From the course: InDesign Secrets
144 Lay out a front back and spine for a book jacket - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
144 Lay out a front back and spine for a book jacket
Making a book cover has long been a pain in any page layout program. It's not the front or the back cover that's difficult, but rather the combination of front, back, and most importantly, the spine of the cover. And one of the reasons why it's so hard is that you often don't know exactly how wide the spine will be until the very last minute. Fortunately, InDesign makes this process much easier, as long as you set your document up correctly. So, let me show you how to set up a brand new front, back, and spine for a book. I'll go to the File menu and choose New > Document. I'm going to set the Number of Pages to 3. That's the back cover of the spine and the front cover. And I'm going to leave Facing Pages turned on. Next, I'll set the size of the book cover. Let's set this to seven inches by nine inches for example. I'm not going to worry about columns or margins right now, but I am going to open the Bleed and Slug area and I'm going to set a bleed area to, let's say, p9. When I hit Tab, all four fields change because this little link icon is turned on. Now I'll turn on the Preview check box, which is available in InDesign CC, and I can see a preview of my document behind the dialog box. So I can see if I got it right. Now, I only see page one right now. I can't see the other pages. We'll take care of that in just a minute. But I can see that that's looking pretty good, so I'll click OK and move on. Now let's open the Pages Panel and we can see that's where my other two pages went. They're on a separate spread. That doesn't help us. We want all three pages on the same spread and there's various ways to do that, but I find the easiest way to do it is to go to the Pages Panel menu and turn off the Allow Document Pages to Shuffle feature. When that's on, all the pages will always shuffle into spreads. But when it's turned off, you can actually put your pages where you want them. In this case, I'm going to move page one down simply by dragging it until I see this thick black line that looks kind of like a bracket, next to page two. When I let go, InDesign moves the page there, so I now have a three-page spread. Now, if this were the Encyclopedia Britannica and it were eight inches wide, then I'd be pretty much done. But in most books, that's not the case. You want the spine, this middle page, to be more narrow. To do that, you want the Page tool, which is the third tool in the Tool panel. After you click it, make sure the middle page is selected. Just click once on it and you'll see little highlights around it with these corner and side handles. Now, I can change the width of this page to anything I want. For example, I'll go over to the Width Field in the Control Panel and I'll change it to, say, 0.75 inches. But when I hit Return or Enter, I have a problem. InDesign alerts me that the page size won't fit because the margins are too big. That's right. All of these have three pica margins, so that's getting in my way. I'll click OK, and while this page is still selected, I'll go to the Layout menu and chose Margins and Columns, and now, I can change the inside and outside margin just for the single page. I'll just set it to 0. When I click OK, you'll see that I still have a top and a bottom margin, but I don't have any margins on the left and right. Now I can go back and change the width one more time. I'll set it to, say, 0.75 inches, and then hit Return or Enter, and you'll see that the page size became more narrow. And because I had set this up as facing pages, the other pages automatically snap, so I have no gaps between them. Let's recenter this page spread in the window by pressing Cmd+Option+0 or Ctrl+Alt+0. And then, I'm going to start designing my page. For example, I might just make a text frame and say Encyclopedia of Art or whatever you want to call it, and I will make it a little bigger with keyboard shortcuts. I'll go ahead and make this not quite so high, and I'll rotate it. You get the idea. I'm going to drop it on my spine, center it on there, and that looks pretty good. Obviously, if you are really designing a cover, you do a lot more work, but I'm going to leave it right there and leave the rest up to your imagination. But I do want to point out that when you're done and just before you go to press, your printer is going to say, you need to change the spine to and they'll tell you how wide it should be. Let's say it was 0.81 inches instead. So, to do that, one more time you go to the Page tool, make sure you have the center page selected, and then go up to the Width field and change it to exactly the size you want. When you do that however, make sure you have the reference point, this little feature in the left side of the Control Panel. Make sure that it's set to the center point of the reference point. That way, when you change the width, everything will get centered. It won't move to the left or right. So, that's set. I'll change my width to 0.81 inches, hit Return or Enter, and everything changes on the page just perfectly. Now, technically you could add the rest of the book, you know, all the other pages of your book here in this InDesign document, but I don't like doing that. I like keeping this as a separate InDesign document. And the main reason I do that is because of how I export this to PDF or print. Let me show you. I'll go to the File menu and choose Export. I'll give it a name. I'll call this my cover and then click Save. And here inside the Export Adobe PDF dialog box, I'm going to turn on the Spreads radio button. Instead of Pages, I want Spreads. That tells InDesign to keep all those pages together, the back cover, the front cover, and the spine all treated as a single spread, a single page, in the final PDF. I need that for the cover. I would not want that for the rest of the book. That would be a disaster. But in the cover, I need to export as spreads. Then I'll go to Marks and Bleeds, and I can turn on some printer marks like crop marks. Also, if I did have any objects bleeding off the side of the page, I'd want to make sure I turned on the Use Document Bleed Settings feature. Let's go back to General. I'll make sure View PDF after Exporting is turned on and then I'll click Export. You can see that InDesign exported this PDF and opened it in Acrobat and I get those crop marks not just in the corners, but also fold marks right where I want them, right where the pages end. That's the spine, and that's what my printer's going to want to see. As you can see, so much of being efficient in InDesign is all about setting up your document right from the start, but using that Page tool at the right time and the right way also really helps.
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Contents
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229 Batch converting ID files to current version with the Book panel6m 9s
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230 Getting around InDesign limitations6m 46s
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231 Creating better callout lines with effects and object styles5m 47s
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232 Swapping column and row information in tables6m 9s
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233 Making bigger text link targets4m 52s
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161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items3m 55s
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162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text3m 50s
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163 Make a pop-up footnote for your ebook3m 48s
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164 Deleting tabs at the beginning of paragraphs and applying a paragraph style3m 10s
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165 Five InDesign Presentation tips6m 28s
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111 Packaging images on the pasteboard3m 32s
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112 Automatically updating figure references for books6m 9s
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113 Adding Tool Tips to your form fields in InDesign3m 21s
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114 Setting poetry, flush left, center on longest line3m 54s
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115 Use bookmarks to navigate long documents in production4m 57s
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107 Using the same keyboard shortcut for two different commands with the Context feature5m 22s
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108 Making a text highlighter3m 33s
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109 Updating an interactive PDF without losing work done in Acrobat5m 30s
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110 Adding custom text at the beginning of each line automatically4m
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089 Three great Object Styles for any designer8m 1s
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090 Choosing alpha channel image transparency2m 25s
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091 Adding and reading metadata for InDesign files3m 25s
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092 Adding ALT tags to your images6m 59s
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093 How to Place & Link a text frame's text but not its formatting7m 4s
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094 Setting the baseline position of a caption2m 39s
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051 Five things that should be in every new file5m 19s
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052 Forcing EPUB page breaks with invisible objects6m 21s
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053 Understanding component information6m 39s
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054 Creating running heads using section markers4m 16s
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055 Making a font with InDesign using the IndyFont script5m 20s
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056 Finding where that color is used7m 17s
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047 Specifying an exact amount of space between objects5m 17s
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048 Fixing last lines that are too short8m 16s
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049 Creating web graphics from your InDesign artwork7m 20s
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050 Using “No Language” to suppress unwanted hyphenation, spell-checking, and smart quotes2m 48s
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037 Updating a linked table without losing formatting5m 18s
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038 Creating electronic sticky notes4m 49s
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039 Moving master page items to the top layer for visibility2m 48s
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040 Five guide tricks that will impress your coworkers6m 18s
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041 Letting InDesign add the diacritics4m 21s
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042 Using single-cell table cells for custom paragraph formatting6m 2s
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027 Creating running heads using variables5m 1s
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028 Live Caption tips and tricks8m 3s
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029 Making professional drop caps10m 37s
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030 Making two-state buttons in interactive documents5m 5s
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031 Moving pages from one document to another3m 15s
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032 Wrapping bulleted text around a curve5m 58s
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007 Selecting through and into objects using cmd-click and Select Above/Below5m 46s
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008 Some great tips and tricks for the Swatches panel9m 40s
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009 Saving down for backward compatibility with INX and IDML5m 54s
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010 Using the INX and IDML formats to fix problems4m 46s
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