3.2 Headlines

Hi, everyone. Now headlines are going to be a bit tricky because there's so many different ways that you can format a headline. So what I'm gonna show you is just a few options to consider when you're thinking about laying out your headlines for your template, and then it's up to you. Creative freedom galore. So enjoy it. Now when we were working on our mast head in the last lesson, you can see that we already had a headline here. So we're gonna branch off of that, and headlines are exactly what they say. They're headlines, they headline an article. So as you're working through your magazines, these can take on various formats depending on your pages and your layouts. So don't think that just because you have a headline that looks like this that it has to be exactly like that on every single page. And I'll show you what I mean. So, say for example, we're going to take and just create A single article here. So it has its headline and everything. And then there would be supplemental text and images in this white space. But then we have another article on the right hand side. So one thing that I always do is I copy and paste when it's already been created. Because it just saves so much time, and it keeps that cohesive style together. So I'm just going to copy this and paste it over into this page. But we are going to do something different with this article, than we did with this article. But we're still going to keep the same colors and we're still going to keep the same fonts. One thing that you can do though, is you can vary how those are laid out and the sizes to create some visual interest in your headlines. Now, before I continue, I'm going to create a character style. And you can see there's one already here. So, as your working through selecting your fonts and your colors and your placements, be sure to keep creating character styles. That way you can easily apply these as you work throughout your document. So once you have a font choice chosen, I have League Gothic here. 60 point front, regular style, and we do have some spacing of 50. You can easily create a character style, by going over to your character style pallet and saying New Character Style. Now this already exists, so I'm just going to double-click on this. Then you want to make sure that you name it something that's easy to recognize. So in this case its an H1 Headline, meaning it's our biggest headline. From there, we go into our basic character formats, and it's saved all of our font choices. It saves the font, the style, the size and the leading. And then any other items that you want such as color. We want it to be orange. And any other settings that you want here for your character style. Once you're happy with it you hit okay. That way, say for example, we are starting from scratch, and we're just going to take a text box. And we're gonna have a new headline here. Now, it's already selected so let me undo that. Let me, I'm gonna click none in my character style. So we're gonna start really anew with a new headline. Okay, very basic font here, no styling whatsoever. Make sure that this is selected then hit headline one. And there you go. Now all of the sudden I have a new headline that matches the look and feel of our style. So I can place this anywhere on the page, and now I have a new headline. Now what if you want to vary it a little bit? There's several ways that you can tweak this once you have the main style applied. For example, you can vary your size a little bit and it keeps the style very similar to what we have going on. But it just creates something slightly different than our previous headline. Especially if we're not gonna have a mast head on here, we're just gonna work with a giant headline. That's one way to do it. Okay, see so now you have a new headline. And then you would drop in, and I'm just gonna show you really quickly. You would drop in some supplemental text here. I'm gonna fill with placeholder. Create three columns. And now we have a brand new article with very little effort. Now obviously you would style this a little bit more and play with placement a little bit. But that's one way to get one headline that we've already styled into a brand new style headline. Now another thing is you may want to copy over your dots. And line those up like so. And it can go all the way off the page or it could just go and line up with our text there, for example. So, that just kind of carries over those design elements that we originally set into a brand new article. And then you can continue to style this article however you want. Now, I'm gonna show you how to style four different articles, in the next set of lessons. So this is just to show you how to create a headline and vary that from our original. And from there if you want, you can even change the color of this to stick with our sort of orange and gray. But don't be afraid to change it up entirely. It doesn't have to match two colors. You can add another color in there if you want to. So once you get this laid out, you can start to see some design options for you. And then just feel free to play with your headlines. Vary the sizes. Vary the colors. Vary the placement. But make sure that you stick to some sort of cohesive style. Meaning, you tend to create design elements and you transfer them across like we did here with the dotted lines. We also have the same font as we did from original headline. We're not going to stray from that. You don't want to have too many fonts going on. So you can have some variety in your layout, but you're also keeping some of that cohesive style through your headlines from article to article.