4.8 Placing and Sizing Up Ads

Hi everyone. In this lesson I am going to help you deconstruct ad placement in your magazine. Now ads are, still to this day, such a huge source of revenue for any magazine production. So it's important to understand how the sizes work for the size of your magazine. So the template that I'm giving you here today fits the size of the magazine throughout this entire course, but the principles behind it can be applied to any size magazine that you have, which is great. And this is going to be included as a source file for you to download and just reference. To give you an idea of how to break out these sizes for your magazine ads. Now a few things to keep in mind, these are just standard sizes that magazines offer. Standard size meaning we have a full page, a half page and a quarter page. So you can always offer more or less depending on what your situation is. But this will get you started in some of those standard sizes that people are looking for when they are looking to place ads. Okay. So let's take a look here. What do we have? Well, over here on the left, I have broken out a full page, a quarter page, a half page vertical and a half page horizontal for you. Now these boxes are not to scale. They're based on, actually, this size of this full page ad and then the size around that for your other ads, all of these were broken out based on the actual width and height of this box. So that's just a scale for you to get you thinking about how to break this up. Now, the sizes over here on the right actually are based on our magazine size. So that is the page here. This is in our magazine template. So, these sizes are based on that, and I'll show you this in action. Okay, so first off let's take a look at this full page ad. Now full page is pretty simple. It's just the full scale that you have of your page. But you'll notice that there are three different sizes that we offer here for full page. We have the bleed size, which is going to be this entire page all the way around to the red line. So what I'm going to do to visually show you guys how this works, is I'm just going to start creating boxes that are based on these sizes so you see how they fit on the page. And then in a real life situation, you would just be dropping in actual ads that fit into this. So the first one, if we were gonna have a full page bleed, and this is gonna be a very common full page. This may be on your front inside cover. It may be on your back page entirely or anytime throughout. If you're gonna have a full page ad, more than likely it's gonna have a full bleed. It has the best impact if you do this. So that is going to be 8.51 inches by 11.94 inches. And if we hit OK, then we get this rectangle, and if I drag this out to fit, it fits right there on the bleed line. Okay? And it has a little bit extra over here. As you can see it hangs off on the right a little bit. But that's just because you're thinking there's going to be a bleed on the left as well, and that is true if you're on the back page. So if I take this really quick and copy this and we scroll all the way down to the back page and I paste this here, it will fit. See, right on that back page, perfectly. But if you're working on an inside page, you're not gonna have that bleed on the right or the left. Depending on which side. So you can go ahead and take it over to the right, or take it over a little bit on the left. So that it lines up with that line right there. Okay, now I am working in inches here. You can easily convert this online just by converting it to a metric system if you want to. So, this shouldn't be too hard to use these inches. And if you wonder where this bleed came in. All that is is going into Document Setup, seeing what our width and our height is. Okay, and seeing we have an eighth of an inch bleed all the way around. So the width is determined by adding 0.25 inches or a quarter inch, to the width, and a quarter inch to the height. These two combine, these two combine. That's how you get your bleed size. The trimmed area is what your actual width and height of your document is without the bleed, and the live area is the dimension in this margin that we have. So, you'll notice that our half page and quarter page is actually based on the live area measurement, because those ads do not have a bleed. More than likely your full page ad is going to go to a bleed. If you want a full page ad to hit the live area, however, that is quite possible too. All you have to do with that is give your client those dimensions for the live area and you'll see when you drop the ad in it fits perfectly into that margin. And now your ad does not go all the way to the edge, it has a white border around it. All right. And for your half page ad you have two options. You have a horizontal here and a vertical. So with that, this is based again, the horizontal ad, the width remains the same as the live area. So it's this to here. So that's 7.26 inches in our case. However the height is half of the overall height of the full page live area. So that's how we got 5.325 inches. And again to see that in action, we're just going to type that in, and then we get a half page ad. So we have a half page fit here, and if you want you can have two half page ads, and if you do that I would just encourage you to add just a little bit of space between the two, so you get something like that. So, that's two half page ads on our document. If you were going to place a vertical ad, it's the same thing. However, this time, this wide area width for your full page is divided by two and then your height is the same. You're not actually doing anything with your height because you're cutting this in half vertically. So if we're gonna place that ad, we have 3.63 by 10.69 and that will create a half page vertical ad that fits into the live area, and together they create a full page. And again, just to give it a little bit more space if you were to place two vertical ads next to each other, more than likely you would have this scenario, a vertical ad over here and then some text maybe that comes across the page there. And then finally you have your quarter page ad. Now your quarter page ad is the same width as your vertical half page ad. But your height again is divided in half. So to see that in action, we just have to change the height here. And then we get a vertical ad. And again, if you were to duplicate this four times, you should equal up to that full page ad. And again if you wanted to have ads that fit on the page like this, like kind of like a marketplace. Then I would just do something like that, to give yourself some white space between. Okay, so that is a look at how to create standard ads. Now if you have ads already to go to place, all that you have to do to place this into your document is go to File > Place, navigate to your ad, and then you would just drop it into your document. The other option, you could just drag it over from a folder, drag it and drop it here. Now one thing to see here on this ad, for example, is that it comes with a bunch of crop marks. This may happen to you. The nice thing about InDesign is you can bring your lines in. You can crop those out by bringing in the corners of all sides, and you can crop those out, and it should still, if it's sized correctly, fit. Make this fit. Sometimes you have to get a little creative. And if there's enough margin space in your ad, you can do what I'm doing here, which is, essentially, making it fit into the size, because it was not made to fit our magazine exactly. But you can see that, with a little finagling, because there was enough room around the outside, that it does fit a full page bleed. But that is one way that you can drop those ads in. And like I said, if you have enough room on your margins, then it's an easy way to drop it into play. So that is a look at how to figure out, for your media kits, for your magazines, how to create three standard sizes for your ads, and how to determine what those sizes actually are.