4.1 Table of Contents Part 1

Hi, everyone. In the next set of lessons, we're gonna tackle actually designing key components of our magazine. So, we're gonna start with our table of contents pages here. Now, this is the exact replica of what we're going to be creating in this lesson. Now, there's several ways that you can lay out your table of contents page, so this is just gonna show you how to think about laying this out, but know that you can have as much fun as you want to with the overall layout, this is just one option for you. So let's go ahead and get started here. This is the mock-up that we have, we're working from our regular template pages here, so I'm actually gonna go ahead and get rid of everything on this page, and we're going to recreate it. All right, so now we have a blank set of pages. Our table of contents comes first right after the cover, so we have our cover page here. So we are going to work on pages 2 and 3 of our magazine template to design this table of contents. Now, the table of contents can span across two spreads, like we're going to design today, or it could just be one page, it's entirely up to you. But let's go ahead and get started. So we're going to continue with our styles, and the theme that we have already developed in the previous set of lessons. We're just going to apply that to a table of contents layout. So the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to start dropping in our headlines, so it's going to be In This Issue. Now, you can use your character styles here if you want to, and that's the fastest way to drop all of this in, or you can create them on the fly, it's up to you. We're gonna bold this, and we're gonna move this over into the top section. If you want to use layers you can always move back and forth between your text objects and photos, if you want to keep all of that straight. So from here we're going to drag out those colored boxes for our features. Now this is gonna be different depending on the actual content of your magazine, so we're just gonna be using some standard text to fill in here, but it's up to you what that content is actually gonna be. So we're just gonna create three boxes down the side and we'll move these in just a second. And then, this one, we're gonna make a teal color. This one, we're gonna make this lighter color. And this one, we are gonna make a gray color. All right? Okay, and these are gonna be what our headlines are. So we're gonna start dragging out some text here. And I'm just going to make this. A Futura, let's see, Futura, just a regular Futura, here we go. And, we can make this a little bit smaller. And we're gonna make all of these white, because this is the text headers that is gonna fit on top of our boxes here. So this needs to be about 20. Once we get this first one set up then we can duplicate this for the other ones. So, that could be a little bit smaller. Okay. And then I'm just going to Alt+Shift, drag down for my other header here, and this one is a lifestyle header. The neat thing about your table of contents is that all of this, once you drop this in, is going to remain the same throughout all of the rest of your issues, so you're not gonna have to redesign this every time, which is really nice. You just set it up once and then you're just, basically, gonna be changing out what is on each page, is all, and then the photos that maybe go with it. But essentially that's all you will be changing out. Okay, so once we have that, then we can drop in our actual content here. So we need to make that a lot smaller, and again, go to our Futura. And this is what's gonna be on your pages, so with that, we just want this to be a black text here. Then you would tab in, and this is just going to be content, so I'm just going to fill this with some placeholder text for now, but I just want a couple of lines of that. We do not want it capitalized. And I'm gonna drop this to two lines. Tab in. Okay. And then I'm just gonna duplicate this three times for our, zoom in here a little so you can see it, I'm just duplicating this three times just for placeholder for right now, and then just picking some random page numbers for the moment. This would actually correspond with real situations for you. But this is gonna work for the purpose of this tutorial and then I'm just gonna duplicate this for each of our sections here, and then copy, just for some variety, say there's four features here and then our technology section goes back to three. Oops. And then I'm just moving this up. Wanna make sure that everything stays in our margins here, and then move across to our Arts & Culture page. And that has three sections as well. Okay. So now that we have this in place we can go ahead and bring all of this in slightly so it doesn't take up as much room. I'm gonna line this up with our new text box here. So I'm just tweaking this slightly. Same thing here, we can make this a little bit smaller and then, move this over so it lines up. And it goes all the way to the edge so that it's cut. And we wanna make sure that these are lined up the same visually, and that's really important when you're designing, and it's something that I've reinforced a lot, is that you just wanna carry out your styles as much as possible. And if you can't do this by eye you can always drag out a guide here and that'll make sure that all of these end up being the same across. All right, so something like that. Okay, so now that we've placed in our content, and there's a reason why, because it makes it so much easier to drop in photos. Now we have a lot of white space here, so we can see where photos can go and I'm actually gonna line this up exactly. There we go. So now we can see where we have some opportunity for white space here. So the next step is to bring in photos. Now, I always have my photos ready to go in a separate folder here. That way it's easy to drag and drop them into our document. So I'm gonna do that now and I'm just gonna scale down and start placing these photos where I think they would look good. And I'm gonna crop this down, actually. Okay, so put that one there. Then we have another one here that'll go into this white space. So we're just sort of sizing it to fit right now. See what we have. And then we have another one for the bigger white space. That one's gonna fit in here. I'm going to crop it a little bit on her. Move that up there, and then we have another one between Technology and Arts & Culture. I'm just cropping it a little bit, and that one is gonna go right there. All right, so then we're gonna take and just move all of this slightly over so that we have more room. So that fits a little better. Okay, now one thing that I'm gonna show you is, you can leave your images like so, where they're just hard edges, and I'm just holding Ctrl+Shift to make that feel better. So you can leave it just like this, or you can have a little fun with these corners by going to object corner options and you can round out select corners. You can round out all of them, or you can round out just a few and have a little bit of fun. So if we wanna round out, say this bottom left corner, we just select that and hit Rounded, and it'll give it an interesting shape. And we can do that with all of these other ones. And say for this one we're gonna round the bottom left corner and the upper right corner and leave the other ones. See? It creates kind of a fun little shape here. And then we're gonna do the opposite, and do the same thing actually. Do the same thing here, and there, and these are gonna be rounded again. See? So just create some fun shapes. And then with this one we'll do the opposite. We'll do the top left and the lower right rounded. All right, see? So in very time at all, that took about 11 minutes we have a left design for a table of contents and then you can go ahead and fill in your actual content as you need to. So we're gonna come back in part two of this and we'll tackle the right side.