Research And Planning: Introduction To Indesign

In this lesson we did a activity to introduce us to In Design which is a piece of software we will be using during making our college magazines. By doing this task it let me explore the programme discovering that I could achieve the same kind of effects as Photoshop but I had to do them differently ; giving me more experience with designing software.

Collecting the information

To start of this task I had to choose a film of my preference to base it on and use google to find a film review on it and find an associating picture. I saved both of these into my personal folder ready to use later on in my new Indesign document.

Inserting the film title

This was the very first thing that we did. Just like photoshop I clicked on the T tool on the left hand sidebar which allowed me to type onto my A4 document. After doing this I could again change the font colour/size/type by using the dropdown menus at the top of the screen. We also got instructed to add some form of effect onto the text, for example a drop shadw but when I tried to do this, it wouldn't allow me to do so.

Creating 3 columns
To do this all I had to do was go onto create then create guidelines. Doing this allowed me to adjust how many columns I wanted on my page. Once I had done this I simply copied and pasted my review into my columns making sure that all the information was inserted.


Inserting the text

Once I had inserted the columns the text was easier to be exported. To do this I went onto 'File;export' and then I selected the word document with the film review information in. Doing this allowed me to drop the text into each of my three columns giving the page a more organised effect. I could then adjust each column in length to how I wanted them to look.

The picture
To insert the picture I went about it the same as I did the text; by going to export and selecting the file I was going to use. Once I'd selected it I dropped it into my document. Something I discovered though was if you tried to resize it by dragging the corners outwards it cropped the picture so I had to then go to object and to 'Fit.' To get the outline effect I have used on the picture I went to 'layer;layer style' and then I added several effects such as drop shadow.

Adding a page number

This was simple to achieve. All i had to do was add a text box and drag it to the bottom right hand corner with the number 12 in it.


Background
To create the background I created a rectangle box at the same size as my document with my chosen background colour selected. The problem I had at this stage was that the box was covering all the writing I had already inserted. Therefore I had to 'send it back' which allowed all my information to be brought forward giving the box a background effect. I then clicked on the gradient tool on the left sidebar and then drew a line in the middle of my document which gave it a gradient effect.