Project 4 Step 3 Part 5

InDesign isn’t really a web design program, but it is a print program, so here, we’re teaching you about typographic hierarchy and we’re also teaching you about paragraph styles. That will be beneficial for the students going into print, and the students going into web design will see the similarities between what we’re doing here, and CSS style sheets.

One of the things that is actually a little difficult about InDesign is adding color, so we’ll cover that on this tutorial.

To add a color, we’ll go to the swatches pallet, and you’ll notice that the swatches pallet is a little different than Illustrator or PhotoShop. We want to add a new swatch, so we’ll click ‘New Swatch’ then we’ll double click on an item from the list above. We will set the ‘Color Mode’ dropdown list to CMYK because that mode is easiest to work with. We’ll turn down the black, and then you can adjust the other levels to get the colors you want. Once you’ve got the color you want, you can name it. We’ll name ours “Subhead.” Then click ‘OK.’

Now we’ll click on ‘Contrast.’ We’ll see that this is already set as heading 5. So, we’ll click on that, and here we’ll click on ‘Character Color.’ Here, you’ll see the “Subhead” color we just made. That color will apply to our heading 5 style.

We want to make some other adjustments while we’re on this page. Next we’ll click on ‘Indents and Spacing.’ On ‘Space Before’ I’m going to set 12. On ‘Space After’ I’ll set 6. I want the type to be closer to the bottom paragraph than the top paragraph because it will make a visual connection. We also want to make this bold, so we’ll go to ‘Basic Character Formats.’ Here, we’ll change the font to Arial and we’ll change the font style to Bold. Then click ‘OK.’ Now, double click on the hand tool and you’ll see that all our H5s changed automatically, so we don’t need to worry about those.

On your own pages, many of you we’ll see that your type runs off the bottom of the page. Don’t worry about that, just let it run off the bottom. You’ll want to focus on what to do with your header and footer. Look for examples of those to decide what to do.

Save that, and go to a new page in InDesign and open up your workbook, allowing updates, in order to see the changes and how it will look in the workbook.

So, to sum up what is expected from this step of the project: you need to make five header, readjust your typography and add an image and a caption. Keep up with the type. I encourage you this week to continue to experiment and have a good time!