Project 4 Step 3 Part 3

Now, we’re going to compare our web document, at this point, to the site that it came from.

First, I’m going to compare my document to a screenshot. To do this, I’ll double click the hand tool to see my entire document. Then I click ‘File’ > ‘Place’ then I’ll find where I saved the screenshot of the original site and click ‘Open.’  I’ll expand that image to be the same size as my page: 800 pixels wide. Then, I’ll move it off to the side to compare. As I dragged it to the side, I held down SHIFT so that it would stay up. With the document side-by-side you can see obvious differences in the typography and in other things.

Typically, this first line H1 is the header, and this is taken care of in our header, so we can move on.

As we look at the screenshot, if we read the article, we can see that the font used here has a height of 16 pixels, and 16 pt will correspond to that, and it’s set in Georgia. There’s nothing magic about Georgia, it’s just designed to be a nice screen font. I’m not giving you any rules here, I’m just showing you options.

The first thing I want to do is adjust my body copy. I will select a little bit of text and open ‘Paragraph Style.’ If your paragraph styles are missing, you can access them by clicking on the ‘Window’ list, then ‘Styles’ then ‘Paragraph styles.’ In the paragraph styles window, we’ll click on ‘Basic character format.’ In the appropriate input fields, we’ll change the font size to sixteen, the leading to 24, and the font family to Georgia, and the font style to regular. We’ll zoom in to compare with the original website, and we can see that the pages look much more similar.

Now, let’s look at our alphabet. We can see that the line where we typed the alphabet is now a different length. Every font you use will affect the length of your text a little differently. So, to correct the extra letters that skip to the next line, we’ll drag the right margin over a little until the alphabet is all on one line. Now, I’ve changed our width to 538, but I want to have a width number that is more round, so I’ll go to our width input field and type in 550. This will make our work easier later.

Now, our box of text is off center, and I want it to be centered, so, I’ll cut the entire text box from the page using CMMD-X then I’ll double click on the hand tool and paste the box back to the page with CMMD-V. The pasted box will be centered.

Now, we’re going to adjust our text to match the webpage screenshot. The first thing we will do is delete the words Type Matters from our page, because we’ve taken care of those in the masthead. Now, the first line is ‘I Love Typography.’ So, we’ll select that, and set the font to Georgia Italic. Now, I need to increase the size of that line’s font. Also, I need to add a space after that line to match the webpage. Now, I could just hit RETURN twice to make a space, but we now know that’s not the best way to put space in your pages.

I realize that I shouldn’t have changed the font to Georgia yet, so I’m going to hit CMMD-Z a couple time, then I’ll open the heading window. In the heading window, I’ll select ‘Basic Character Format’ from the list, and in the appropriate fields, I’ll enter Font Family > Georgia, and Font Style > italic. Then, I’ll start increasing the font size until it matches the page. To do this, you need to make sure that the preview feature is turned on. Then, I’ll increase this font until it matches the original. I’m going to stop at 60pt. At that size, our leading is shown as 72 in parentheses. Since that number is divisible by 12, I want to choose that size as a leading, so I’ll delete the parentheses.

Now we need to adjust the spacing, so we’ll select ‘Indents and Spacing’ from the list on that window. Then, we’ll increase the ‘Space After’ number slowly until it matches the screenshot. Next, we’ll select the next line and click heading three. We will add space below heading three to match the screenshot. If at all possible, add space below instead of adding space above. There are limited circumstances when adding space above is necessary, but, again, stick with adding below as much as possible. On heading three, we’ll increase space after until it matches.

Now we’ll go to H4. We’ll select ‘Basic Character Formatting’ again and well set the ‘Case’ to ‘All caps.’ Also, we see in the screenshot that this line is a sans serif font, so well change our font family to Arial. Then, we’ll decrease our size to match. We’ll also go back to our H3 window and add some more space after.

When you look after the H4 line, there is a thin line. That’s called a paragraph rule. We’ll look at how to insert one of those in the paragraph styles. So, I’ll go back to H4 and add some more space after. I want my leading and distances to be divisible by 12, so I’ll leave the space at 36.

Now, we want to insert that rule, so, in the same window, we’ll select ‘Paragraph Rules.’ And, in the first dropdown menu on that window, you can select ‘Rule Above’/’Rule Below.’ Since we’re on the H4 line, we’ll select ‘Rule Below.’ And we’ll check ‘Rule On’ next to that box. We’ll move that rule down by increasing the ‘Offset’ value. That will change the position of our rule without affecting our text. We’ll also adjust the ‘Weight’ of our line to better match the screenshot. You can experiment with the line, making it dotted or dashed or whatever else you want to try.