by Chad Neuman

This is part 5 of 5. Be sure to follow along from part 1.

Step One
Open the newspaperlayout.indd we created in part 1, 2, 3, and 4. Open the Pages palette and double-click on page 2 icon to navigate to the first page.

Step Two
Delete the title text, “Rabbit Runs Across Street Downtown” from the top of the article on page 2 and using the Text tool, click-and-drag  a text box across the top of the page. Enter the title text, “Rabbit Runs Across Street Downtown” across the top and apply the “title” style to it by clicking it in the Paragraph Styles palette. Change the font size in the Control palette to 29.

Step Three
Click-and-drag the top of the bounding border boxes of the columns so that they fill the page. Align then with a ruler guide.

Step Four
Select the “By Jane Smith” and change the alignment to Center up on the Control palette and remove the first line indent on the Paragraph palette.

Step Five
Repeat steps 2 to 4 for the third page, adding the title and changing the alignment and indent of the byline.

Step Six
Repeat steps 2 to 4 for the fourth page, adding the title and changing the alignment and indent of the byline.

Step Seven
Adjust the tracking by setting the Tracking up on the Control palette to -10 or +10 where there is awkward spacing, such as not enough spacing between words or too much space between words.

Step Eight
Navigate to page 2 and click-and-drag a text box using the Text tool off to the side of the page. Let’s create a pull quote for this article. Enter the text, “I saw the rabbit run and I ran after it. –Jane Reed.” Enter a Return after the “run” and “it.” Select the text and apply the “captions” style by clicking on it in the Paragraph Styles palette. Change the font to 24 points.

Step Nine
Select the Rectangle tool.

Step Ten
Let’s add rounded rectangle behind the text for it to be set off from the article. Click-and-drag a rectangle over the text box. Change the Fill color by double-clicking on it at the bottom of the toolbar and change it to Black. Change the Stroke to None by clicking on it and then selecting None in the Swatches palette.

Step Eleven
Open the Color palette and change the percentage of the black fill color and change the percentage to 20%.

Step Twelve
With the rectangle selected, go to Object>Corner Options. Change the Effect to Rounded and the Size to 2p0. Click OK.

Step Thirteen
With the rectangle selected, go to Object>Arrange>Send Backward. This will put it behind the text of the pull quote. Click-and-drag around both objects with the Selection tool and go to Object>Group.

Step Fourteen
With the pull quote selected, open the Text Wrap palette and apply the third option, the Wrap around object shape option. Once we click-and-drag the pull quote onto the story, we see that we need to make the pull quote smaller since the story doesn’t fit on the page with the pull quote on it. Be sure to change the text in the pull quote to a smaller font by selecting it by going to Edit>Select All after clicking in the pull quote with the Text tool.

Step Fifteen
Place “kelly.jpg” onto page 3 and place “car lot.jpg” onto page 4 by going to File>Place. Remember to resize the photos by holding down Cmd (PC: Ctrl) first and then clicking-and-dragging a corner bounding box. Hold Shift to maintain proportion. Let go of the mouse first before letting go of either key. Apply a Text Wrap by clicking on the third option on the Text Wrap palette and resize the photos so they cause the article to fill up the page. Remember to enter a Return after a sentence if the lines need to be moved down. This is what pages 1-4 should look like.

We’ve completed laying out some articles, using paragraph styles, pull quotes, resized and cropped photos, text wraps, and various layout considerations. You should be now be familiar with the basics of laying out a newspaper, white space considerations, consistency, and alignment. Feel free to print this as a PDF by going to File>Print and changing the printer to PDF. You can then add it to your layout portfolio.

Optional:
Here’s a copy of my newspaper layout.

by Chad Neuman

This is part 4 of 5. Be sure to follow along from part 1.

Step One
Open the newspaperlayout.indd we created in part 1, 2, and 3. Open the Pages palette and double-click on page 1 icon to navigate to the first page.

Step Two
Now we need to add titles to the articles. The default titles for the articles are in the first line of each article, so we’ll need to remove them from there and put it above the articles. Navigate to the top of the page by using the Hand tool (hold down the Spacebar and click-and-drag if the Selection tool is selected by default). With the Text tool, click-and-drag a text box across the top of the article.

Step Three
Type in the text: “Committee Meeting Suspended Until Tuesday.” Remove the same text line from the beginning of the article. With the Text tool, click anywhere in the title and go to Edit>Select All to select the text. Click the “title” style in the Paragraph Styles palette to apply the style.

Step Four
With the text of the title still selected, change the text size to 24 points up on the Control palette. This has the text run across the top without going too far to go off the page or text box. In newspaper headings, sometimes it’s centered, but it’s pretty standard to have it left-justified and run all the way across the story.

Step Five
Next, let’s enter a subtitle. Click-and-drag a text box below the title and enter this text: “County Committee Asks for Time to Decide on Electrical Power Issues.” Apply the “title” style by clicking on it in the Paragraph Styles palette after selecting all the text with the Text tool. Change the font size to 15.5 in the Control palette.

Step Six
Now let’s format the byline in a different style that the rest of the body text. Select it with the Text tool by clicking-and-dragging over “By Alice Stugall.” It’s automatically justified, so change it to center by clicking the Center justify in the Control palette at the top of the screen. Next, click the Paragraph palette and change the first line indent from 2p0 to 0p0 to remove the indent.

Step Seven
Next, let’s move the text boxes of the article to the top so they fill the entire page. Click-and-drag the top borders of the text boxes and drag them to just below the subtitle. They aren’t perfectly aligned yet. The page should look something like this.

Step Eight
Now we need to align the lines of text. Zoom into the document and click-and-drag a ruler guide by clicking-and-dragging from the top ruler. If the ruler is not showing, to go View>Show Rulers. Drag the ruler guide just below the first line of text. Use the keyboard arrows to move the text columns up and down after selecting them with the Selection tool to align the columns.

Step Nine
Next, let’s insert the photo for this story. Go to File>Place and select “construction.jpg” and click Open. To resize placed images in InDesign, be sure to hold Cmd (PC: Ctrl) before clicking on the corner of the bounding box of the image. Click-and-drag the corner to resize it, and be sure to hold Shift to maintain proportion. Release the mouse button before letting go of either keys. Resize it to about this size.

Step Ten
Let’s crop out part of the sky in this photo. To crop, don’t hold any keys, but just click-and-drag with the Selection tool the top of the bounding box and drag it down.

Step Eleven
Next, let’s add a caption. We don’t want to add a text wrap yet to the photo, because then the caption would be pushed away from the photo. Move the photo off the document area by clicking-and-dragging it with the Selection tool. Click-and-drag with the Text tool a text box right below the photo. Be sure to keep all elements at least one pica apart, so don’t let it be flush to the photo. Type in this text: “The committee plans to talk about the electrical power imact of the new condominiums.” Click the “caption” style in the Paragraph Styles palette to apply this style to the caption.

Step Twelve
Next, we need to add a text wrap to the photo and the caption together. With the Selection tool, click-and-drag around both the photo and the caption. Go to Object>Group to make the two items one group. With the group selected, open the Text Wrap palette and click the third option, Wrap around an object shape.

Step Thirteen
With the Selection tool, click-and-drag the photo and caption group onto the top right corner of the article. The article will wrap around it. If you want more of the sky showing to push the text to avoid blank spaces along the bottom just click-and-drag the top bounding box border with the Selection tool. The text in the two right-most columns may be unaligned vertically with the other ones, so try clicking-and-dragging the top bounding box border of those two columns so they are below the caption. Then use a ruler guide to adjust and align the columns.

Step Fourteen
If you have an extra line of space at the end, try adding a Return after a sentence to start a new paragraph somewhere it would make sense. This is acceptable in news stories in order for the article to fit the area. The first page should look something like this. Save this file as “newspaperlayout.indd” for the next tutorial in this series. We’ll cover how to avoid awkward spacing in article columns by using tracking as well as adding pull quotes in the next tutorial.

by Chad Neuman

This is part 3 of 5. Be sure to follow along with the support files from part 1.

Step One
Open the newspaperlayout.indd we created in part 1 and 2. Open the Pages palette and double-click on page 1 icon to navigate to the first page.

Step Two
Let’s place the first article on page one. Go to File>Place and select “article1.doc” from the support files and click Open. Be sure Replace Selected Item is unchecked, in case you have an object selected, it won’t replace it.

Step Three
The cursor will turn into an icon which previews the beginning of the text that is about to be placed. We could place the text by clicking-and-dragging, but instead of that, let’s just click once about one fifth from the top of the first page in the left-most column. The text will be place within the column and run down automatically to the bottom of the page.

Step Four
Near the bottom of the first column, there should be a small red cross. This is telling us that there’s more text within that document that isn’t showing because the text box is smaller that the placed document.

Step Five
We want the text to flow from the bottom of the column to the top of the next column. Click the red cross and the cursor will turn into the icon again. Navigate to the top of the page by using the scroll bars and click near the top of the page again, this time in the second column. It should look something like this.

Step Six
Repeat this process until all five columns have text in them. The text naturally flows from one column to another, so if you insert text in one column it’ll push the text to the next column. If you delete sentences or paragraphs, it moves columns back to the left. For now, the first page should look something like this.

Step Seven
If you notice, there’s indents already applied within the document. (All these documents are from Alice in Wonderland, a public domain text available to use without having to deal with copyright). We need to remove those tabbed indents, since we will apply the first line indent by applying the paragraph style. Many times, writers will submit stories with indents already applied, even though it’s preferable to not have any indents. With the Text tool, click at the beginning of each paragraph and delete the tabbed indents. All the text should be flush to the left for now.

Step Eight
Next, let’s apply the Paragraph style to the article. With the Text tool, click anywhere in the placed document. Go to Edit>Select All (Or press Option-A (PC: Alt-A) to select all the text. Open the Paragraph Styles Palette and click on “body text” style to apply it to the article. The font style, size, and justification will change.

Step Nine
We’re going to add titles, photos, captions and pull quotes later. For now, let’s place all the articles. Navigate to the second page by either using the scroll bars or double-clicking on Page 2’s icon in the Pages palette. Place “article2.doc” by going to File>Place and clicking in the left-most column again.

Step Ten
Repeat the process from step four by clicking on the red cross near the bottom of the first column and then clicking at the top of the second column. Click near the bottom of the second column and place into the third column, and repeat this until all five columns have text. It should look something like this. Note: all the text in the article may not be showing, as it may be too long for all five columns currently. That’s fine—we’ll adjust the article later. Remove the indents to the beginning of each paragraph.

Step Eleven
Go to File>Place and place “article3.doc” onto page 3, and flow the text across all columns, following the same steps 3 to 6. Repeat this process and go to File>Place and place “article4.doc” onto page 4 and flow the text into each column, using the same steps 3 to 6. Next, select all the text on page 2 by clicking in it with the Text tool and going to Edit>Select All and apply the “body text” style by clicking on it in the Paragraph Styles palette. Apply the same style to the articles on pages 3 and 4. Pages 2 and 3 should look something like this, with the style applied.

Don’t worry if the columns are a little higher or lower, we’ll fix this in the next section of the tutorial as we add other elements. Save the file as newspaperlayout.indd for use in the next part.

by Chad Neuman

This is part 2 of 5. Be sure to download the support files and follow along from part 1.

Step One
Open the newspaperlayout.indd we created in part 1. We could place each article in and then change the font size, style, paragraph indent and justification one at a time. But we can make the process of changing these text attributes much quicker by using paragraph styles. In newspaper layouts, you want a consistent style across the publication. Creating this style ahead of time saves time when you want the various stories to be the same size and justification. Open the Paragraph Styles palette and click the New Paragraph Style at the bottom of the palette. This will create a Paragraph Style 1.

Step Two
Double-click on Paragraph Style 1 in the Paragraph Styles palette and it’ll open a dialog for the attributes of this style. Change the Style Name to body text.

Step 3
Click on Basic Character Formats. Change the font to a font you want for the body text of the articles. I chose Georgia. All the other settings look fine. From here, you could change a story to all caps, bold, and adjust other settings, but leave the settings besides the font style the same for this tutorial.

Step 4
Click on Indents and Spacing. Change the First Line Indent to 2p0. This will put a consistent indent at the first line of each paragraph. The Right Indent and Left Indent refer to the spacing if we wanted to indent the entire side of a story, such as with a long quote where it would need to be indented on both sides for the entire quote. But leave the other setting at 0p0 for this tutorial.

Step 5
Under the same Indents and Spacing menu, change the Alignment to Left Justify. What that does is slightly stretches or compresses the lines of text in the paragraph to create an aligned column of text, just like in newspapers. The Left in the Left Justify name means that the last line of text of each paragraph will be left justified, since the last line would not need to be stretched across the column width.

Step 6
Click on Character Color. It should be set to Black. For other publications, you may want to adjust this. But for this tutorial, we’ll leave it set to Black.

Step 7
Click on the General menu again, and you’ll see the Style Setting we applied: Georgia, align justified, last line left, and the first line indent to 2p0. Click OK.

Step 8
Next, we’ll need to add the style for our article titles. Click on the New Paragraph Style icon at the bottom of the Paragraph Styles palette to create a new style. It’ll be called Paragraph Style 1 by default. Double-click on it to adjust its attributes. Change the name to Titles.

Step 9
Change the “Based On” to “No Paragraph Style.” That way, we’re not basing it on any other style.

Step 10
Click on Basic Character Formats and change the Font Family to what font you’d like to use for your titles. I chose Bookman Old Style for a clean look. Change the font to a larger size that it’ll start as. I chose 36 points. For titles, we’ll adjust the sized when creating them.

Step 11
Click on Indents and Spacing. Change the First Line Indent to 0p0 so there’s no indent for the titles.

Step 12
Change the Alignment to Left instead of Left Justify. Click OK.

Step 13
In the Paragraph Styles palette, click on the New Paragraph Style icon again to create a third style, this one for the photo captions. Change the Style Name to captions and change the Based On to No Paragraph Style.

Step 14
Click on Basic Character Formats and change the Font Family to what we changed the Font family for the body text. For this example, change it to Georgia. Change the Size to 12 points and the Font Style to Italic. With publications such as newspapers, you don’t want too much font variation in order to have some consistency. Use no more than two or three fonts for the same publication.

Step 15
Click Indents and Spacing to make sure the justification is set to Left and there’s no first line indent (all indents should be set to 0p0). Click OK. Go to File>Save to save the InDesign file for use in the next tutorial. In the next tutorial in this series, we’ll start placing articles and applying these styles.

by Chad Neuman

With the magazine design tutorials, we learned about placing stories, adding unique cover teasers, and wrapping text. Oftentimes magazine design allows for more creativity. While that’s true to a certain extent, since newspaper often have a more traditional layout, recently many newspapers have been re-designing with more white space and a cleaner layout. Mario Garcia has re-designed over 450 newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal. With these tutorials, you’ll learn to design cleanly but still having that consistent newspaper layout, such as consistent column width and alignment. You’ll learn more advanced text formatting, including paragraph styles and setting indents and other options.

To follow along with this tutorial, you’ll need these support files. Download them here.

Step One

Open Adobe InDesign and go to File>New>Document. I’m using InDesign CS3, but other versions should be somewhat close to the instruction here. Among other new features, CS3 has a more convenient palette layout, but those with older versions should be able to follow along relatively closely.

Step Two

Set the number of pages to 4 and the number of columns to 5 and keep the paper size to Letter. The setting should reflect the ones shown here.

Step Three

Let’s add a header to the newspaper that will appear on every page. In the Pages palette, double-click on the pages next to A-Master.

Step Four

Just like with many other Adobe programs, use Cmd/+- (PC: Ctrl/+-) to zoom in and out of the document. Zoom into the area at the top of the left master page. To move around the page, use this shortcut and press the Space bar and hold it while clicking-and-dragging. Select the Text tool and click-and-drag a text box that centers over the page.

Step Five

With the cursor in the text box we just created, open the Paragraph palette and change the alignment to Center (the second-from-left option at the top of the Paragraph palette).

Step Six

Type in the words, “Smalltown Sentinel.” Click-and-drag over the text with the Text tool after you type it and change the font size to 36 on the Control palette at the top.

Step Seven

With the Text tool selected, click-and-drag out a new text box on the left side corner. Be careful to not click within the other text box, or it will just insert the cursor into the other text box. If you are having trouble, just click-and-drag off the page to create the new text box, and then click-and-drag it with the Selection tool to drag it to the corner.

Step Eight

Let’s enter the automatically-updated page number. With the cursor in the new text box, go to Type>Insert Special Character>Markers>Current Page Number. This will insert an “A” in the text box indicating where the current page number will go.

Step Nine

Next, let’s add the page number to the right page. Instead of repeating those steps, let’s duplicate it. Option-Click (PC: Alt-Click) the “A” text box and drag it over to the left page on the mirror side of the original page (the top corner). Hold down Shift to keep it aligned vertically. Let go of the mouse first and it’ll be duplicated.

Step Ten

To duplicate the title header, let’s use another technique. With the Selection tool, click on the “Smalltown Sentinel” text box. Go to Edit>Copy. Go to Edit>Paste in Place. Press the right arrow to move it over to the right page. Hold down Shift for it to move more quickly over. Center it over the page just like the original header. On the Pages palette, click on pages 1 to 4 to see how the master page headers and page number are applied. It should look something like this.

Step Eleven

Save this InDesign file as newspaperlayout.indd and we’ll open it up in part 2 and begin setting up Paragraph styles to save time when formatting text.

Next: Newspaper Design with InDesign part 2 of 5