Class Project 02 - Design a magazine spread

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

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Student class projects

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.

Downloads & Exercise files

Download Exercise Files Download Completed Files

Transcript

Hi there, welcome to our class exercise. What we're going to do is, we've made this one together. I'm going to get you to rebuild the next spread, pages 4 and 5. It uses the same layer, but with different text, and different copy. Now, like the last class exercise, the people that do this exercise are the types of people that end up doing really well at InDesign, and remembering this kind of stuff. So I've created a checklist, like I did before, here it is here.

I've also got it in your exercise files so if you check out your exercise files, under 'Newsletter', there's 'Class Exercise'. There is the 'Checklist'. And also, the images and text you're going to use. We've already imported the text in the earlier exercise so you don't have to do that again. But there's the image of this handsome man here. So, let's go through quickly what you need to do.

So, you need to apply the 'None' to the master page, for page 4. That means, on your 'Pages' panel here, on this left hand 'Spread', that is where we do not need this page number, and this box. So, I've gone through and applied the 'None' to this. If you're ringing, "Holy Molly, I don't remember doing that" you're allowed to cheat and go back to the videos. What you're not allowed to do is copy and paste from this page. That will be too easy, we're learning.

Next on our check list is adding this 'Cafe' image. So add it, and crop it in, so it fits inside that page. I said right Spread, I mean left Spread. What I'd like you to do is check the Effective PPI of this image. Make sure it's 300 or above when you're finished. You don't have to do anything. I just want you to find out where it is. Check it, make sure it's 300, or round about that before you move on. I'd like you to add this box down here. Similar to the one we did in the last exercise. Drop that in, I'd like you to put this text in here. And in this case, you're going to add the Glyph. Can you see, this Glyph here, this registered trademark Find that under the Glyphs panel. And I want you to add it after BYOL. Add this one as well.

I'd like you to steal the color from the image using the Eyedropper tool. See this brown here, that came from part of his arm. You can pick any color from the image to color this box here. I'd also like you to add a Drop Shadow to it. So that's the next thing in our list. Make sure there's a Drop Shadow applied to it. Now, Ligatures, this is this page. Remember, we can pick fancier versions of this. I've picked a fancy H, I've picked a different C, and a G. Go through, sex it up with different Ligatures. Up to you really what you do in this one. Next thing I want you to do is be able to fix one of the Paragraph Styles. It's this one here. You’ll notice it's different from when we were working earlier. This now is Roboto Slab, and it's a size of 17 point. So change it, redefine the style so that it applies to both pages. That's for Paragraph Styles.

Next thing is this text. Needs to be in 3 columns, I don't mind which order you do these mainly because I'm not there. You can do them in any order. So this has to be 3 columns. Apply all the Paragraph Styles to it, so it looks like this. I'd like you to remove the double spaces after the full stop. Remember, there's two spaces on some of them. This one definitely has it. I'd like you go and find, and change, and remove them. And I want you to make sure there's no overset text. By that I mean, see this little box here, it's clear and crisp. If I had too much text, watch this, the text box is not big enough, it overflows and there's going to be problems, mainly, we're missing part of our text. So make sure that the text box is tall enough, or wide enough so that you can fit it all in there.

The last one, is I'd like you to make a PDF. Export it, make sure the Crop marks are turned on, and in this case, I want you to turn on the Spreads when it gets to exporting a PDF. That way, it will export, and these pages will be side by side. When you've finished, I'd like you to send me the PDF. Depending on where you're watching this, it might be a link in the comments, or it might be under the 'My Project' section. Or a screen shot, just something, I want to see what you've done. You might have Flashed it up a little bit. You might have used different images, different colors, different fonts, or you might have got it bang on, and exact. I'll hold you accountable if nobody else will, send me, I can be found by lots of social media. Just to make sure, or give you any tips, or just to say, "Nice work."

Okay, lovely people, let's get into the next project where we work on a nice long document. Kind of cool. I'll see you over there. Once you've finished your homework, do your homework.

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