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.”

In the Master Options dialogue box, under Name type “Inner Pages” (or whatever you want to name yours!) and hit OK. Now we know that this specific page layout is for the inner pages of the magazine. Let’s create the cover page master now.

There are a few ways to create additional master pages in the Pages Panel. One way is discussed here, and another way is by using the Create New Page button if you are in the Master Page section of the Pages Panel. But, for this exercise, we will use the drop down menu and select the New Master Option.

In the New Master dialogue box, we will name our new master page “Cover.” Before we hit OK, we want to define the dimensions differently because we have to make up for the thickness of the physical magazine. We will change the width from 8.5″ to 8.75”, adding an additional quarter of an inch for this purpose. Hit OK.

As you can see, we now have two Master pages, one for the cover and one for the inner pages.

Let’s say that we know every issue of the magazine is 36 pages with the cover. Let’s add those pages to our document so that we’ll always have the exact amount of pages needed when we open the template. To add the pages, in the Pages Panel drop-down menu, select Insert Pages.

From the Insert Pages dialogue box, type the number of pages to be insert (in this case, 35 because we already have a page in the document section). Make sure that After Pages is in the Insert field and choose Master: A-Inner Pages. Hit OK.

If I right-click on the Pages Panel and choose View → View Horizontally, I can see that I now have 36 pages in my document.

But there are still a couple of issues with this that need to be fixed before we save it. First, we want the first and last pages to be Cover pages, and secondly, we want the last page to be right hand facing, not left. If you think about how the magazine will open, it seems to make sense to have the last page sitting like the back of the cover.

To change the last page from left to right hand facing, make sure that Allow Document Pages to Shuffle is unchecked in the drop-down menu, then simply press and drag the page to the right until a small vertical line appears next to it and let go.

Unchecked!

To change the first and last pages to the Cover page size, press and drag the cover page from the Master Page section to the Document Page section atop the first, and then last page.

InDesign will tell you that the pages are different sizes, but we already knew that so click Use master page size.

Now that we have all of our pages set up, our guidelines and style in place, let’s save this as a template!

Awesome.

To save our file as a template, under File on the Menu Bar, choose Save As.

In the Save As dialogue box, be sure to designate the location where you want your template to exist, name it, and most importantly, under Format, choose InDesign Template.

And that is it! You have created a template!

If you need to make any changes to your template, you can always open up the file, make the needed adjustments and resave as a template. When using it as a template, be sure to save your file as an InDesign document as to not destroy your template.

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.

Make sure you are on the Master Page view and press and drag a guideline from the top ruler to an 1/8 of an inch below the bottom margin (red) guideline on your page. This time I don’t worry about keeping the guide inside the page or its color because I am actually only using this specific guideline once. However, you can do what you wish with your own template guidelines!

Next, we’ll grab the Type Tool and draw a text box along the new guideline and starting from the left margin line. It doesn’t matter how big the box is as long as the desire text fits within it.

Here I will type the word “Title” to represent the title of the Magazine. By default, the text appears in the font Minion Pro and size 12. I don’t much like this, so we’re going to format it differently. You can format your own however you want, but for this article, I want to change the font to Helvetica Neue Bold Condensed, all caps, size 8, and the color blue.

This looks nice and we want the rest of the text of our footer to be formatted just the same. Rather than going through the steps of formatting each piece of text individually, we can create a paragraph style and then simply apply that style to each piece of text.

To create a paragraph style based on the Title formatted text, select the text with the type tool. Then, open the Paragraph Styles panels from the dock, or find it under Type on the Menu Bar. With the text still selected, press the create new style button on the bottom of the Paragraph Styles Panel. A new style will appear in the list called Paragraph Style 1. To change the name, double click it and in the Paragraph Style Options dialogue box, type Footer where the default name exists.

Create new style. 

Rename.

Next, we’ll add the page number to the right side of the page and format it like the title by using the paragraph style we just created. Navigate to the right corner of the page and draw another text box. This time, instead of typing in the content, we will insert a special character (the page numeber) so that InDesign will automatically number our pages. To insert a page number, right-click the text box. Choose Insert Special Character, Markers, Current Page Number.

A capital letter will appear (in this case, an A). To format the text, select it with the text tool and click Footer in the Paragraph Panel. Then in the control panel, choose right align to align the page number to the right edge of the page.

Next, we’ll add the month and year to the second page in the spread (this is where you might add volume and issue number). We’ll do this in exactly the same way as we did the title and format it with the Paragraph Panel. We’ll add another page number (current page number again) to the second page as well.

Often times a magazine will employ a standard body text format. This means that all the body text in the magazine will be the same font, the same size and the same color. Sometimes magazine will employ the same standard header as well, or a number of any other elements. For this reason, we’ll make a standard body text for our template so that in the future when we use it to lay out articles, the body text style will already be there to use.

We’ll want to get a look at what the final version will appear like before we make it into a style, so we’ll start by drawing a text box on the page. It doesn’t matter where because, like the cyan guideline, this will not need to remain.

Fill the text box with Placeholder text, found under Type on the Menu Bar.

The text box is then filled with Latin nonsense (literally). We’ll select this text with the type tool and begin formatting it with the Control Panel. For my body text, I want the font to be Palatino Regular, the size to be 10 point with a 12 point lead, and the color to remain black.

I’ll add this style to my Paragraph Styles Panel by clicking on the create new style button and naming the new style Basic Body.

Now that I have the style, I can just delete the text box as well as the cyan guideline. To select the guideline, make sure your guides are not locked and select it with the selection tool then hit delete on your keyboard.

Save your progress! In the last part of this tutorial, we will cover creating an additional Master page, adding pages to your document and saving the document as a template.

Here we have an example of what can be accomplished. 

Designing layouts for a magazine can be tedious and time consuming without templates. Having to set up the parameters of the page for each article can take a lot of time. It only makes sense to create a basic page template that can be used as a base to every page design. In Part 1 of the three part series of designing templates in InDesign, we’ll cover creating and using guidelines.

For this tutorial I am using InDesign CS6 and a Mac, but you can use InDesign as old as CS4 and a PC for the same purposes.

There are a few things that need to be considered before starting on a template. In the example of a magazine, the first thing to be aware of is page size. We’ll consider that most magazines seem to be the standard letter size of 8.5” x 11.” This is a good place to start.

To begin. launch InDesign. Choose the standard letter size, Letter. InDesign automatically sets the page margins to 3p0, but we’ll be making our own margins, so set the page margins to zero.  Leave everything else on default and press Okay.

The first thing we’ll want to do is turn on the rulers, if they aren’t already on. Rulers can be found on the Menu Bar under View.

Next, just to make things easier in this case, we’ll change the rulers from Picas (default) to Inches. Right-click on the top ruler and choose Inches. Do the same with the side ruler.

Next, we’ll make our own margins. But, before we start drawing guidelines on our page, we’ll want to be sure that we draw them on our master page so we’ll be sure that every page in our document page has the same guidelines. To switch to the master page, open the Pages Panel from the dock, or find it on the Menu Bar under Window.

In the Pages Panel, the master page exists in the top section and the document page exists in the bottom section. Notice we are currently on the document page because in the Pages Panel, the document page is blue. We’ll want to navigate to the Master page by simply double-clicking on the Master Page icon.

Now we can start drawing our guidelines. To draw a guideline, you simply press and drag from the ruler and let go when you have reached the point at which you want the guide to exist. Press and drag guidelines .375 inch from each edge of the page.

Notice how the guideline is existing inside the parameters of the page. This will keep the guideline inside the page, which seems cleaner to me. If you have difficulty with lining up the guideline to exactly .375, you can always type the number in the x coordinate box (left hand corner) on the Control Panel, below the Menu Bar. For the right side of the page, you can type in 8.125 (this is 8.5 minus .375). The top guideline would be .375, but in the y coordinate box instead of the x. The bottom guideline would be 10.625. Look at that! We are using those math skills!

We’ve now got some perfect margins for our page! Let’s change the color of these guidelines so that when we start adding other guidelines we won’t be confused by cyan lines all over the place. Changing the color of a guideline is simple. You just need to select the guideline with the selection tool. If you can’t select the guideline, make sure to uncheck Lock Guides under View on the Menu Bar, Grids & Guides. Once the guidelines are select, find the option to change the color of the guidelines in Ruler Guides, under Layout on the Menu Bar.

Here we see the Ruler Guides dialogue box and the numerous colors InDesign allows us to assign to each guideline. Choose a color and select Okay. Deselect the guidelines on the page and see how the color has changed! We can now copy all the guidelines and paste the to the second page. Copying and pasting guides is just like copying and pasting an object. You just have to make sure you line them up just right.

Red guidelines!

Copy and Paste can be a little difficult with guidelines.

For our magazine spread, we know that occasionally part of the page will be allotted to advertisements. Sometimes the ads will take up a vertical part of the page and sometimes it will be horizontal. We better draw guides for both types so that when we use this later to layout text before our ads come in, we’ll know where to put it.

Our first guide needs to be 3.5 inches from the left edge of the page. This is half of the interior of the page.  We can use the Zero Point on the ruler to adjust the rulers so that they start measuring from inside the margins of our page.

Press and drag the Zero Point so that it lines up with the corner of the left margin, then press and drag a guideline to 3.5 inches on the page. Press and drag another guideline to 1/8^th of an inch to the right of the first guideline. This will be the margin between the ad space and the text space.

We can do the same with the second page. And, we can also change the color of these guidelines as well.

Next we’ll add the horizontal ad guidelines.

Now we have our template guidelines set up and ready to go! Go ahead and lock them under View, Grids & Guides, Lock Guides. In the next article, we’ll learn how to place footers like page numbers and dates, as well as creating a set of paragraph styles to be used with our template.

it2go – The IT Training Podcast

Follow us on Twitter

Like Us on Facebook

Add us on iTunes

Have you ever tried to set a single Ruler Guide across a two-page spread in InDesign– and been frustrated in the effort?  A Ruler Guide that extends across a spread is called a Spread Guide. To create one, set the view so you can see the Pasteboard and then drag the guide out across the pasteboard instead of across the printable area. Viola–it extends all the way across the spread. If you are zoomed in, hold the Ctrl key while you drag.

To place a copy of a Ruler Guide or Spread Guide on other pages, point to the guide and right-click when you see the cursor change. In the right-click menu, choose Copy. On following pages, from the Menu bar, choose Edit, and Paste in Place.

Remember also that you can only see Ruler and Spread Guides in Normal view.

Here is a sample document with all the guides showing:

Now, at the bottom of the toolbox, there is a tool that looks like this:

Press and hold your cursor on this tool and you will see:

Choose the Preview option and you will see (Normal shows all the guides and margins):

This gives you a much better idea of what your final project will look like.

HOWEVER, a much faster way of doing this is to simply press the letter “W” on your keyboard. It toggles back and forth between Preview and Normal modes.

2. If you are one of those people (like me) who type two spaces after a period, there is a very quick way to convert the two spaces to one: With any tool selected, hold down the control key and press the “F” key. This is equivalent to the “Find” key in Word. You will see the following:

With your cursor in the cell after: Find what, type two spaces. Nothing appears, but there are spaces in the cell. Press the Tab key to advance to the next cell and type one space. Click on the FIND button and then the CHANGE ALL button. InDesign will tell you how many instances of two spaces are changing to one space. Cool!

3. Creating an album or a yearbook or possibly a page of illustrations or graphics? As of CS5, there is a quick and very cool way to place multiple objects at the same time. The one preparation you will need to do is to put all your pictures, illustrations or graphics that you want to use in one folder.

From InDesign, go to File and Place just as you would to place objects the traditional way. Locate the folder that your objects are in and open it. Now select the files you want to include. Remember that you can use the control key if the items are non-contiguous or the shift key for contiguous items. Click Open or hit Enter.

Here is the “tricky” part. You have a loaded icon now. Press and drag a selection over the part of the page you are putting the pictures in, but DO NOT let go of your mouse button. While holding it down, press the up arrow key to add rows to your placement and press the right arrow key to add columns. To reduce the number of rows or columns, use the down and left arrow key. When you release your mouse, you will have each space filled in with a different picture. These spaces can be modified using the selection key. Could look something like:

Modified:                                                                   Not Modified:

A contact sheet is a grid of thumbnail images that may be used for a lot of things: yearbooks, calendars–anything in which you would like to post a thematic group of pictures. Adobe offers this automated function in some of its Creative Suite applications and in Lightroom.

In InDesign, creating a contact sheet is an easy process.

1. From the Menu bar, choose File, then Place.
2. Select multiple images by Ctrl-clicking or Shift-clicking. If you want to include captions with your images, check Create Static Captions.
   
3. Click Open.
4. On the InDesign page, start dragging. You will see a grid forming as you drag.
   - Press the arrow keys to set the number of rows and columns you want.
   - To change the spacing between frames, press Page Up or Page Down or hold down Ctrl (Windows) or Command (Mac OS) while pressing the arrow keys.
   You will see a preview result of your keypresses onscreen as you work.
5. Release the mouse button to place the grid of images.
6. At this point, you can replace captions and resize at will.

You can watch how to to do it here:

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/adobe-and-your-voice/creating-your-personal-brand-episode-creating-a-slide-presentation/

And you can check out all the features with written step-by-step how-to’s here:

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/indesign/cs/using/WS328f5ee33f08f77d1e63e3d120f2667a4c-7ffe.html

If so, you  know that just typing the letter that appears in parentheses when you hold the pointer over any tool (called the tool tip) works nicely — except if you are currently working with the Type tool. In that case, when you press any key you simply type the letter. This can be frustrating if you are trying to work quickly and efficiently.

To quickly switch to another tool when the type tool is active, press the Escape key and then type the letter of the tool you want to activate. If you want to switch to the Hand tool, press Alt with the h key.

Follow us on Twitter

Like Us on Facebook

Add us on iTunes

it2go – The IT Training Podcast