Assignment 2: 8 Page Newsletter

Lessons Learned

Reminders

• If you write copy, spell check it. Better, have someone else proof read it for you.
• Use measuring squares.
• How to use a design grid and how to set up the rows without gutters.
• Forgot this was already built in but not documented: Use "w" to toggle grids and guides on and off, and shfit-W to switch to presentation mode. You don't need to program a special keyboard shortcut for it.

Pro Tips

Text Wrapping

Best when done with justified text

Use a custom shape built with the pen tool or this

Watch out for...

Double returns between paragraphs

Double spaces after periods

Matching leading to paragraph spacing:

Unmatched spacing: 12/14 with 16pt spacing

Matched spacing: 12/14 with 14pt spacing

So why not just use double-returns?

Flexibility! Sometimes you may want to use 1/2 the leading value to save vertical space. 12/14 with 7pt leading.

Matching
baselines
is a
good
thing!

 

Remember that legibility is more important than good looks!

• The writers intent with punctuation and grammer matters
• Paragraphs are a kind of grammer
• Always have some method to distinguish paragraphs

No separation can lead to incorrect reading

Use:

Space between

Indented or outdented first lines

(avoid over-indenting paragrahs)

First initial caps (but this can often break up the text too much, and you read "MOBDI" when you shouldn't)

Here's a trick: Use first initial cap on two lines with a shift-return to create a large cap on the first line

Rule of thumb: Margins at the bottom are usually larger than at the top

Make text boxes with inset options and strokes rather than putting a text box in front of a rectangle

Setting vertical align to center is helpful also...

The importance of using Zoom

Demo document

• Aligning to guides matters!
• Computer monitors gloss over errors that are easily seen in print
• Zoom in!
• A lot of design is just aligning things to each other and matching spacing
• Using spacer rects (demo)
• Set the stroke to "Inside" in the Stroke panel for the optimal alignment
• A Rule Of Thumb:
• Space around a text block should be at least as big as (and probably bigger than) the visual space between lines
• Bad:

• Better:

• Best:

• Actually set to 1p9 top, 1p6 left and right and 0 bottom and bottom dragged to be visually pleasant

Chapter/Lesson 7: Working With Typography Reviewed and Completed (hopefully)

Lesson 7 Download

Typography, or the art of type, is a fundamental element of graphic design. All fonts carry meaning. Choosing the right typeface for the job is as important as choosing the right image. Beyond the integral choice of which font, there are also the basics of what to do with the font once you've chosen it. Things like which member of the font family to use where (italic, oblique, bold, condensed, extended, thin, heavy etc). Then things like alignment, size, kearning, tracking, leading, glyphs, hyphenation, hanging indents, hanging punctuation. InDesign is a very robust tool for manipulating all these elements and settings.

Adjusting Vertical Spacing

Vertical spacing as referenced in our text isn't just about leading, but it's also about spacing between blocks of type - usually in the form of paragraphs - and things like keeping blocks of text together when they flow across pages and columns.

Changing the Spacing Between Paragraphs

You can set spacing before, after, or before and after paragraphs. Before and after spacing is accumulative, that is, they get added together if they're both there, so it's best to use only one.

• Set the view to Normal and turn on Hidden Characters

• Focus on the recipe and put the cursor in front of 1/2 lb strawberries with stems
• Select the text from 1/2 lb strawberries to Protein 0g

• Set the Space After field up by one click:
  0.0625 in

Spacing Between Paragraphs

Space Before A caveat about Space Before paragraphs: It won't add space before a paragraph at the top of text frame. To add space before a paragraph at the top of a text frame (or any text for that matter) use Text Frame Options, Inset Top.

Space After Probably a better and more reliable choice for spacing between paragraphs, unless you use the next one.

Space Between Puts a consistent amount of space between paragraphs of the same style. Overrides any Space Before or Space After settings. Combining this, you could have consistent spacing between paragraphs of the same style, but add more space (or less) between blocks of paragraphs with different styles. This is a new feature, and I think it's meant to reproduce the behavior of spacing between paragraphs in HTML.

There's a good Adobe Support article on formatting paragraphs here.

Working With Fonts, Type Styles, and Glyphs

Fonts are kept by the operating system except Adobe Cloud fonts. A font is usually more than just a font, it's usually part of a Font Family, which includes different flavors of a given font name. We can think of the different properties of a Font as what we can manipulate in InDesign with the various panels. These include:

• Font Family
• Font Style (Regular, Bold, Italic, Condensed, Medium, Semibold)
• Font Size (in points)
• Font Leading (in points)
• Font Variant: All Caps
• Font Variant: Small Caps
• Font Variant: Superscript
• Font Variant: Subscript
• Font Variant: Underline
• Font Variant: Strikethrough
• Kerning
• Tracking
• Vertical Scale (% of Font Size)
• Horizontal Scale (% of Font Size)
• Baseline Shift
• Skew (False Italic)

Font Formats

TRUETYPE (.TTF)

TrueType is a font format that was developed by Apple and was eventually licensed to Microsoft. TrueType fonts can be unreliable for publishing.

OPENTYPE (.OTF & .TTF)

OpenType is a newer font type built on the TrueType format that supports an expanded charater set (smallcaps, ligatures, glyphs, and alternative gylphs). It's just better than TrueType.

Applying A Stroke And Fill To Text

Unlike Illustrator, this actuall does it the right way and applies the stroke to the outside of the glyph, and not centered on the path. Those of you who've had my Illustration class will know how much this bugs me.

• Set to 122 pt, fill with red and stroke with green...

Inserting Fraction Characters

The recipe in our sample file uses a number, a diagonal slash, and another number to make a fraction. Not usually good form. Minion Pro has fraction glyphs for common fractions which look much better. It also has all the glyphs needed to make any fraction, like 1234/5678.

• Focus on the recipe text, open the Glyphs panel, show Numbers and set the correct fractions

Working With Columns

It's all in the magic of Text Frame Options...

Specifying Columns For A Text Frame

• Focus on the recipe
• Choose
  Menu Object Text Frame Options
• Number: 2

Creating A Straddle Head

• Focus on the headline of the recipe
• Choose
  Paragraph Flyout Menu Span Columns
• Paragraph Layout: Span Columns
  Span: All  

Adjusting Columns (we got to here last week)

• Put cursor in front of Nutritional Facts
• Choose
  Menu Type Insert Break Character Column Break

Changing Paragraph Alignment

Let's align a bunch of stuff with the Paragraph Panel's buttons, shortcut keys, and the Control Panel's buttons

• Center with Paragraph panelA BITE OF DELIGHT

• Justify With Last Line Aligned Left Heart-shaped fruit...

• Center with Command/Control-C Chocolate-Covered Strawberries

• Center with Control panel You stand out...

Icons Defined

	Align Left		Align Center		Align Right
	Justify With Last Line Aligned Left		Justify With Last Line Aligned Center		Justify With Last Line Aligned Right
	Justify All Lines		Align Toward Spine		Align Away From Spine

Hanging Punctuation Outside The Margin

For as long as I have been a designer, there's been battles waged over Hanging Punctuation, To Use or Not To Use? Basically it means when you set a block of type to justified, should the hyphens, commas, periods, and other puncutation marks hang past the edge of the bounding box or stick inside.

Basically this, normal punctuation:

Versus this, hanging punctuation:

The function is burried in the Story panel! I suppose because you want it to affect the entire Story, and not just a text frame. Me, I would have put it in Text Frame Options...

• Put cursor in the Heart-shaped fruit... paragraph
• Menu Type Story

• Check    Optical Margin Alignment

Creating A Drop Cap

Slick trick! Very old-timey feeling, harkens to the middle ages and illuminated manuscripts, where the first letter on a page was oversized and lavishly illustrated. Some books and magazines still use the idea, greatly simplified, where the first letter of a paragraph is larger then the paragraph text and spans 2 or more lines. I use it on my website just to show off my HTML chops (it's hard to code)

• Insert the cursor in the first paragraph of the story
• In the Paragraph panel set Drop Cap Number of Lines to
  2

Note that the next button, Drop Cap One Or More Characters, jumps to 1. You can extend the number of characters to cover the whole word if you want.

• Might as well set the drop cap to green while we're at it...

Dropcap Hack

Sometimes you want the spacing between the first letter and first word to be tighter, but is seems like you can't kern the first line of the drop cap without also affecting the other lines, but there is a hack:

First, set extra kerning between the "S" and "ure"...

...then insert a white space character with Menu Type Insert White Space Nonbreaking Space...

...then set the kerning to a large negative value.

Adjusting Letter And Word Spacing

Well-designed fonts have a lot of data in them about how far apart any two pairs of letters are from each other. These are called Kerning Pairs, and they're a part of the font file that contains the font outlines. It's a tricky business, with no set rules about how to adjust these distances. It's done by the trained eye of the typeface designer(s). There's even a cool game online about guessing the best spacing.

InDesign, Illustrator, and most other applications that allow changing the distance between letters use two modes to do so. One is kerning, which give spacing control over any pair of two letters, and tracking, which gives spacing control over two or more letters.

Kerning UI

Tracking UI

This separation between kerning and tracking allows you to set custom kerning between several letter pairs in a single word, then apply tracking to the entire word and maintain the distince kerning relationships between letter pairs even though their pair spacing has changed from the non-tracked word.

Adjusting Line Breaks

Hyphenation and line breaks at the end of each line of text in a paragraph affects readability and impact. InDesign has three ways to affect line breaks:

1. The Adobe Single-Line Composer and Adobe Paragraph Composer
2. Hyphenation settings (under...)
3. The Balance Ragged Lines feature

So, in theory, these three samples below should look different:

But, they don't. Or they often don't. Seems to work at 13pt. The Balanced Ragged lines seems to have an effect, but Single-line and Paragraph Composer look the same to me. And it makes no visible difference in our Strawberries example either. Too subtle for me. Download this file to check it out.

Inserting A Manual Line Break

Easy Peazy Lemon Squeezy, just hold the shift key when you press the Return or Enter key.

Note: Spaces are not counted as part of the length of the line when they are at the beginning or end of the line.

Setting Tabs

Tabs are weird, but useful. They don't exist in HTML, and it's a real drag that they don't.

Aligning Text to Tabs and Adding Tab Leaders

• Focus on the 2nd column of the recipe and select Serving Size to Protein 0g
• Look for the tab marks     with the Show Hidden Character setting on
• Menu Type Tabs

• Select the Right Justify Tab

• Set the X to 2 in and the Loader character to .

Working With Tabs

Demo:

• Entering
• How they affect the current paragraph
• Specifying type
• Dragging or entering value for X
• Changing the type
• Repeating from flyout menu
• Reset to default
• Align on for decimal tabs

Working With Paragraph Shading and Rules

Applying Shading To A Paragraph

Check Shading
Strawberry swatch

Applying A Rule To A Paragraph

Chapter/Lesson 08: Working With Color

Background frame
filled with color

Line with color
applied to stroke

Text frame with
linear gradient

Graphics frame
with stroke

Text with PANTONE
color fill

Text with stroke
and fill

Lesson08.zip

Managing Color

The Need For Color Management

It's partly about how the eye sees color, whether it's through transmitted light or reflected light, and about the limits of a given system to reproduce a range of colors, also know as a gamut. Matching the color you see on screen to the one that is printed falls under the pervue of color management.

Color management is a way of translating the colors from one gamut (RGB) to another (CMYK). Every print device, like an offset printing press, an inkjet printer or a color laser printer, has its own gamut. If you use a professional printer for your project, work with them to match what you see on your screen to what gets printed. What you don't want is to show a client a project on your screen and then give them a final printed product that doesn't look like it did on your screen. The problem is usually that RGB images never look as good in CMYK as they did in RGB.

Creating A Viewing Environment for Color Management

The work environment you develop a project in can influence how you perceive colors. The kind of light bulbs you use and the color you paint your walls matters. If you plan on doing print production work, you should create an appropriate workspace for it. Some things to think about:

• View docs in an environment that provides a consistent light level and color tempurature (the right 5k lighbulbs)
• NO FLORESCENT LIGHTS! They're too cold and have irregular spectrums (that is, some color wavelengths of light are weaker and/or stronger they are in daylight)
• View doc in a room with neutral-colored walls. Neutral gray is considered best.
• Remove colorful backgrounds from your desktop
• Vew document proofs^* under real-world conditions which your audience is likely to face
• Pay attention to color proofs^*

^* Document, Pre-Press and Color proofs are provided by the printer you choose to do the printing work.

Here's a good YouTube video on Comprehensive Guide to Color Settings, Color Profiles and Proofing in Photoshop (17 minutes). Very detailed.

Specifying Color Settings in InDesign

InDesign works with what's called a Color Setting File (CSF). It contains data about color management polices and profiles. The default CSF is North America General Purpose 2, which the book says is the best for beginners.

This is huge, complex, and more detailed than we can possibly go into. To me, the net net is work with your printer to get these setting right.

• Put the mouse cursor over the various popups and checkboxes to find out more about them

Proofing Colors Onscreen

• Menu Window Arrange New Window for 08_Start.indd
• Menu View Proof Colors
• Menu View Proof Setup Custom

Device to Simulate: Dot Gain 20%

• Click OK

Dot Gain 20% lets you preview how the document would print in black and white

Defining Printing Requirements

Work with your printer before you start designing, or have an existing relationship with one so you know the constraints and profile settings needed for the upcoming project. any printers will give youa Preflight file for InDesign.

Loading A Preflight Profile

• Menu Window Output Preflight
• Flyout Menu Define Profiles...

• Submenu Load Profile...
• Choose Ad Profile.idpp

• Examine the farious setting by clicking on the little    

These setting will trigger warnings in InDesign when you do a preflight, and also place icons in the UI. One of the more common setting is Color Spaces and Modes Not Allowed where yoy can explicitly call out any images that might be set to RGB, which can lead to trouble.

• Select Ad Profile and click OK

• Examine the results of the preflight, expand the Color space not allowed line and highlight the line error

The problem is with RGB color. There's a swatch of color for the line that isn't in CMYK colorspace, but RGB. Next, we'll convert it to a legal CMYK color.

Converting a Color Mode for a Swatch

There was a preflight error for a line with an RGB color. Let's change the swatch it's colored with to CMYK.

• In the Swatches panel, double-click on the Green-Dark swatch
• Change it's color mode from RGB to CMYK

Creating Colors

There are about 100 ways to pick colors in InDesign...

• With the fly-out menu in the color panel
• With the "New Swatch" button in the Swatches panel
• Pick on up with the Eyedroper tool
• With the Color Theme tool
• From the Adobe Color Themes panel
• From CC Libraries from Photoshop and Illustrator

Creating a PANTONE Color Swatch

PANTONE is the leading manufacturer of specialty colored inks for the printing industry. When you print on an offest printing press, the standard is four colors, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black (CMYK). This has a limited color gamut, but you can extend it with PANTONE inks. Literally a can of ink you put in the printing press in addition to the four colors you've already got.

That ink goes on it's own station in the printer. Below is a 5 color offset printer, notice the 5 towers, one for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black, and one more - usually a PMS color or varnish. That 5th color is often called a Spot color or Spot Varnish.

• Deselect all
• Open the Swatches panel
• Flyout Menu New Color Swatch...

• Color Mode: PANTONE+ Solid Coated
• PANTONE 266 C

Result

Creating CMYK Color Swatches

CMYK is the normal color space for print. It's even more unintuitive that RGB, which is a no no is print.

• Choose Eyedropper tool under the Color Theme tool in the toolbar

• Pick a color that's light yellow off the photo

• Switch the CMYK color space if it's not already set

• Wacky, decimal included values, we'll tweak'm

• Tweek to:

Cyan (C)	10	%
Magenta (M)	0	%
Yellow (Y)	40	%
Black (K)	0	%

• Click on the Add Color button at the bottom of the Swatches panel

This duplicates the selected color.

• Double-click on the duplicated color

• Set to:

Cyan (C)	25	%
Magenta (M)	75	%
Yellow (Y)	0	%
Black (K)	0	%

• Choose New Color Swatch from the flyout menu
• Set to:

Cyan (C)	90	%
Magenta (M)	70	%
Yellow (Y)	30	%
Black (K)	10	%

• One more time
• Set to:

Cyan (C)	65	%
Magenta (M)	25	%
Yellow (Y)	100	%
Black (K)	10	%

We now have a Swatches panel with 5 new colors in it for use in our document.

About Spot and Process Colors

List of color spaces and spot color brands in the popup menu in the Color dialog

A spot color is a special premixed ink that is used instead of, or in addition to, CMYK process inks (or process color), and that requires its own printing plate on a printing press. Use spot color when few colors are specified and/or where color accuracy is critical. Spot color inks can accurately reproduce colors that are outside the gamut of process colors. The exact appearance of the printed spot color is determined by the combination of the ink as mixed by the commercial printer and the paper it’s printed on.

• For best results specify process colors using CMYK values printed in process color reference charts, such as those available from a commercial printer or online.
• The final color values of a process color are its values in CMYK, so if you specify a process color using RGB (or LAB, in InDesign), those color values are converted to CMYK when you print color separations. These conversions differ based on your color-management settings and document profile.
• Don’t specify a process color based on how it looks on your monitor, unless you are sure you have set up a color-management system properly and you understand its limitations for previewing color.
• Avoid using process colors in documents intended for digital devices, because CMYK has a smaller color gamut than that of a typical monitor.

Sometimes it’s practical to use process and spot inks in the same job. For example, you might use one spot ink to print the exact color of a company logo on the same pages of an annual report where photographs are reproduced using process color. You can also use a spot-color printing plate to apply a varnish over areas of a process color job. In both cases, your print job would use a total of five inks—four process inks and one spot ink or varnish.

Applying Colors

It's all about the fill/stroke or foreground/background tabs, with a bit of variation when it comes to type.

Object Color

Text Color

The solid square tab is the fill color, the square donut is the stroke color for objects, signified by the dark grey square with the light gray border. The capital T if the fill color for text, and the red diagonal slash behind it is the stroke color, signified by the little light gray capital T.

Applying Fill Colors To Objects

Basic poke and grunt technique.

• Select the backing rectangle and fill color it C=65 M=25 Y=100 K=0

• Reduce the opacity, or set the tint, to 50%

• Select the text frame for Urban Oasis Gardens and fill color it C=0 M=0 Y=40 K=0

• Select the text frame for $75 and fill color it C=25 M=75 Y=0 K=0

• Select the text frame for Orchid Clinic and fill color it C=90 M=70 Y=30 K=0

This bit may have you wondering, why didn't this color the background like it did for the $75 and Urban Oasis Gardens frames? It's because, despite appearances to the contrary, the words Orchid Clinic are not acutally text, it has been converted to a vector object with Menu Type Create Outlines applied to some editable text. Because it's in outlines, it can't be edited anymore. I actually think this is needlessly confusing...

Applying Colors to Strokes

More poke and grunt.

• Select the rule below the large photo and apply the stroke color C=25 M=75 Y=0 K=0. Be sure to use the stroke color tab and not the fill.

• Select the square photo of the orchid and apply the stroke color C=90 M=70 Y=30 K=10

Applying Color to text

If you are in the text tool, the color choice tabs reflect it with the capital T in the squares, or you can force the application of color to the text by clicking on the little T icon near the color squares

• With the text tool, or by double clicking into the text rect, select the whole line of text Tuesday • January 8 • 7—10 p.m. The Text form of the fill in the Swatchs panel should be showing. Set the fill color to C=90 M=70 Y=30 K=10

• Select the text Grow. Maintain. Bloom. and set its fill color to C=90 M=70 Y=30 K=10

• Select the text Urban Oasis Gardens and set its fill color to PANTONE 266 C

• Using the Properties panel, which also has color set tabs in it, to set $75 and give it a 1 Point stroke with a stroke color (the other tab) of of C=90 M=70 Y=30 K=10 and a fill color of C=65 M=25 Y=100 K=10 AND also

• Should look like this when we're done!

Working with Tint Swatches

Any given color, like solid Cyan-or C=90 M=50 Y=50 K=0-or Black-can be expressed as a tint of itself.

Tint's are expressed as a percentage of the original color, so you might end up with a set of colors something like this:

100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10%

Creating a Tint Swatch

• Deselect all
• In the Swatches panel, choose
  Flyout-Menu New Tint Swatch...
• Set the Tint to 65%

Resulting color swatch added. Note the 65% mark at the right of the C=25 M=75 Y=0 K=0

Applying a Tint Swatch

• Select the text field with $75 in it
• Click on the newly created tint swatch to apply the color

Working With Gradients

A gradient is a transition from one or more colors to another over a distance. In the case of InDesign, it's a linear change from one color to the next, or a radial (circular) change from one color to the next. Thusly:

Linear
Gradient

Radial
Gradient

And, a gradient can be between more that just two colors:

A Note of Caution: Gradients are notoriously hard to print. Ask your printer about how well a gradient you used will print with their printing system, or test it yourself if your printing on a laser or inkjet printer. They tend to have a problem with what's called banding, where gradients show distinct steps between colors instead of smooth transitions.

Creating A Gradient Swatch

• In the Swatches panel, choose
  Flyout Menu New Gradient Swatch...
• Name the Swatch Name: Pink/Yellow
• Click on the little square below the left side of the Gradient Ramp
• If it's not set, choose Stop Color: Swatches
• Choose the color C=25 M=75 Y=0 K=0
• Set Location: 5 %

• Click on the other square on the right side of the Gradient Ramp
• Choose the color C=10 M=0 Y=40 K=0
• Set Location: 70 %

Applying A Gradient Swatch

• Select the text frame with Grow. Maintain. Rebloom.
• Set it to the Pink/Yellow gradient we just made tp the text frame

Adjusting the Direction of a Gradient Blend

• With the Grow. Maintain. Rebloom. text frame still selected, choose the Gradient Swatch tool or type G

• Make sure to choose the Gradient Swatch tool, and not the very similar looking Gradient Feather tool

• Click and drag from just outside and to the left of the text frame...
• With the shift key held down to constrain the span
• ...To just past the center

Result. Let's play with this for a while...

Working With Color Groups

Sometime you need to organize. I like being organized.

Adding Colors to a Color Group

• From the Swatch panel
  Flyout Menu New Color Group...
• Name: Orchid Clinic Ad

Result

• Select all the color after [Black]

• Drag them down into the Orchid Clinic Ad Group. You'll know when by the line that appears below the folder icon

• Release. The deed is done...

Previewing the Final Document

So far. Still a bit more to play with with Color Themes...

Color Themes

A new-ish feature that takes advantage of what used to be called Adobe Kuler, and now is called color.adobe.com, but built into the UI of InDesign

Creating a Color Theme

• From the tools panel, click on the eyedropper tool and hold until the submenu appears

• As soon as the tool is selected it will pick up colors from what you click on. You'll know because the cursor will be pointed down and to the left, with a little set of color tabs at the bottom. Once it picks up a color set, the tool changes to a color placer tool instead of a color picker tool.

• You can choose what theme the theme will use; Colorful, Bright, Dark, or Muted
• And you can save that set to the swatches panel with the obvious button in the Theme panel