Project 5 Step 2 Thumbnails

Last time when we finished we chose a certain column layout and margins. This is an example of the  demonstration that we did last time. So we have five columns with one pike in between, which is 12 points. And, this one has three pt, but you can’t use 3 pt because it’s the default. So, where we’re gonna go from this is we have a five column layout. How do we use this in our layout. I’m going to show you first what I don’t want to see. I’ve got this scan here of some layouts. In these layouts, we see a drawing that shows boxes with x’s in them. This is generally used as shorthand for where a photo is would be. In this assignment, everything is going to be typographic. There may be some small charts showing how grid works, but boxes with x’s are not adequate. If, for whatever, you did have a photo, you should draw a box with a small indication of what’s in the photograph. The other thing is that this doesn’t tell me anything about the body copy. And it doesn’t have any reference to the grid whatsoever. This is what you don’t want to do.

Here’s an example of what the sketches should look like. In this one, I’ve got a cover example here, and on the cover I’ve got the name of the book, I’ve got “Grid” and then right here “Alignment” and then we have the author’s name. We can tell that this is a sans serif font. I can tell that this is an upper case “G,” a lower case “r,” a lower case “i,” and a capital “D.” I don’t know if that would work, but it’s an idea of how type could work on the cover.

 On the interior spreads, we can tell some things about these sketches. One, we see a page number right here, we see an introduction or a headline right here. Our body copy is two columns wide. So, there’s one blank column, two columns wide, a space, two columns wide. So, this is based on a five column layout. We have a blockquote here, two subheads. We can see where the type aligns. We can see the margins: how large the margins are. In this one, we see a place where we have two columns wide, then we skip a column, and have another two columns wide. This blockquote is three columns wide. We have a larger subhead here. And here’s possibly a different section where we have one column, we have four columns and the headline then three columns and the block of text. That’s what the sketch should show you: it should give you some idea of how to work with the grid. That’s what we want to see with your three thumbnail sketches.

Now, I want to briefly cover these scans. I just scanned the pages of the workbook and drew right on the workbook page. I want to cover how to place this in your workbook document.

When you scan something, generally you have a little bit of gray in the background. To get rid of the gray, we’re going to add an adjustment layer. Here in the layers pallet, we’ll add one called “levels.” Levels show a little chart here is black. These are all the black pixels here at this end, and you’ll see that there aren’t any black pixels. It shows all the white pixels stacked at the other end. That smaller stack is actually light gray pixels. We want to make an adjustment. Grab the right arrow and drag it to the other side of the light gray stack. That makes all the gray pixels white. Then, we’ll adjust the black pixels to where we start seeing black. That gives us higher contrast on our layout.

Now, we want to go export this as a jpg for your book. We’ll do ‘File’ > ‘Save As’ > we want to save it as a jpg. We’ll call it “thumb01” and we’ll save it in our ART 230 folder. We’ll save it here. When the quality window pops up, just click ‘OK.’ Now, when we go back to InDesign, we’ll go to our workbook, and we want to place it on page 9. I’ll do ‘File’ > ‘Place.’ Find our “Thumb01” > ‘Open’ It shows the import options. Click ‘OK’ Then, out here in the gray area, I’m just going to click once, and it will place the document. From here, I can drag it onto the page. Now, some of this stuff got duplicated here on the side and in the heading, so I’ll place this approximately in position. ‘Object’ > ‘Arrange’ > ‘Send to back.’ While it’s selected, you can use the arrow keys to move it around and get that closer in place. Then, you can select the black arrow. Don’t hold any keys, you can just move this top margin in, and it crops off all the extra type. Then, the only thing you need to do is delete the boxes that were there from the original print. That way, you have an example of your grid that has a nice, white background. You can do this from either a scan or a photo. You need to create three of these thumbnails for this assignment.