Creating an InDesign Document

Begin by launching InDesign and creating a new document. Standard presentations are 10 inches wide by 7.5 inches tall, and you should set the margins to be 0.5 inches all around. Specify two pages, with Facing Pages turned off (see Figure 17.1).

Figure 17.1. Creating a new document in InDesign CS2.

You're not going to add anything to the pages just yet, though. The nature of business presentations practically demands the use of master pages, and you'll set those up first.

Design Two Master Pages

You're actually going to create two master pages. The first will be used for graphs and charts, the second for bulleted lists.

Open the Pages palette, and from the flyout menu, choose New Master (see Figure 17.2). Give it a Prefix of B, name it Graphs, and click OK.

Figure 17.2. Choosing to create a new master page.

The first thing you want to do is create a background, so place the image of the beach with the trees. Scale and crop the image so that it fills the entire page (see Figure 17.3). Then, with the image still selected, choose Object, Feather, and specify a value of 1 inch. This will give the background a nice soft edge effect (see Figure 17.4). Finally, open the Transparency palette and change the Opacity value of the image to 30%.

Figure 17.3. Cropping and positioning the image on the page.

Figure 17.4. Adding a feathered edge to the image.

Next, you'll do a few things by the numbers.

Press the M key to switch to the Rectangle tool, and draw a rectangle (any size) on your artboard. Press the D key to color it with a black stroke and no fill, and, using the Control palette, click on the upper-left corner of the proxy. Enter the following values for the rectangle: X = 0.5 in; Y = 0.5 in; W = 9 in; H = 5. 5 in. This gives you a nice border for your slide (see Figure 17.5).

Figure 17.5. Adding the border for the slide.

Now draw a second rectangle on your artboard. Use the Control palette to give this rectangle the following values: X = 0.5 in; Y = 0.5 in; W = 9 in; H = 0.75 in. Color the rectangle with a black 1-point stroke and a fill of green (see Figure 17.6).

Figure 17.6. Adding the background for the header.

Switch to the Type tool and click once inside the yellow rectangle to convert it to a text frame. Then type in the words HEADLINE GOES HERE and press Command+Shift+C (Ctrl+Shift+C) to center the text. Select the text and set the font to Adobe Caslon Pro Bold at 36 point with optical kerning. Finally, choose Object, Text Frame Options, and set the Vertical Justification to Center (see Figure 17.7). Select the text and change the color to Paper (white) from the Swatches palette (see Figure 17.8).

Figure 17.7. Changing the vertical justification of the text to Center.

Figure 17.8. Setting the color of the text to white.

Finally, place the Sunflowers logo, scale it 40%, and center it at the bottom of the page to complete this master page (see Figure 17.9).

Figure 17.9. Adding and positioning the logo.

You need to create one more master page for presentation slides that will contain bulleted lists, and you can use the master page you just created as a starting point. From the Pages palette flyout menu, choose New Master and assign it a Prefix of B, name it Bulleted List, base it on B-Graphs, and click OK (see Figure 17.10). On this master page, draw a new rectangle with a stroke of None, and position it in the middle of the page. Using the Type tool, convert it to a text frame and type in a bullet character followed by the words Bullet Item 1. Set the text to Adobe Caslon Pro Regular, 36-point type on 44-point leading. In the Paragraph palette, specify a Space Before setting of 0.125 inches. Select the text with the Type tool, and copy and paste a few copies so that you have several lines of text (see Figure 17.11).

Figure 17.10. Basing a new master page on a previous one.

Figure 17.11. Adding the placeholder for a bulleted list.

You're now ready to move on to filling the presentation with content. In the Pages palette, double-click on Page 1 to switch to that page.

Did you Know?

If you want to reuse this design for future presentations, you might want to save the fileas it is nowas an InDesign template.

Add the Content

You'll start with the easy one first. In the Pages palette, drag the Bulleted List master page to the first page of your document to apply that master page (see Figure 17.12).

Figure 17.12. Applying the Bulleted List master page to the first page.

First, you'll edit the header. You'll notice that you can't select the header because it's an element that appears on a master page. To "override" the object to make a change to it, press Command+Shift (Ctrl+Shift) while clicking on the header text. You'll now be able to change the text for that object to read COMPANY GOALS.

Do the same for the text box below so that you can add your own bulleted text list. After you've applied the override, change the bullets to read Customer Service, Personal Treatment, Unmatched Services, and Affordable Pricing (see Figure 17.13).

Figure 17.13. The final bulleted list slide.

Save your file into your Version Cue project.