Adding the sidebar article to the front page

The next thing we'll add to our newsletter is a sidebar article. Sidebars are brief companion articles that are related to main stories, but set off visually from the main article in some way. Despite their name, sidebar articles can be located anywhere adjacent to the main article — and the first one we'll add to the newsletter will be located on the bottom of the front page.

Creating a frame for the sidebar article

Just like we did with the main article, we'll place the text for the sidebar article into the document, but first we need to make a frame to put it in. After it's created, we'll designate the frame as a text frame and apply a bounding box text wrap to it.

Placing text into an existing frame

Now the frame is ready for us to place the sidebar article's content into. Earlier, we placed the content for the main article by selecting the file to place, then telling InDesign where to put it. This time, we'll select the frame we want to put the text in first, then select the file we want to place into the document.

The article we're adding was created using Microsoft Word, and the text is already formatted to match the newsletter's fonts, so we won't have to worry about formatting the article's content. Let's go ahead and select the sidebar article frame, then place the contents of the file spotlight.docx into the frame.

The contents of the article appear in the selected frame.

NOTE: If you're importing a Word document or other text file that has formatting and want to remove the formatting before it's placed into the document, you can do this using the Import Options dialog box. Instructions on how to do this are included in the section Removing formatting from a Word document before placing it into a layout in the course appendix.

On your own: Adding a headline to the sidebar article

At this point, we've created a number of text frames and applied formatting to text multiple times. For this section, you'll be adding the headline to the sidebar article on your own.

1. Create a 0.5 inch tall by 7.5 inch wide frame across the top of the sidebar article on page one, and set the frame's content to text.
2. Apply a bounding box text wrap to the frame with a bottom offset of .1 inches.
3. Use the text "Shelter Pet Spotlight: Binky" for the headline.
4. Format the headline so it uses Verdana Bold, 18 pt font.
5. Change the vertical alignment for the text frame to center.
6. Deselect the text.
7. Save the document.

If you would like a walkthrough of how to complete this section, watch the video On Your Own: Adding a Headline to the Sidebar Article.

Once added, the sidebar article should now look like the following image:

Viewing the document in Preview mode

As we've been adding more and more content to the newsletter, our page has accumulated more and more text frame outlines in addition to text — which is all visible on top of the document grid. Although the frame outlines and grid lines are helpful in positioning contents and viewing the boundaries of text frames, it makes it a little hard to visualize what the newsletter might look like when it's printed.

Thankfully, InDesign provides a number of different viewing modes we can use to see our document in different ways. We'll switch to Preview mode to see what the front page of the newsletter would look like if we were to print it right now. The view mode switcher is the last item in the Tools panel, so we'll go there to switch to Preview mode.

The document grid and text frame borders disappear.

In Preview mode, it becomes a little more obvious that we need to do something with the sidebar article to help it stand out from the main article more.

Adjusting the inset spacing of a frame

One thing we can immediately do to help the sidebar article stand out more is to change the spacing inside the text frames for the article and its headline, to give the text some space from the frames containing it. We can do this by adjusting the text frame's inset spacing through the Text Frame Options dialog box.

Let's adjust the inset spacing for the headline and article text frames to 1/10th of an inch.

The front page of the newsletter should now look like the following:

It's looking better, but there's still more we could do here. In the next section, we'll explore how to make the sidebar stand out more using color.