From the course: Designing a Poster

Setting up the document in InDesign

From the course: Designing a Poster

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Setting up the document in InDesign

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- [Instructor] In this project I'm going to show you how we can make a poster of two letter Scrabble words. I'm using this as an example of a collection poster. Maybe you collect something and you want to make a poster of that thing. This type of poster is going to be more than the sum of its parts. Any one of those individual items might not be very impressive, but when you see a whole array of them, then it makes a big impression. I'm using two letter Scrabble words. As a king Scrabble player, I thought this was an interesting idea. There are 124 permissible two letter Scrabble words and this is a list of them. For this, I'm going to use InDesign. I'm using InDesign because of its paragraph styles and because of its object styles, and because of a feature that we're just about to see called gridify. First of all, I'll create a new document. I'm using an A3 size document. You may prefer to use a tabloid or 11 by 17 document, which is a standard size in the U.S. I'm going to have three pica, or half inch, or 36 points, or 12.7 millimeters. Whatever unit you're in, these are the margins I'm going to have. In this case, I don't need a bleed 'cause I don't intend to print to the edge of the page. I'll turn off facing pages, not that that's going to make much difference since we are going to have just a single page. I want to create a grid of text frames, so I'm going to choose my type tool. I'm going to click and drag over my live area. I'm keeping my mouse held down. I'm now going to divide this text frame into 10 columns and 15 rows. It's five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, and that's pressing the right arrow. Now press the up arrow to divide it into rows. All the while, keep your mouse button held down. Then let go and we should now find that all of these text frames are threaded together. That is tremendously useful for our next step, which is to place into this sequence of threaded text frames the text file containing all of the two letter words. I'll just click into the first of them. Now they only go so far because at the moment, we have several filling each frame, but that is what we're going to address next with our keep option. I'm going to select the first of these. Triple click to select the whole line, including the invisible paragraph mark. Let's change the font. I want to use Helvetica here. If you don't have Helvetica, then use a simple Sans Serif type face. I'm using Helvetica bold and I'm going to increase the size to 36 points. I'm going to center it. Then, I'm going to come to my control panel and to keep options and say stop paragraph in next frame. Now click OK. Now I will save this as... a paragraph style. I'll just call it text. Click OK. Now press command A. That will select the whole story. I will apply that paragraph style to all of the text. We now see that we get one word per text frame. In the next movie, I'm going to consider the object styles, the appearance of each of these frames. We'll see a similar global approach to the formatting.

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