1. How to Create a Professional Magazine Layout Handout-16

3. Here’re step by step details how professional designers strike a perfect balance between text and image Using InDesign's powerful tools, you will learn techniques to help you set and arrange a magazine layout

4. Step 1 Setting up the Document A standard A4 size document will be used for this tutorial Start with setting the number of pages to 8, the bleed to 2 mm, so we have some space for images to overlap, the margins to 10 mm for top and bottom, the inside margin to 13 mm and the outside margin to 20 mm The reason for these different margins is that in a spread with 2 pages a slightly larger margin on the outside of the page looks better and provides space to hold the printed version. It is also useful for the page grid in the next step

6. 1. Trim is where the product will be cut 2. Bleed is the zone outside the trim area 3. Margin is the zone inside the trim area.

7. Bleed (printing) Bleed is a printing term that refers to printing that goes beyond the edge of the sheet before trimming. In other words, the bleed is the area to be trimmed off Artwork and background colors can extend into the bleed area. After trimming, the bleed ensures that no unprinted edges occur in the final trimmed document It is very difficult to print exactly to the edge of a sheet of paper/card so, to achieve this, it is necessary to print a slightly larger area than is needed and then trim the paper/card down to the required finished size

8. Step 2 Creating a Grid To set up the page grid, go to the "A-Master Spread" and choose Layout > Create Guides A grid is used to keep consistency in the page layout and provides a framework for positioning content Here, we're going to use a 12 rows by 12 columns grid with 3 mm spacing Choose Fit Guides to Margins to create a grid with a column width of 12 mm. Because our page width is 210 mm, with 20 mm outside and 13 mm inside margins we have 177 mm left for 12 columns and 11 gutters (Gutter is the space between columns of printed text, including the gap between facing pages). 12 columns of 12 mm plus 11 gutters of 3 mm is 177 mm

10. Step 3 Placing a Background Strike a good balance between the white space, images and text A good technique is to use an image with a lot of 'empty' space; space around the subject has the same function as white space Here, the photograph used has a nice blurry background that can be used for placing text Go to page 2–3 and place your photograph in the bleed space so that the entire spread is covered. Move the photograph in the frame so that the subject is within the margin of the first page and the top of the cocktail is at the edge of a grid row

12. Step 4 Creating Body Text Make a text frame that is placed at the same vertical and horizontal position as the cocktail on the other page, here in the third row, fifth column of the grid This creates a imaginary line that connects the image with the text Title of the photograph is 'Summertime Sunshine’, which is also the heading Rest of the frame has been filled with the "Fill with placeholder text" function of InDesign

14. Step 5 Setting up a Baseline Grid To make the text look good we need to set up a baseline grid Go to the Preferences > Grids and set an Increment Every to 8 pt In this tutorial, a text size of 12 pts and a leading of 16 pts have been used A baseline grid of 8 pts, which is half the leading, provides flexibility because we can also use it for smaller text sizes

16. Step 6 Changing the Basic Paragraph Style Go to the paragraph styles palette and change the style of the Basic Paragraph Here FF Meta Book Roman has been used with a size of 12 pt and a leading of 16 pt You can also leave the leading at the auto setting because our baseline grid will make sure all the text is nicely aligned

18. Step 7 Alignment Go to Indents and Spacing and set the Alignment to Left Justify On the web, good looking justified text is almost impossible to achieve, but InDesign makes it very easy to do Also, change the Align to Grid setting to All Lines, and add 16 pts of space after a paragraph This is not necessary and you can also use First Line Indent for separating the paragraphs

20. Step 8 Hyphenation Hyphenation is very important for justified text It breaks up long words at the end of a column so that the column has a straight edge instead of containing a large amount of gaps The default hyphenation settings in InDesign need some adjusting to improve the look of our body text Here the settings has been changed to use hyphenation only for words with at least 6 letters, and after the first and before the last 3 letters The hyphen limit sets how many lines in a row can have a hyphen on the end You should disable the checkboxes for Capitalised Words and Last Word

22. Step 9 Justification By default, the justification settings are a bit too loose Set the word spacing to a minimum of 85% and the maximum to 105% This way the words don't have large or small gaps between them For letter spacing, set the minimum to -2% and the maximum to 2% This improves the justification a lot

24. Step 10 Text Colour In this tutorial, white has been used as the colour for the text because of the dark background Choose what looks best but keep the text readable

26. Step 11 Text Columns Open the Text Frame Options with right click on the text frame and change the columns to a number of 2 with a 3 mm gutter This way the line length is reduced and the readability increases

28. Step 12 Heading For the heading, we want to use a larger text size of 42 pts and a negative tracking value of -50 to decrease the spacing between the letters Headlines can often benefit from tracking adjustment

30. Step 13 Span Columns A new function in InDesign CS5 is the possibility for a paragraph to span across columns We're going to use that here to make the heading span across both the columns of the text frame Set the Paragraph Layout to Span Columns and Span to All

32. Step 14 Heading Adjustments Because of the tracking adjustment, the letters "r" and "t" are touching each other now This is something you want to avoid in general To solve this, set the kerning (The adjustment of space between letters) to 75 between the letters which creates enough space to separate them

34. Step 15 Optical Margin Alignment The last thing you will have to do is a small setting in InDesign's Story palette: Optical Margin Alignment This pushes the hyphens, quotation marks and wide characters such as the W and A outside the text frame This increases the look of the edges Click on the text frame, enable Optical Margin Alignment and set the value to the size of the body text

36. Conclusion You have now learnt to create a simple, but well balanced page with good typography and use of white space You have the basics set up for a consistent magazine layout