Creating a new document and setting up for efficient design

Now that we’re a little more familiar with the InDesign interface, let’s get started on creating the newsletter. As mentioned previously, we’ll be making a four-page newsletter — specifically, we’ll be creating an issue of the Midwest Pet Pals Gazette, which is mailed out to donors and volunteers at the Midwest Pet Pals animal shelter. The newsletter will be composed of a main article, a secondary article, and two sidebar articles. To add visual interest and draw readers into the content, we’ll incorporate a number of photos of cats and dogs; additionally, we’ll also make use of color to help make some of the articles contrast from their surroundings. Before we start laying out the document, let’s make sure we have a plan for the design of our newsletter.

Planning the document

When putting together any layout, it helps to have a plan in mind before opening InDesign and getting to work. It’s also important to keep basic design principles in mind as you plan out your layout, such as consistency, legibility, and generating visual interest without overwhelming the reader. While we won’t be specifically discussing page layout principles in this course, we will be putting them into practice when building the newsletter.

NOTE: If you're interested in learning more about the basic principles of design, consider enrolling in the course Page Design and Layout Basics, which discusses the process of designing a layout in more depth.

When approaching the task of laying out a document, using the following workflow can help make the process more straightforward:

• Gather the materials you’ll be using in the layout
• Create a rough sketch of the layout
• Create the new document
• Build the underlying structure of the document
• Fill the document with content

Let’s talk a little bit more about each of these steps in detail.

Step one: gathering materials

This step involves collecting everything you’ll be including in your publication so it’s all ready to add to the layout when you start building it. This includes (but is not limited to) text, images, color swatches, and even the fonts you plan to use in the document. This step has already been completed for you today — the text and images we'll be using in the newsletter are included in the Images and Text folders in the exercise files, and the fonts we’ll be using today are Verdana and Georgia. For color, we’ll be using the shades of blue and green from the Midwest Pet Pals logo (shown in the following image) to help unify the document.

Step two: creating a rough sketch of the layout

With the materials you’ll be including in the document on hand, the next step is to create a rough sketch of how you want to lay out the contents of the document. It doesn’t have to be a very detailed sketch — just focus on figuring out where individual elements like photos, articles, and other design elements will go in the finished document. We've already created a rough sketch of the planned layout of the Midwest Pet Pals Gazette — you can view the rough sketches in the following accordion folds:

Step three: create the new document

Once you have the contents of the document on hand and a sketch of where those contents will end up in your layout, now you’re ready to create your new document. This will involve setting the document page size, indicating how many columns of text we want to work with and the spacing between them, how many pages we want to start with, and setting the units of measurement for the document if necessary. (We’re about to start this part of the process.)

Step four: building the underlying structure of the document

For this step, you’ll be making use of parent pages (which can be thought of as page templates - we’ll learn more about these later) to create the underlying structure for the document. Items we might want to include on parent pages include headers and footers, page numbers, and other elements we may want to appear in multiple pages in our document.

Step five: adding content to the document

With the document’s underlying structure created, you’re ready to start adding content to the document! In this step, you’ll lay out the materials you collected according to the rough layout sketch you created previously.

Creating a new InDesign document

Since we have our materials on hand and a sketch of how we plan to lay out the document's contents, we’re ready to create a new document to lay out the newsletter in. To start, we’ll create a new document with two pages and a 3-column base layout. (We’ll add the other two pages of our document later, to get practice adding pages to an existing document.)

Let’s create the new document now.

At this point, the New Document dialog box should look similar to the following image:

Here, we can change the settings for our new document, including adjusting the page size, number of pages, how many columns (if any), the space between columns, and the unit of measurement used in the document. We’ll set the number of pages for the new documents to two, and leave the Facing Pages setting turned on. We’ll also change the number of columns on the pages to three — however, if desired, we can manually override this, and a few of the articles in the newsletter will use one or two columns instead of three. We’ll also set the gutter, or spacing between the columns, to 0.15 inches.

While we're here, we’ll also change the unit of measurement used for the document. When looking at the New Document dialog box, you may have noticed that InDesign’s default measurement unit is set to picas, which is a measurement unit used in typography that roughly equals 1/6th of an inch. Since we may not be familiar with measuring in picas, to make it easier to lay out the document, we’ll switch the unit of measurement to inches.

NOTE: If desired, you can change the default unit of measurement used for all InDesign documents created on your computer — instructions on how to do this are included in the section Changing the default unit of measurement in InDesign in the course appendix. 

Let’s change the necessary settings for the newsletter document and finish creating it.

InDesign will display a blank page containing pink and purple guide lines — these lines indicate the page margin, columns, and spacing between the columns. With the new document created, let’s take a moment to turn on some features in InDesign that will help us out in the design process.

Setting up InDesign for efficient page design

When working in InDesign, especially when we need to precisely lay out items on a page, we’ll want to set up the InDesign interface ahead of time to make the design process as efficient as possible. Choosing a specific workspace in InDesign will bring out all the panels and tools we’ll need to lay out a page, and turning on the rulers and grid will assist in measuring and positioning objects as we work.

Switching workspaces

As mentioned previously, InDesign comes with a number of pre-made workspaces that we can use when laying out a document. Since we’ll be working on a newsletter that contains a fair amount of text, we’ll switch to the Typography workspace to display panels that will help with the layout process.

Showing the rulers and document grid

Since we’ll need to be aware of where items are placed on our page and what size the objects are, we’ll display the rulers in the document workspace. Once active, the rulers will appear along the top and left side of the workspace. These rulers will display the cursor's position on the page as dotted lines in both the vertical and horizontal rulers that move as you move your mouse. In the following image, for example, the mouse is positioned at 1/2 an inch in on both the horizontal and vertical rulers, with the dotted lines on each ruler indicating the cursor's position:

We'll be using these indicators frequently during the course to help precisely position items on the page.

We’ll also turn on the document grid, as it’s a very useful tool when working on a layout. When active, it appears in the background on the document page as well as on the pasteboard. The grid can help us measure and position items on the page, and the grid squares can be customized to whatever size will be most useful to us as we work. We'll also turn on the option that allows us to snap objects to the document grid — this will make it so an object will snap to the nearest grid squares as we create or move it.

Let’s turn on the rulers (if they're not already visible) and the document grid, then adjust the document grid so the individual squares are 1/4 inch in size.

Now we're at the point where we can start adding content to the document. Before continuing on, let’s save the document.