then I just have to click on each line to apply that paragraph style to any texts throughout the document. Once all my paragraph styles are applied in my main document, with nothing selected, I'll create a new character style. I only want my character styles to affect the color not anything else about how the text looks, so I will select this peach color and name the character style Peach. Now it can create variety without overwriting my paragraph styles. Using the eyedropper from here, I'll copy all of the text attributes though. I will only use that if I want to copy the look of the text exactly. The benefit to doing it this way instead of selecting and coloring straight from the swatches panel, is that you can make changes much more quickly and know for sure that your intended styling is being carried throughout the document. In the next video, I will go spread by spread and design this whole document so you can see from a more detailed perspective what I'm doing step-by-step. If you are already familiar with InDesign, you might want to skip that. But if you want to see how I do things and my thought process as I go, feel free to watch that. 8. Design-along: Spread by Spread: Now I'm going to take the styling that I did in my concept spreads and apply it throughout the rest of the book. This video might take a little bit of time, but you can see what I do step by step if you are interested. I'm going to start by taking the work that I have already done. I want to not select anything that's already going to be in my master pages, but I don't want to recreate the wheel, so I'm going to copy that into my Amish Oatmeal recipe, and it's okay to delete those. I'm going to set this in, make sure that it is aligned, and then make the styling match what I originally had. I'm going to create another character style for gold, and make my Amish Oatmeal gold. The little byline here, peach, and then I am going to Command Shift on this element that is in my master pages and make it white, and then make this white as well. I'm also going to just double-check. I've got my aligned to margin selected, but I'm going to, I think actually I will leave that on. I like to center things to the margins because if you'll notice, the gutter here is a little bit wider than the margin over here. That kind of accounts for the experience of reading a book. The fact that something centered in the page here might not actually looks centered once you have opened up the page because these pieces of paper are pretty close together. I'm going to align it to the margins, and because of that, shift my photo up a little bit. If I turn on my preview, this looks a little bit boring. I'm going to do just a little bit of design work here to make it look like the white text is behind the strawberry and whip cream. I will come back and do that to all three of the section titles at the end, I'm going to also copy in my apricot cheese Danish page. Shift Command on this footer, select the text inside, and make it white. If I were to call it good and move on from this page right now, it actually wouldn't include this in my table of contents because my paragraph style has not been applied to it yet. I'm going to select that, makes sure that my paragraph style for the recipe title is actually applied and you can see that it has this plus on it. That is because the color is creating an override and you actually do not want overrides. I'm going to select all, hit "Clear overrides" there, and make sure that this paragraph style is my little makes byline and then in my character styles, that's where I can make sure that the color is added. Then this is our first spread where we really haven't done anything to it. I'm first going to make sure that the crop on my photo is what I want and my first step for each spread is going to be making sure that all of my paragraph styles have been applied correctly. I love that I'm not seeing any overrides. Next, I'm going to make sure that my character styles are all applied correctly, looks like they are already applied on the makes line. I'm going to jump back to my preview mode. It looks like this margin is being crowded and I should probably move that over to where my words at least are lining up with the edge of my margin on this left side. I'm going to make that match exactly, and that will help me be consistent all the way through the book onto biscuits and gravy and if you are not hungry at this point, then I have failed. I'll be honest with you, my mom didn't know to serve vegetables with biscuits and gravy. That is a new habit I have adopted. Speed up, and this is super repetitive. You can even do it while you're watching the Great British Baking Show. I'm just going to speed it up and stop talking so that you can see it all happened at a little bit faster at a pace. Before I go through the rest of these breads, I want to show you how I do this text effect to where it's going to look like the letters are hiding behind the strawberries and whip cream. First, I want to make sure that there is actually enough to make it look interesting instead of like a mistake, so I'm going to move that up. But that looks like it should provide plenty. Then I'm going to move this up a couple of clicks and then go in with nothing selected, I'm going to get in really close and use the pen tool to this little bit of strawberry and whipped cream. I mean, get in close. I don't want it to look too much like it is cut out, so I'm actually tracing along just barely on the inside of this strawberry. Because if I don't do that, you might be able to see a little dark border, and that kind of ruins the effect. When you're zoomed in this far, the slightest adjustments can take you very far. Then I'm going to zoom out and create a large box around my lettering or my title that is, and I'm holding down shift so that it is pretty even coming back to close it. Then I'm going to select my text and this is live texts or editable text. It hasn't been turned outlines, would you do want because we need this for our table of contents. Then I'm going to cut it, and then I need to find my box again. I'm going to right-click, then if I click in there, I will select the text again. I'm going to align it to the margins, make sure it's aligned there, and just like that, it has hidden behind the strawberry. You can also, if you realize like okay, that looks like it's actually not quite how I wanted it to be. You can one, just raise your box a little bit or lower it, and then you can also by hitting A, you can activate the direct selection tool and then edit particular points. I'm going to go through the rest of the cookbook and apply the styling. 9. Table of Contents & Cover Design: It's finally time to design the Table of Contents and the Title Page. For the Table of Contents, I want to do a grid of some of my favorite photos coming into about a third of the way here like this. Then just have my Table of Contents along this side and this dedication is just going to be a small bit down at the bottom, just using the rectangle creation tool. As you click and drag it out, if you use the arrow keys, you can create a grid. Then I can actually delete this box that says Table of Contents because the Table of Contents will have a title. Then I'm going to just go pick some of my favorite photos. This amish baked oatmeal is actually being used on the cover and on the first red, so we'll just start with cinnamon rolls. This waffles one is one of my favorites. Maybe we'll do three breakfast ones. Sometimes your photo will disappear and it's there. You just have to click on this circle and then maybe use the arrow keys. Cool. That looks pretty good. Now to actually create the Table of Contents under Layout, click on Table of Contents, I'm going to name it, and I'll use some previously established paragraph styles for this, I'm going to use the recipe title for that, and then we'll add the section title to our Table of Contents. You may see there's More Options button. Click on it so that you can actually customize the look of this. For this Entry Style, I want it to match our Makes byline. Then I actually don't want a page number for my section titles. This book really isn't big enough to warrant that. Then I'm going to add recipe titles. For that, I think I'm just going to go with our basic paragraph style. I want the number to come before the entry. It's actually going to import the colors that are on our recipe titles right now and that's something that I actually want. Let's see it in action. Some of this text is coming in white. What we're going to do is go into our character styles and change that. I also want to include another space in between each of these. Then my main title here, think I actually want that to just be black and I'll add one more space. If I make any updates to this content, I can always go into Layout and Update Table of Contents. There's nothing to update right now, so it won't do anything, but it will remove all of that other styling that I've applied. Keep that in mind. This is why it's best to wait until the end to design your Table of Contents. Then finally we've got our title page. I'm just going to generally align the copyright and then design a title that will also work for the cover of the book. Most of the time, you will actually go design your cover and then come back and add this title but I already know what my title is going to look like, so I am doing it in the opposite order. I'm aligning it to the margin, which you can see that's shifting things over quite a bit. That is accounting for the binding that's going to be on this side of the page. That works for my title page. Now that I know for sure that this is a 36 page book, I am going to now use the blurb book creator to create my cover file. Same thing where we've got a layer that has instructions on it that I can turn on and off. The only thing that I really need to watch out for is my placeholder, ISBN and for trade books, that's something that you just come standard with them. Then as it says here, I want to make sure that I'm not adding any text to the spine of the book because it's too small. I want there to be a red spine, so I am going to grab red. The way that this cover document is set up, it is just one page. This will be my front cover, this will be my back cover. I'm going to increase the size of this and then align it to the center of the page. I'm actually going to copy this and make it a 100 percent red for that very middle section. Then I'm going to go into my extras file and get my front cover image. I want to layer beneath and I will increase the size of this. I'm actually going to increase it quite a bit. I'm going to grab from my title page, the lockup of my title. I'm going to turn these white and then reduce the size of this just a little bit. Then for my back cover, I have this flowers image. I can always turn on my instructional layer if I need to know where the ISBN is going to be. I have one more little bit of handwriting that I want to use and then I can bring this image back and that is that. 10. Proofing & Printing: If I was ordering this through blurb, I could just go through the Blurb book creator hit upload book, and Blurb is actually going to preflight the book for me so that they'll be able to see if there are any mistakes that I didn't catch. It looks like the preflight went well and it automatically created some PDFs for me, so it's going to open those up for me to proof and this is my chance to look over the document and go back to my original goals. Does this feel the way I want it to feel? Does everything makes sense? Is everything legible? One thing I can see is, this cover is feeling just a little bit unbalanced, if this rail was coming down a little bit more along here, it would follow the rule of thirds more. I will try to make that change and then the rest of the book is in this other document. This is where I will probably read each recipe and this is going to take me page by page, by the way, not spread by spread. I'm going to read through each recipe, ideally I would have someone else also read this, it's also a good idea to print it out and review it that way. I'm just going to order a proof through Blurb but if I was ordering this another way, I would definitely want to see it in print before multiple copies were made. If I want to export this as a PDF, that is good for either e-mailing or sharing online, not quite so big as a print file, I'll go to export I'll export it for print, hit save, then I am going for the smallest file size spreads. I'm going to make one modification though, I don't want my images to look too crappy, so I'm going to just do, bicubic downsampling to 200 pixels per inch, that'll retain most of the details. Now that this PDF has exported, I can see that the spreads have turned out awesome and do one more double-check. Since I want this to be used primarily online, I'm going to hit organize pages and get rid of some of the stuff that really only applies to the printed version. Then I can also add my cover file, so I'll go in here, grab my cover and just add it to the front. I will hit save on that and it has saved with my cover included. If you are not using Blurb and you still want to preflight your document, you can click this little preflight panel and click on, right now it's saying that there are no errors, if for some reason I had overset text, it would show me one error, overset text, text frame number 9 and I can click on it and it'll take me right there, and that is it. 11. Thank You: Thank you so much for taking this class. I hope you learned a ton about how to create awesome layouts in InDesign. One of my favorite things about design is how the same content can be given to different designers and you will get all kinds of totally unique results. So I really can't wait to see your class projects. You can keep up with me on Instagram @ABBI.PAGE and I can't wait to see you in the next class.