• Build It

Now that you have your whole design complete as sketches, colour palette and type selection, it’s time to build it in InDesign. It’s crucial that you set up your InDesign document properly at the outset.

Document Setup
Number of Pages	2
Facing Pages	No
Page Size	Letter
Orientations	Portrait
Columns	X
Gutter	1x Leading
Margins	3x Leading
Bleeds	0p9

Units of Measure

Points and Picas are often used in design for print. This is an explanation of these ancient units of measure.

It may take time for you to get used to using them, but they are useful. We use points to measure type. It stands to reason we’ll use picas, too. They’re all part of the same measurement system.

Colour Your World

You should also be adding your colours to the swatches panel in InDesign to ensure your design remains consistent as you build it. Colour swatches are global by default in InDesign. That means, when you add your colours to the Swatches panel, they’ll be editable from there. If you edit the swatch, the colours will change on the page.

The Grid is Gold

One of the main goals of this assignment is to have you work on a modular grid, as shown below. What we have here is a 6-column grid on a letter page. As you can see, it’s mostly used as a 3-column grid with half increments, in case you need them.

You could also do an 8-column grid, which essentially works as a 4-column, with half increments.

Let It Bleed

Be sure to make your bleeds correctly. If any art goes beyond the margins, it needs to reach out to the bleed line and no further.

Take a moment to look at this graphic to ensure you really understand what an accurate bleed is.

Type Handling

You’ll have already established your type selection and hierarchy. Now’s the time to set up paragraph styles for all your type. You could/should do this at the start. When you import your text, you can apply the styles right away. If some sizes aren’t right, it’s easy to then adjust them.

The rule in InDesign is to create as few text frames as possible. If content can be in fewer fames, do that. If it’s more complicated to place content in one frame, then use two.

Clean Up Your Fonts

You need to make sure your InDesign document only contains the fonts you’re actually using in your design. To that end, go to Type > Find/Replace Font…. If there are stray fonts in there, remove them.

Image Handling

There are a number of photos provided by the client. Always use File > Place… to import them. You can scale them in InDesign as you work. Once you’re done, go to Photoshop to scale them to 100%.