2.2 Typographic Hierarchy: Designing a Preliminary Article and Paragraph Styles

Hi there, welcome back to this course. In the last lesson, we learned how to properly set up an InDesign file for a magazine. And in this lesson, we will take a look at how to design a small, short article so we can decide what fonts, colors, and placements we want on the page. From there, we will learn how to create paragraph styles, so let's take a look. So on InDesign, slide the text tool from the toolbar and create a text frame at the top of the left side page. Here we will add a headline. Select the headline by pressing Command A hit over to the Options bar. And let's look for our fun bw gradual black. Let's set the size to 36 points. To get out of text frame, click on the selection tool, press W to check out the preview, looks fine. To add more text, get over to the text frame, right click and select Fill With Placeholder Text. Now, we want the headline to be in all capitals so select all the headline, head over to the Options bar and click on the all caps button. Press W so we can see the text, this feels a little bit too spread out. So let's change the lighting to 40 points. Press W again so we can see the spread. That seems to be working better. Select the text tool and create a second frame underneath, and this will be the intro text. Right click and select Fill With Placeholder Text. Head over to the options bar that select BW Gradual Light, Change the size to 18 points, Press option in the up arrow to change the lighting. So here, the auto lighting seems to be working just fine. So select Auto, perfect. Let's click here on the plus button and create a second text room so we can delete the rest of the content. Let's bring our guides again. Select the text tool and here we'll create a copy text frame. Right click and select Fill With Placeholder Text. Press Cmd+A to select all of the content and let's change the font to BW Gradual Regular. Let's make this a little bit smaller, 9 points, that's a very comfortable size. And now we want to divide this into two columns. So press Cmd+B, or head over to Object > Text Frame Options. Check the preview box so we can see what we are doing, and change the number of columns to 2. See here we'll split it into two columns. If we need three we can add more, but the gutter is different from the gutter that we initially created, so let's change the gutter to 0.5 centimeters. And click OK, perfect. Many magazines have a drop cap at the beginning of the copy, or at the beginning of an article, and they give a very dramatic and polished look at the beginning of a paragraph. So we'll add that here. So let's select the first letter of the paragraph. Head over to the Options bar. So like the paragraph option, let's set the line to 4. But let's change the font to something a little bit heavier. So let's see how that works, that works nice. Let's create a poll quote and duplicate this by pressing Shift+Option and drag to the right. Select all the text papers in command A and it's changed this to black. Let's change this to 21 points and make it 1 column. So let's add this here, lets see how it works. Head over to that text wrap panel, you can open this panel by going to Window Text Wrap, and click on the wrap around bounding box so we can make space for the texts frame here. Let's make this text frame a little bit longer and that looks great. Now we will extend this single page article into the next page to create a spread. So to extend the body copy, click on the text frame and then click on the little square here at the bottom, right corner, and draw a text frame on the opposite page. Right click and let's fill it up with a placeholder text. Select the text frame, press Cmd+B so we can add a second column to the text frame, number of columns 2, click OK. Now let's add a square so we can pretend it's an image, select the rectangle tool from your toolbar or M on your keyboard. Let's draw a rectangle or a square, head over to the text wrap panel, then select the wrap around bound in box to make space for it. Let's duplicate the intro here so we can make a little photo caption. Set the font size to 7 points and the font style to bold. Head over to the text wrap and select a wrap-around bounding box. Let's make this one column and bring it down under the image to see what it looks like. Looks good now we're missing are our folios. So let's duplicate this, the name of the magazine. Right click Insert Special Character > Hyphens and Dashes > Dash. And you can see that this dash is longer than the regular dash so let's delete the old one, we have the new one and now we want to insert page number. For now we can add just any page number, when we set up the master pages we'll do it the right way. Set the font style to regular and the size to 7 points. So let's make this smaller. Let's add some tracking so that it's easier to read. Set a tracking to 500 and let's place this on the outside of the page. So always different from regular magazine. Rotate by pressing R and rotate with the mouse And now let's add a, Story credit, For the page. Let's make this a little bit bigger. We're gonna write story by on the first line and then name on the second line. Let's make it 9 points so it's easier to read. Let's zoom out. The looks a little bit too prominent maybe we can make it subtle. So, select the text deactivate the all caps button. Head over to Type > Change Case > Title Case, and now it looks much better. We just need to bring the page folio out a little bit more, it seems too close to the content so that looks better. It's good to design our preliminary stories, so that way you know the size and the font that you want on the page. And also so you can place some of the elements around, and get an idea of what a regular story will look like. So now we're going to start doing the paragraph styles. For that, open the paragraph styles panel. So head over to Window > Styles > Paragraph Styles. Select the headline, we create a new style, double click on the paragraph style and you can check on the style setting subscription, all the specifics. So we have Bw Gradual, Black, size 36 points, leading 40 points and you want it to be all caps, and that is all already set up. Of course we can make further changes if we want to but for now we will just change the Style Name to Headline and click OK. We'll do the same for the intro, double click intro, just check that the style settings is correct and then click OK. For the first paragraph of the copy, we have to set up a separate character style and that's because we have a drop gap. The character style is only for one character rather than a whole paragraph. Head over to Windows > Styles > Character Styles. Select the Drop Cap and click on Create New Style. Double click on Character Style 1, change them to Drop Cap. Here we can change the character color to red if we want to and then click OK. Go back to the Paragraph Styles panel, click on Create New Style. Double-click and rename the Style Name to Copy- Drop Cap. In here on the Styles Settings description, make sure that there is a drop cab line and Drop Cap characters is set to 1. Click on the drop caps and this is cells from the left side menu. Under Character Style, select Drop Cap. So that will grab the character cell that we just created and attach it to this specific paragraph style, click OK. And to check if it works, just click on any of the other paragraphs. Click on the copy drop cap and we can see it's working perfect. So now we need to create another style for the actual regular copy without a drop cap. For this you need to click after the first paragraph so that way the new style doesn't grab the drop cap style. So click on the second or third paragraph, create new style. So they're telling them to copy regular and click OK, perfect. Let's create a pull quote style. Click OK, another style for photo caption, another style for a byline. And the last style, for a folio, perfect. If you design the same magazine every month, it's good to have an InDesign template where all of your paragraph styles and your layers and master pages are already set up. That template is going to make it easy for you to format the whole magazine quickly. On the next lesson, we will learn how to add color swatches and use the colors theme tool to grab color swatches often image. So I'll see you there