Indiana University: IT Training Tips Blog

In the last article, Creating and Using Templates in InDesign Part 2, we talked about creating paragraph styles and footers. In this final part, we’ll cover adding an additional page size, adding pages to our file size and then saving our file in the template format.

When dealing with a magazine, you have to consider thickness of the finished product. This basically means that the cover of the magazine will be slightly wider than the inner pages to make up for the thickness of the contained pages. Since the page we already designed is 8.5” by 11” and it contains all of our ad guidelines, we know this is the size for our inner pages. Let’s define it as that by changing the name in the Pages Panel.

To change the name of the Master Page, in the Pages Panel, choose Master Options for “A-Master.”

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In the last Creating a Template with InDesign Part 1 article, we covered guidelines extensively. In this Part 2, we’ll cover creating footers and paragraph styles.

Generally recurring published materials like magazines have such information as title, page number, and date as footer information. With our template, it just makes sense to add this now as opposed to adding it later when we actually use the template to put together an article or magazine.

Let’s start with the title. We’ll first want to place a guideline 1/8^th of an inch below the bottom page margin so that our footer isn’t right up against whatever content fills the page at a later time.

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Templates come in handy when working on design projects that use the same basic composition. Some examples are newsletters, magazines, or advertisements that have to maintain a certain size and layout.  InDesign allows you to create page layouts and then save those layouts as templates quite easily. Today we will talk about adding guidelines and paragraph styles to a page layout in order to really take advantage of what InDesign has to offer in this realm. We’ll create a template for a basic magazine page layout.

Here we have an example of what can be accomplished. 

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If you’re familiar with InDesign and the Pages panel, you should already be aware as to how to add pages and even work with Master Pages so that you can carry designs throughout your document. But sometimes you have a document that may need different page sizes. Up until recently, the only way to do this would be to create different InDesign documents and then combine them together in a book, or perhaps some other way that I have never thought of. However, with InDesign CS5 and later, you can actually adjust your InDesign page sizes (much like creating Master pages) inside the Pages panel. It’s really quite simple. Let’s take a look at how that is made possible.

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Tilt-shift photography refers to the use of tilt for selective focus. There are special lenses that can be used to create this effect optically, or it can be simulated in digital editing and processing.

Here are a few examples I did, following the steps I outline below:

The tilt-shift effect essentially creates a imitation of a miniature scene or a small-sized model, often from real-life photography. The tilt-shift effect can be a lot of fun and is very easy to do with Photoshop.

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There are many different ways and programs you can use to go about creating a fun and interesting animated gif for the web. For this tutorial I will show you one quick and easy way to create an animated gif using Photoshop CS5. I am working on a Mac, but a PC will do just the same.

You can check out a preview of what the completed animated gif can look like by visiting this link. Keep in mind, this is a web page I designed to showcase the animated gif created for this specific tutorial. Uploading your completed animated gif directly to the web will not result in the animation being centered on the web page.

To begin with, I used Photoshop to create a series of images of which I kept in one folder. These images will act as the states for my animated gif. It is not necessary to use Photoshop to do this. You can create an animated gif with a series of photographs or a group of illustrations created in Illustrator in much the same way. Really, as long as you can open your files with Photoshop, you can create an animated gif out of virtually anything. The important thing to note is that each layer, or state, should be the same dimensions and resolution and will need to have something different, whether that change is slight or dramatic.

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Knowing the basics of Illustrator and very little Dreamweaver, it has become very easy to create an interesting and fun website, complete with rollovers without knowing any code. Here’s an example of what can be accomplished. I used CS5 on my iMac, but you can use a PC and Adobe versions as old as CS2 just as well.

To Start with, create a new Folder on the Desktop (or wherever you plan to save your website) and title is “website.” This will provide a location where all your files for this particular website will be saved. It is important to keep all web files for one website in one location.

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