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