Creating a new company newsletter or brochure, what are spreads in InDesign

Course contents
SECTION: 5
PROJECT 4: Long Business Document 1:46:26

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Course info

82 lessons / 7 hours 4 projects Certificate of achievement

Overview

Hi there, my name is  Dan. I am a graphic designer and Adobe Certified Instructor (ACI)  for InDesign.

Together we will work through real life projects starting with a simple company flyer, then a brochure & a company newsletter. We’ll make business cards & take control of a really long annual report.

We will work with colour, picking your own and also using corporate colours. You will explore how to choose & use fonts like a professional. We will find, resize & crop images for your documents.

There are projects for you to complete, so you can practise your skills & use these for your creative portfolio.

In this course I supply exercise files so you can play along. I will also save my files as I go through each video so that you can compare yours to mine - handy if something goes wrong.

Know that I will be around to help - if you get lost you can drop a post on the video 'Questions and Answers' below each video and I'll be sure to get back to you.

I will share every design trick I have learnt in the last 15 years of designing. My goal is for you to finish this course with all the necessary skills to start making beautiful documents using InDesign.


What are the requirements?

  • You will need a copy of Adobe InDesign CC 2018 or above. A free trial can be downloaded from Adobe.
  • No previous design skills are needed.
  • No previous InDesign skills are needed.

What am I going to get from this course?

  • 76 lectures 5+ hours of well structured content.
  • You'll learn to design a flyer, newsletter, brochure, annual report & business cards.
  • Learn how to create PDF files ready for printing.
  • You will get the finished files so you never fall behind.
  • Downloadable exercise files & cheat sheet.
  • Forum support from me and the rest of the BYOL crew.
  • Techniques used by professional graphic designers.
  • Professional workflows and shortcuts.
  • A wealth of other resources and websites to help your new career path.

What is the target audience?

  • No previous InDesign experience is necessary.
  • This course is for people completely new to InDesign. No previous design or publishing experienced is necessary.
  • This is a relaxed, well paced introduction that will enable you to produce most common publications. Only basic computing skills are necessary - If you can send emails and surf the internet then you will cope well with our course.

Course duration 6 hours 20 mins + your study.
Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

Certificates

We’re awarding certificates for this course!

Check out the How to earn your certificate video for instructions on how to earn yours and click the available certificate levels below for more information.

Downloads & Exercise files

Download Exercise Files Download Completed Files

Transcript

In this video we're going to create our newsletter, or our brochure, we're going to work on our margins, our columns, the gutters between it. We're going to look at things called spreads. It's going to be exciting, let's go and do it.

First thing we're going to do is create a new document. Either click this button, or you can go to 'File', 'New', 'Document'. We're going to start with some of the presets, Print'. Depending on the part of the world, we're going to use 'A4' or 'Letter'. We'll use 'Letter' in this case. You can see, mine keeps defaulting back to millimeters, it's mainly because, in between making videos I've to do work in InDesign, and I work in millimeters so I can switch it back. So there's my sizes, I'm going to work in 'Portrait'. We're going to have 'Facing Pages' turned on this time. Remember, pages, we're going to have 8. Just consider when you are making a newsletter or a brochure, often you have to work in multiples of 4. You can have 2 pages. So, front and back of 'US Letter'. Also, when it gets past that it's actually big sheets of paper folded in half, and stapled. So you can't have like, say 6 pages because you'll have one big sheet folded in half.

And then you have this kind of one sitting in the middle, and it becomes really hard to bind together. There's ways around it, but often you work in multiples of 8. If you ever pulled up a newspaper, and pulled one sheet out of it, you've chopped it to pieces, and you've pulled out one sheet, you'll notice there's actually 4 sides. So, think of that when you are doing a newsletter. Definitely don't do 5 because you've got the back of a sheet of paper that you have to use. Starting number? This might be that you've got a really long document and you've got pages, and you want to start the page numbering on something different. We're going to keep our start to 1. Very rarely will I change that.

'Primary Text Frame', we'll look at that in a later video. Columns, we haven't used this before. By default you have to have a minimum of 1. What we're going to have is 3 in this case. And the gutter is the space between these columns. Just leave it to whatever the default is. Let's have a quick look at why we use columns.

So in here, I've done a little research for magazine spreads. What you'll notice is that when people are designing magazines, professionals, they will start with the number of columns, and consistently use that throughout the magazine. It gives a bit of consistency through, say a really long document, so that you're not going to every page, switching out different columns. It's one of the things that are really easy to notice when you're looking at amateurs do work, there's no consistency with columns. So, often it's 2, 3, 4, 5 columns. So we'll look at some of the examples. Now you can break these rules, kind of, but it adds a bit of consistency throughout.

So let's look at, say this one here, it's an easy one. There's 3 columns. That's what we're going to be doing. And that is keeping to 3 columns. So let's have a look through, say this one here. This one's a little bit different, they're using 3 columns but they're kind of breaking the rules, a tiny bit, with the spreading across of these. So there's still 1, 2, 3; I know you're thinking like, "There's only 2 columns" but you can see, this image here is actually spanning two of them. And they do the same thing over here, so there's still 3 columns but this one here is spanning two of them.

Let's have a look at some of the ones that, say this one here, I'd say is maybe an amateur work because this just, I don't know, you can kind of see there’s no real columns in there. This is not even. It should be one, and then another one, and then, this one's a bit short. I don't know, I hope you can kind of see it, it feels like it's not. There's no consistency there, this one doesn't span the columns like it should. So it's got all the right ingredients for a great magazine but I think, columns can really help lift an amateur's work.

This one here, 2 columns. This one here, still is, I think in the amateur category. It's cool, it's nice, but it's columns that I'm just unsure about. See this one here, it's beautiful, but crazy, but it's still using 4 columns. This big giant no. 2 spans two of them. That's okay, we're allowed to break the rules, but really breaking the rules within the rules, if you know what I mean.

That was a long explanation, let's jump back into InDesign. So we're using 3 columns. Margins, we're going to use something slightly bigger, so we're going to do '0.8 inches'. You'll notice that they changed all of them at the same time because this little linking icon is set. I'm going to break that now, so I'm going to do all of them, except I want to do the bottom to be a little bigger, maybe 1.4". Now, if you're using millimeters-- I'm using 20 all around, except the bottom, which I'm using 35 mms.

Couple of things to know, often the bottom will be bigger than the rest of the document. Gives you a little bit of wiggle room down the bottom to put things like page numbers and document titles. It also just gives a nice-- even if you're not going to put page numbers down there it gives the document a sort of grounding, gives it kind of a base at the bottom. So, it's just a visual footing. Not sure how to explain it but it's nice with a nice thick bottom at the bottom.

What you'll also notice, there's no left and right, there's inside and outside. So if I turn 'Facing Pages' off, can you see, it becomes left and right, which we understand, but then, 'Facing Pages' on, it becomes inside and outside. That means, if I jump back to my example you can see here, it just means-- look at this example here, you don't have a left and right essentially, but you have an inside margin, and an outside margin. And what you often can do is, you can have a slightly bigger inside margin if you've got something called Crepe, if you've got a really thick magazine, maybe these pages will disappear into that gap here, they call that Crepe. So you can kind of increase that. Our magazine's not big enough to worry about that. And often, as a designer, even if your magazine is really big, that is often the role of the printer to start playing around with the Crepe, and adjusting that for you. Talk to them about it if you are worried about it, and often they'll help you out.

'Bleed', we're going to have of '0.125' unless you're in millimeters, then it's 3mm. 'Slug' we never use, so we're going to click 'Create'. Let's jump to our pages panel. If you can't see it, let's go to 'Windows', 'Pages', and just have a quick look at what we have done. We've got 8 pages. So our page 1 here, that's our cover, and then it moves to 'Spreads'. So I double click page 2, you can see here I'm going to zoom out, 'Command -', or 'Control -' on a PC. You can see, they've put pages 2 and 3 together. You can have them separate, that's fine but obviously when you're working on a magazine it's handy to see them together, that's why we look at this word 'Spread'. We want to see them together. Great work, let's go inside of it, 'File', 'Save'. And let's put it into our 'Desktop', 'InDesign Class Files'. Let's call this one 'Green at Heart Newsletter', 'V1' not 'Final'.

All right, let's get on to the next video. Let's look at something called 'Master Pages', exciting.

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