Chapter 7: Creating Layout Standards

Overview

Think for a moment about the publications you produce. Chances are that most of your work involves creating multiple iterations of a basic set of publications, and each publication looks more or less the same from issue to issue. For example, periodicals such as newsletters, magazines, and newspapers don't change much from one issue to the next (disregarding the occasional redesigns that all publications undergo). The ongoing uniformity of such things as page size , margins, page layouts, text formats, even the tone of the writing, gives each publication a unique look and feel.

If you had to start from scratch every time you created a publication, you'd spend the bulk of your time setting up your documents and have little time left to attend to the appearance of the content (you'd probably get terribly bored, too). Few things are less rewarding than doing the same job over and over. Fortunately, InDesign includes several extremely useful features that let you automate repetitive tasks . This chapter focuses on three of them ‚ master pages, templates, and libraries:

• A master page is a preconstructed page layout that you can use when adding pages to a multipage document. With master pages, you can design a single "background" page and then use it as the basis for as many document pages as you want. Without master pages, you would have to create every page from scratch.

• A template is a preconstructed document that's used to create multiple iterations of the same design or publication. A template is a shell of a document that contains everything in a publication ‚ except content. Each time you need to create a new version of a repeatedly produced publication, you open its template, add the content (text and pictures), tweak as desired, and then print. Next issue, same thing.

• As its name suggests, a library is a place where you store things. Specifically, InDesign libraries are files for storing objects that you've created in InDesign and that you intend to use repeatedly in multiple documents.

When you combine master pages, templates, and libraries with the ability to create character and paragraph style sheets (covered in Chapter 20), you have a powerful set of automation tools. Style sheets automate text formatting; libraries automate object creation; master pages automate page construction; and templates automate document construction.

How and to what extent you use these features depends on your personal preferences and the publications you produce. You might think that something as small as a business card wouldn't benefit from any of these features, but if it's a business card for a corporate employee, the chances are that, other than the personal information, it's exactly the same as business cards of every other employee. By creating and saving a business-card template, you could quickly build cards for several or several hundred new employees . All you have to do is open the template; add the name, title, and phone number of the new employee; and then print.

For other publications, you might use several ‚ perhaps all ‚ of the aforementioned timesaving features. A good newsletter template, for example, would contain a set of style sheets for formatting text, probably a master spread or two (depending on whether all pages shared exactly the same design), and perhaps an associated library of frequently used objects ‚ house ads, corporate logos, boilerplate text, and so on.

Tip ‚  

Although this chapter begins with master pages, this doesn't mean that you should begin work on a publication by creating master pages. You may prefer to work on text formatting tasks first and build style sheets before turning your attention to page-layout and document-construction tasks. One of the best things about InDesign is that it lets you perform tasks in whatever order makes most sense to you. Over time, you'll develop a personal modus operandi for creating publications. Whatever style you develop, make sure that you make full use of style sheets, libraries, master pages, and templates.

Note ‚  

In this chapter, the terms master page and master spread are used interchangeably. If you're working on a facing -page document, you'll use facing-page masters that have both left- and right-hand pages. These are master spreads . For single-sided documents, a master page has only a single page.