This tutorial will show you how to make a list in InDesign with an anchored graphic of your choosing instead of the default bullet shapes. This tutorial also provides you with a great last minute wedding card. (The original text comes from a poster my wife found hanging up in a Chinese restaurant.) Continue reading
Tag Archives: InDesign
An InDesign List with Anchored Graphics
Nested Styles for By Lines and Paragraph Leads
Nested styles have huge advantages because you can use a paragraph style that is a collection of individual character styles, apply it to quickly format large amounts of text and then – if necessary – make changes to one of the character style and see your result cascade throughout the document.
Continue reading
Low Contrast Images for use as Backgrounds
A lot of times I have students propose putting an image behind text in order to give the page interest. Its a fair enough request, but one that introduces a lot of problems in comprehending the text. Sometimes, they will lower the opacity of the background or throw a lowered opacity white fill under the text but it usually doesn’t help. Full color Images have a variety of tone and color and as a background makes reading the text extremely difficult. The difficulty arises because in order for text to be legible it needs a consistent background that offers decent separation between the positive space (the text) and the negative space (the page), if you have a variety of contrasts as the background it acts counters to comprehension . One way to remedy this is to prepare a low contrast image with a single color.
Continue reading
Vintage Music Poster – Mr. Hi De Ho!
For this InDesign tutorial we will be making a vintage music poster for Cab Calloway. Now, first off, if you don’t know the music of Cab Calloway I suggest you check out these links – Minnie the Moocher, St. James Infirmary, Hi De Ho Man. – and put them on in the background while doing this tutorial.
Continue reading
Cupcakes!
In this InDesign tutorial we will create a layout that includes a series of recipes. The tutorial uses paragraph and character styles to format the recipe and establish a hierarchy of information. It also gives you three delicious recipes for cupcakes!
Continue reading
Super Massive Text in InDesign
There are lots of ways to use text as design elements in InDesign. This tutorial will only touch the surface of ways to do this.
Continue reading
Sexy Pull Quotes pt.1
I think pull quotes are great because they typically use pure typography to draw interest into magazine articles. If the typefaces we have chosen stir us emotionally, these discrete instances of pure type should send shivers down our readers spine.
This tutorial will introduce the technical steps and considerations needed to set up compelling pull quotes in InDesign. Although set up for one specific layout approach, the steps and considerations can be tailored to meet many design needs.
Continue reading
Sexy Pull Quotes pt.2
In the first part of this tutorial we set up a document and placed a text frame that held a pull quote. In this second part we’ll add the sexiest part of pull quotes – the actual quote marks – and customize how they look.
Continue reading
Don’t Break the Grid redux
There is an unfortunate dearth of InDesign tutorials online – good ones at least – and when you find one that addresses the software as well as design it is always worth sharing. I found this one a while back and liked it quite a bit, but I thought it needed a bit of a rewrite for my students.
Continue reading
Imposing a document with InDesign
There is no imposition function within InDesign, but with a little creativity using the FILE > PRINT BOOKLET we can create a document that can made into a PDF and then printed and assembled into a saddle-stitched book.
Continue reading