Transcripts
1. Lesson 01: Class Intro: Hi. Welcome to page later design. Normal spread where you'll learn to design magazine style center spread doesn't need your please. I'm Stacy Fredericks, owner and graphic design her every point created senses, and I will be God throughout this class. I'll guide you from step, but I take from working through any publication well over five elements official hierarchy and how to use them to create stunning page loads that draw meter aim and guys in three Next uncle. A bit of steps that I take to get a project started I'll share some of my favorite resource is for inspiration. Then we'll sketch out some ideas for our central spread projects for the final few lessons working in in design, we're all go over some basic document set up as well as how to use paragraph and character styles to bring your project together. I can't wait to see what you create, so let's get started
2. Lesson 02: The Makings of A Good Layout: welcome to lessen, too. The makings of a good lay out the foundation of good design. First question We need to ask ourselves before designing and page is what makes a good page layup. You might be thinking things like typography, whitespace, contrast, etcetera, and you wouldn't be wrong. But what it all boils down to is something designers call visual higher kicks. So what is visual? Harkey? Visual hierarchy is arranging elements in a way that establishes an order of importance and balance on a page. Establishing a visual hierarchy allows the designer to be in control of how their readers are as well move through their contact. A basic example of this is having a large title like you See here followed bison. Smaller pair attacks. The contrast between the large heading and the small paragraph taxed is creating a visual higher if you, for us, the most important thing to remember when it comes to Visual Harkey. If that contrast is the key, achieving this contrast can go well beyond a difference in font size. The use of grids, texture and tone, typeface, weights and pairings, scale and color all contribute to the visual hierarchy of a page in the next lesson will take a closer look at these five elements and check out some examples of each.
3. Lesson 03: Elements of Visual Hierarchy: lesson three elements of visual higher feet. First up Grid's grids are the foundation upon which your design will be built. Grid's help. Keep your content aligned in a clean and organized manner. Although they sound restricting, it can actually be very flexible. The more columns that you have in your grip, the more flexible I will be. In this first example, the designer used a three column grid to arrange content. The title graph expands the middle two columns, drawing the eye to the graphic and main subject of the article extra, either drawn to the remainder of the heading and then on to the paragraph text. The second example uses a five column grid. In this case, the designer has chosen to break the grid, drawing emphasis to those elements extending past it. As I'm sure you've noticed in both of these examples, there is a lot more at play here than just the use of grids. A visual hierarchy rarely depends on just one of these elements. In most cases, you going to be using several of thumb throat a page. The next element will explore is texture and tone. Texture and tone is the density of letter forms words and lines on a page. This first example, as you can see, is actually a typographic portrait. Looking at this portrait or any typographic portrait, you can really see how the density of type can create different textures and tones on a page. In this portrait, the lines of type actually create the shadows and highlights, which bring them portion toe life. When it comes to page load texture is not necessarily used to create picture but to create variants on the page. As you can see in our second example here, the page on the left has very little variance. If you kind of squint at it, just sort of all runs together. We're not really sure where to look or as the page on the right has a lot of texture, which makes it easier to read and pick out the different elements. Next up, typeface waits in pairings. When choosing font families to work with, I recommend selecting ones with several different weights. At the very least, you're gonna want a regular and a bold wait along with italics in each. But I like to have more than that because the more you have the more you got to work with in the or kind of playing around you can do and fun you can have with that specific fault. As for font pairings, it's kind of an art in and of itself at the most basic level. Parent, A Sarah for the San Serif, is kind of good rule of thumb, but we could make an entire class on foreign pairings. However, I do have a link in the resources section to an article that's, Ah, a pretty good overview of the subject. If you would like to learn some more. This first example uses a handwritten font for the headings paired with a Sand Saref for the subheadings and a Sarah for the paragraphs. Although the paragraphs and sub headings are the same song is the bold weight of the subheadings helps bring contrast to the page. The handwritten title, the larger in size, is subtler with its thin strokes and brings a nice balance to the bold subheds. In the second example, all the headlines are equal importance to break up the cover, the designer has used to contrast ing type styles in varying weights to create texture, while still maintaining balance between the headlines. The final two elements, scale and color are probably the ones that you notice most commonly if you're looking through a magazine. Um, Scale refers to the size of an element in comparison to others, and color is not only used to draw the eye, but also it can. You'd be used to evoke emotion. This example from the Houston Forward Times is an excellent example of the use of scale. The large heading, coupled with the photograph, ensure a reader can quickly determine the subject of the horrible. The much smaller paragraph text is clearly this a secondary element on the page. Much like our previous example. The color in the last three words of this headline quickly draw the attention to subject matter, Although the entire heading is the same size. Our eyes are automatically drawn to read because it stands out and there you have it. This has been just a brief overview of visual hierarchy and how it could be used in your design. If you're interested in learning more on the subject, please download the resource document from the Class Project page in the next lesson will gather some inspiration and start sketching out some ideas for related projects.
4. Lesson 04: Idea Generation: listen for idea generation if you haven't done so already, that was a great time to choose the copy that they like to use for your project. I strongly encourage you to personalize this by choosing a piece from a favorite book article or even your own creative writing. If you'd prefer there is a document that you can download in the resource section. Ah, that has a piece from one of my favorite books, Treasure Island. All right, so let's go over some of the places where I like to find inspiration for my projects. First up is pin just which I'm sure many of you have used before for several different things. Um, basically Pinterest, you can search whatever you desire. In this case, I'm gonna search for editorial design with interest. When you find something like you can just hit, say fun here and you can create a board, you know, whatever you like, it's called this moved the trick and create and then that pin, yet save to layer projects. So no, next time we find one, you just hit save again and layer projects there. And you could just save once you've gathered a bunch of stuff you can't go to profile and see all of the different boards you have created. You click on the board, it will show you all the pins you have within their You can bring them up and look at them closer. One thing that I like to do if I find something I like, it's a few school down. Um, it will show you more stuff like it just kind of cool. I usually end up going through several different things, hitting them and then looking through this stuff that's underneath them as well. The next to resource I want to show you is called Inspiration Grid. This is kinda new to me, but I do know that Do you can once again search here somewhere right here? Print design, And it kind of brings up a similar thing to pin dress. Um, you can just sort of scroll through. You see something you like. Oh, I can't like that. So I just click on it, and what I do is save as, and I just make a folder on my desktop and save any images that I like into it and the last one that I want to show you is issue. So issue is basically like a whole bunch of, like online magazines and catalogs and all that kind of stuff. Um, you could just go to read and discover, and it's gonna bring you up all the stuff. Popular editor's picks suggestions for you If you haven't account them already, when you click on one, it brings you to this reader. She could make full screen if you want. Can I just read through the whole magazine, which pretty cool on what I would do with this? Actually, if you see something that you like is actually just take a screenshot this course that's just going to say to my desktop. But when I'm done, I would just take us sometimes I have, like, an entire desktop full of screenshots cause I take some money, drop them all in my inspiration folder. And another thing I like to do is I do have, um, several different books on hand, like design books, and, uh, I like to kind of flip through those and I'll stop any time I see something that I'm like. Oh, that might be kind of a cool element or whatever and all make a sketch back, Teoh the inspiration we gathered online. So basically, at this point, I would have a big folder full of a bunch of staff. I open my aisles in preview and I go through them one by one. And I sketch. So whatever kind of idea is brought to mind or this, uh, layout inspires, I will draw a little sketch in my in my book and kind of go from there. And eventually I end up with, like, a ton, a little sketches, and I sort of refined ideas and get it down to two or three that I actually want to try in in designs. And as for the things that I pin on Pinterest rather than taking screenshots of all of those since, you know Pinterest has this candy little boards thing that you can pin stuff too. I kind of take the same approach. I just go into that particular board and all open each one. I can't look at them individually and do the same thing. Sketch something for each another. Actually, a great thing. Vote pin dresses that you can write comments or add notes. Sorry, you cannot notes and uh, you couldn't if there's, like, a specific piece at you like is really what is really what drew your eye. You can write that in the notes. And that way, when you go back, you have that reference there to know. Oh, yeah. I like this because of the way this photo, waas or whatever, Right? Eso These are obviously just a few of places you can find. Inspiration doesn't have to be online. It can be imprint as well. And if you have any places that you frequent looking for inspiration, please do share them with the class in the discussion board. At this point, I would invite you to pause the lesson yet to gathering your own inspiration, creating your sketches in your sketchbook. And once you've kind of refined it down to two or three ideas that you'd like to try and in design, take some photographs of those and share them in your class project.
5. Lesson 05: Getting Started With InDesign: All right, listen, five getting started with in divine. So one of the things that I want you to take away from this is how to properly sappier and design document for, uh, printing and how to set up grids So you can use those to help with your layup. So we're gonna open up in design, and you're going to go to a new I am going to click Prince. Now it's going to default to 8.5 11 which is perfect. That's what we want. Um, we're gonna want facing pages clicked. We're gonna want to pages. So we're creating a spread. So we're gonna want, like to 8.5 11 side by side hand, because this is spreads. We're gonna and we only have two pages were going to actually get to start at page two. That'll actually bring our pages side by side rather than having like, one by itself on the right hand of the screen and one by itself on the left hand. We're not going to worry about setting up columns right at the moment. He can set them up here. Or however we're going to do that. A little bit later on our master pages. Um because you may want to sort of change the number of columns that you use. I typically like to stick with three, you know, starting out. But you can have as many columns as you would like and as works with your design and I'm going to say the same thing for the margins. Gonna leave them all of the default of 0.5. But it's likely that they will end up getting changed through your your design and bleeds. We're gonna set the bleeds to a default of 0.1 to 5. Click this and that will make it the same on all four sides. And now we will hit, create. So this point, we will set up couple things with our master pages. So one thing that we're going to warned ah, for sure is alms, as you mentioned. So just make sure that you have both sides of the master selected because then that will apply any margin and column changes to both left and right of the page. Or is it you just have one selected, then it will only apply to one. So let's go lived emergence and columns. Um, as I mentioned, I like to start with three. So kind of Ah, I think a good starting point for someone starting out. Just go with three. Now, if you have kind of year like two or three sketches done out that you were wanting to try and design and you kind of based them off of, like, five or six column layouts, you go right ahead and just out as many columns as you need in there. And as former Jin's eyes like to have a little bit more on the top and the bottom. So I'm gonna go 75 and on five here as well, and hit OK and you can see that was already starting the margins as we went. And now we are going to set up our baseline grid so you actually will go to Preferences. Hey, and grids. The default color for the Baseline group is light blue. Um, it's entirely up to you can leave it like that, or you can change it to whatever you want. I prefer to put out that light gray. It's a little less, you know, the truth of our starting point rather than starting at the top of the page having it relative to the top of page story, we're going to have it relative to the top of our margins. And they were gonna put this start 0.0 because that will start it right at the beginning of our margins And the increments, um, default to 12 points. You're going to want you're increments to be the same as the leading between your main body copy. So we'll leave it out 12 points for now. If we get working through and you feel that you need more spacing or whatever, you can come back and adjust your grids at any time, and that will adjust throat, your layout and grids in back. So what this is going to do is if you, uh, on click that your baseline good will actually show up over any background elements you have in there. So if you're planning to have any, like photographs that cover the entire background or anything like that, you may want to shut this off because with it on, you won't be able to see your grids. When you put your pictures in. Now you can hit. Okay, And then we're gonna go to view guides A and show based languid. And there you go. So now weekend start dropping in her elements. Um, if you've got your sketches and everything together, then probably have some graphics already ready along with your tax. So I'm going to you. Here's my text document and grab that and I'll drop it in hopes. Strikes again if you get this little, uh, cursor, I guess that's like shows your text in ready to drop in and have you just position it where you want and they hold down shift. I'll give you a little squiggly arrow and any click it, it will flow the text throughout all of your calls. Now, there's probably more text here than what you're going to come to on your page. So, um, feel free to delete whatever you don't want or you can leave it and wait until you have your photos and stuff in. Or however you see fit to do it. And to wrap up this lesson, we're just going to save our document. And that is the end of Lesson five, and our next lesson we're going to get into our next couple lessons actually are going to be on creating paragraph and character Siles who? Silas or text and kind of make changes easier throughout our design.
6. Lesson 06: Paragraph Styles: moving right along. Teoh Lesson six, we're going to jump into paragraph styles, so I'm going to walk you through creating a couple different ones in most cases, especially if you're doing that page layout design you're going to have at least like a heading on a body copy. Um, but in many cases, you'll get it into a lot more than that. You might have. Subheds. You might have, uh, no pull quotes. There could be a number of different things, different types of lists, anything like that. And they can all sort of be pre defined in your paragraph. Styles are using your paragraph styles. Okay, so gonna start with, uh, Audie copy. So what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna I am going to come in here to create a new paragraph style. Actually, before we do that, I just want to say that creating paragraphs and character styles, um can drastically improve your workflow. Um, just the fact that once you have this created, if I've got, you know, they have, like, six subheds throughout my page, and suddenly I'm like, Oh, this font is just not working. I need to change it rather than going through and selecting each of those six subheadings individually, I can just go into my paragraph style, and I can change the font. And it will apply that change to all of my subheadings throughout my document so you can see how that can speed up your workflow. All right, so now we're gonna go ahead and create a new paragraph style for our body. Copy. Let's call this body copy. We just called by Just call by. You need to base it on anything sleeping at none. A. Then this is kind of where we're going to do the bulk of our work for this section or for this element. So going here, you can choose a type face. I'm going to go with Oscar Ville regular, and I want to use 10 points for my body, hoppy. And then I'm just gonna leave me letting at Auto. For now, um, you'll see here that at 10 points, the letting is out of Mike Leigh set to 12 points, which is the default, uh, space between lines for our baseline grid. So in this case, that's perfect. If you ah, choose a different Fonsi like maybe you want it to be to appoint, um then the auto leading. It's going to you 14.4. Or you can pick whatever you want. Like maybe you want to be 18. And if that's the case, you're gonna have to go back into your baseline good settings up in your preferences and set, uh, those increments to 18 point instead of 12. Because otherwise you're gonna get crazy spacing as she was going on. I don't actually just show you right quick what can happen. So we leave this at 18 and then we go to It's an Indian since facing and we tell this to align all lines to the grid, we hit, okay, and then we apply the style. You can see that. Obviously this spacing is actually larger than 18 point because it's moving all of the text down to the next line on the baseline grid. So we don't want that. So we're just gonna go back in here and I'm gonna put this back to 10 and you could see it see a changing already. So we changed font size, and then we put this back to 12 and now everything is lined up on your grids. So many different options you can go through here you can with your current rating. You're talking inside the case superscripts sub scripts, all that fun stuff. Uh, and then we're gonna go back to her intense spacing. If you want to change your alignment, I mean, tow center. If you wanted where any of the other options but are available, that left until to balance the ragged lines, which concern trying to be nice auction to go for and then this, which I guess we already said previously, but it defaults to none. So it's not actually a lot into wrestling grid by default. So you do need to go into your intense is facing and select all lines to have that align to every slime baseline grid properly. There are a 1,000,000 other options here, one that is kind of fairly frequently used as a character color. So say I want my text to be pink. Look, we just click that and Boylan it's pink. Go back to black. We're just gonna default to that. Great. So let's hit. Okay. And there we have our body copy. All right, so now we're going to create a second paragraph style this time for heading. So I like to name my heading. Subheds. All that stuff. Um, it's like a Chuan age two inch three. The reason I like to do this is because it follows the same organisational behavior, I guess, as them basic HTML and CSS does. This is just my way of organizing things. If you need a more descriptive title or you just have a different organizational, um, structure, that's entirely up to you. There's no kind of right or wrong and how to do this. So we are going to base our header on our body coffee. We're going to basic character format, going to change the font family, too. We're done. I would like this to be bold. Let's say 18 points is that the leading to auto and have come down to intense is facing. You'll see that all of the options that we selected for a body copy are already selected because through since we based are heading on our body style, it okay here and I just zoom in here going to apply our heading style, too, a voyage, and then let's say maybe we want to apply it here A swell. This is gonna be another headache. We put that on there. If we turn this on and talking it off, you'll see there's kind of a little bit more space there than I'm wanting. Whoever you see that it is a line to the baseline grit because our body copy was also lined to the baseline grip. So to change this, I'm going to go back into our each one style here. Just gonna move this over here so you can see and I'm gonna go to our in dense since facing and right here where it says align to grid instead of setting it as all lines align to grid , I'm going to say first line on Lee. So what this does is it aligns this first line in our heading to the baseline grit. But the ones underneath it are more flexible. They don't have to be right on that baseline grid. So now we can go back to our He's a character formats, and I can adjust this leading and you'll see that that second line of text is moving, as it normally would without baseline good attachment. Right. So I'm gonna leave that as is, and we'll hit okay here. And just to show you how like now that we've got this heading applied to two different pieces of taxed, I go in here and I say, All right, I am going to change. I phoned to let's say hope up. You see that? That applied the change to both of my headaches. All right, so you've seen how we create a new paragraph style through the and, Well, here you go to new paragraph style and it brings up this big window with all your options. If you prefer to just work on your page rather than in that panel. But you can dio it's gonna just create a subhead here so I can show you say, this is gonna be our subheading. So you might say, OK, let's create a subhead And let's say it's gonna be bold and no 12 point phones with auto letting that's giant because of our baseline good options and then go into paragraph from we'll say no hyphenation right here. This is actually a button to click to align to baseline grid and you could see that it's on . So we this one, it will shut off on alignment to a baseline grid. They're going to do that. You shut that off and you'll see now that it's no longer lined up, which is fine for this. Now we can go back to your paragraph styles menu, and you can with that text selected. It's a new paragraph style. I'm going to call this each to. But which will see here is all of the changes that we've made to this highlighted copy from the body text. If we go into our basic character formats, you'll see that our font style and size and letting is exactly what we had chosen for this highlighted copy. Have we hit okay Because we had body selected. You'll see there's this Plus here. If we were to hit option and click on that, it would clear out all of these changes and revert back to body copy. But well, we actually want is for this to be our each to. So we got each too, and then now each to is applied to that text. So if we were to go in and added something here going to our basic care to formats and we're like crediting, that's doing it a little bigger. That's easy enough to do by just going in there and doing that. You can hit okay and you'll see that that applied the changes to your H two. Either way works for creating paragraph style ones. Kind of justice go together. It's just totally up to what you prefer. Once again, we will save our document to command us, and next we will move into character styles.
7. Lesson 07: Character Styles: moving right along to less than seven character styles. Let's hop right and and design and get this going. Okay, so now that we have our paragraph styles in place, we're going to talk about character styles. The difference between a character silent paragraphs. Is that a paragraph? So I will be applied to an entire paragraph so I can just put my cursor anywhere is in this paragraph here. Then if I go to my paragraph styles and I say I want to apply heading to applies to the entire pair off with a character style, it's only going to apply to the characters that I have selected. If I just click in the middle of a paragraph and try to apply a character Sile, nothing's gonna happen. Okay, so say we want this first paragraph to have a drop cap on the first letter there gonna actually go into a paragraph Styles selector, body copy. We're gonna duplicate it and we call this first parents our first paragraph. We want that to be based off of body copy, and then we're going to calm down to drop caps, invested styles. I'm going to say I want to drop captain crosses three lines. It's just one character, and we're going to create a character style to go with this. We'll call it drop cap, go to the basic character format. We can pick any phone we want. It doesn't have to be the same one that we've already used. So in this case, I'm going to choose our own old style. And I think that I'd like to be bold and I talk. I'm not going to set a size at this point, although we can come back in a just set later. If we see fit, I am going to choose character color. They're gonna make that red and hit. OK, then we'll hit. Okay, Here we could just select this a and apply this character style. You'll see. As we says. We didn't pick a font size. It just uses this existing phone size. However, what we're going to do here instead is where it's gonna under that so community. I'm gonna just click in this pair of gonna go to my paragraph styles. I'm going to apply this first Paris style that we created with a drop cap in it, and now you'll see that we've created drop cap with this character style applied Do you just our first pair off so I could come over here. So here's another heading and sub head and and I'm gonna click in here and I'm gonna say, uh, this is also needs to have drop drop cap, so we'll use first para again. The nice thing about this is if we decide Oh, we want to change your body copy. Because this first para is based on our body copy style When we change our font here, that will also change. But we still keep our character Sile and drop Cap soldiers don't do that and we'll come back to this. So let's create it one more character style. So what we're gonna do this time is, um rather than actually creating a paragraph style to go along with us. We are going to go into character Siles t everywhere. This says Espanola, we wouldn't do something to make it stand out. So we're going to with that selected a new character style gonna call this Espanola basic character that's picked in Demi character Color blue We're gonna hit Okay now, as I mentioned before, if we air trying to apply character style. If we just click in a paragraph and click it, nothing's gonna happen is we don't actually have any character selected. So I'm going to highlight the word Espanola, and I'm going to click that character style and you'll see there that it applied. Okay, so the other thing that we can do with our character, Siles, go into paragraph styles here per second. We're going to select this first paragraph and you will see under drop caps and nested styles that there's also this nested styles auction. So we're going to take a drop cap off by that. There you go. They were going to go to new nested style. Let's select our Hispaniola character style. We couldn't tell it to go through one sentence and you'll see that it applies itself until we get to the first period of our paragraph. If we had okay, we come out here, we'll also see that this applied to the other section that we've applied our first paragraph style, too. The take away from these last two lessons is that paragraph styles are used to style. Entire paragraph and character styles are used to style individual characters with in those paragraphs. So play around with your paragraph in character, saw us a little bit, get comfortable with um and, uh, see how they help improve your workflow. So now we're going to wrap up this lesson and move on to our final reveal of our project.
8. Lesson 08: Bringing It All Together: for our final lesson. I'm going to show you just a couple more little tricks and in design. And ah, and revealed the final project. Okay, so this is Ah, my final page spread on. There's couple last things that I would like to dio. First thing I'm going to show you is little thing called story. So we're going to do is run a click. Our main paragraph here you go up to window type and tables and we're gonna open this story window. What story has is this a button called Optical Margin of alignment? Well, we click that it's just a really small little difference, but what it does is that you can see where there's ah thes quotation marks. You click that it actually aligns all the text to the left hand side, and it just kind of gives a little bit more balance. It can give a little bit more balance to your copy. Um, it's entirely up to you. If that's something that you like the look of. If not, you certainly don't have to use it. All right, so we'll close that on the very last thing I want to show you is adding page numbers. So we're going to do this on our master pages. Um, but first, I'm going to go into layers. It's gonna lock my coffee, create a new layer. Looked o master. Okay, fast like that. And then we're gonna go into ages and here on her master pages, I'm going to make a text box. I just would like toa put my numbers, but at the bottom here, miss. Select a bond eight point. And to insert numbers rather than like, you don't putting one or two whatever. We're not actually in a right. The number in here. We're not gonna put them on each individual page. We're just going to create, um, this numbering box here on our master page. So I made box. I'm gonna go to type, insert special character. I go to markers and select current page number, and you're going to see that That's gonna add a little a down in the corner there. I'm going to just go into my extreme options. They're gonna line the city bottom. Oh, and we're also going to go into a pair of this is saying that this tax box is aligned to the baseline grid, but I actually want to on a line it so that that will actually go to the bottom. There. Now, the white Make this. It's Waller. I'm gonna make a copy of this. What? Over here. It's like that, and we're just going to write a line it. And now, when we flip back over to our spreads, you'll see that you have the numbers too, and three in the bottom corners up our pages. And now our center start is complete. So I hope that do you learn some good tips and trucks for creating your page loads from this class? And, ah, I'm really looking forward to seeing what you come up.
Stacy Fredericks, Graphic Designer
