Explore the inner workings of creating a digital file with a focus on image and text placement. Learn how to manipulate tools to ensure your image spans the distance of the page, import an image, add a title, and more.
Key Insights
- The article provides detailed instructions on creating a frame across an entire page, importing an image, and fitting it proportionally to display it in the most appealing way. The example used features an image of a house, aimed to showcase an entire room with added details.
- Discussion around text placement within the frame is thorough, highlighting the importance of how text fits within the text frame. The differences between various fonts and their alignment within the text frame are demonstrated with specific examples.
- A considerable emphasis is placed on the manipulation of the baseline options for text alignment. The article explains how to properly center text within the text frame, particularly with certain fonts, utilizing text frame options and changing baseline options to ensure visually appealing alignment.
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In this video, we'll be working on our third page of our digital file. So let's scroll down to our third page, and we'll hit W so we can go to our Normal view. For this page, we're going to have an image that spans the entire distance of our page.
So let's go over to our Rectangle Frame Tool, and we're going to start by creating a frame across the entire page. We'll release, and next let's import our image. We'll go to CC Libraries, and for this page, we're going to be importing the image of the House on 44th.
We'll click and drag it in and right-click to fit it proportionally. We'll then hit A on the keyboard to drag it, holding Shift so that we can see a bit more of the bottom—and here we have this nice display. In this instance, the company Domus wants to display the entire room and provide a little more detail about this image.
So let's next add our title. To do this, we'll be utilizing the Rectangle Tool, and let's create it by dragging down from the guide so we have a bottom guide for the first 100 pixels. We'll then create our rectangle as the background for our title and drag it the entire 100 pixels, swapping out our Fill and Stroke so we have a black top background.
Next, let's create the text for our title. In this case, the text is going to say "The House on 44th." To start, let's simply create a text frame about this size and type out "The House on 44th."
We'll then hit CTRL + A to select all of the text, and let's change it to Chivo—and we'll use Chivo Bold. In addition, let's also increase our size here. We'll leave it at about 30 points, and if we click here, we'll see that we have "The House on 44th."
In addition, let's spend a little bit of time talking about our text here. As we can see, we have the text within our frame. However, we have a bit of a gap between the top of our frame and our actual text.
This is true even though our text is aligned to the top. This brings up an important point about how our text fits within the text frame. To show this a little more clearly, let's change our font from Chivo to another common font found on the computer. In this case, for me, I'll select Times New Roman Regular.
However, feel free to select any other common font within your computer. In this case, we have the text aligned to the very top of our text frame. If we zoom in a bit, we can see this, as we see the top capital letters go right to the top of our text frame.
This is because of our first baseline. So let's discuss this a little more. We can do this by utilizing our Selection Tool, and with this selected as our text frame, we're going to right-click and go to Text Frame Options.
From here, let's go down to Baseline Options. As we can see here, our first baseline is set by the offset. This is essentially the line where the text sits.
Currently, the offset is set to Ascent. However, if we click the dropdown, we can see how this changes based on the different offsets: Cap Height, Leading, X Height.
For example, the X Height will align the top with a lowercase “X.” There are multiple ways we can do this such as changing to Fixed. Let's go back to Ascent for now and click OK. In this case, if we use Times New Roman or many common fonts and we go to Align Center within the text frame, it looks pretty centered.
If we go to Align Bottom, it aligns pretty well to the bottom. However, if we now select all of this text and change it to Chivo, Chivo gives us an instance where our text doesn't always align appropriately. We align it to the bottom—
This looks pretty good. Aligned to the bottom. However, if we utilize our Selection Tool and select the text frame and align it to the top, we'll see that we have a bit of a gap from the top to our text.
As well as if we align to the center, clearly our text is aligned a little more toward the bottom. While each font can vary a bit, this is an important consideration if we want to actually center our text within the text frame. In cases like Chivo, we want to do this by utilizing our Text Frame Options and changing our Baseline Options.
In this case, we're going to select our first baseline and choose the one that's appropriate for our font so we can center it properly. In this case, Cap Height gives us the best centering of our text. We'll click OK.
For Chivo, we're going to be working with our Cap Height baseline. With that now done, let's zoom out. With this text now set, we're going to align it within the rectangle.
We'll start by selecting our rectangle and change the color by going to our CC Libraries. Let's change it to our nice green. Next, we'll take our text and drag the text frame so it spans the entire distance of our rectangle. From here, we can make sure that we're aligned center.
For the actual text itself, we'll triple-click and choose Paragraph Align Center. As we can see here, the text is well aligned in the center of our text frame. This looks nice.
To give a comparison of what we were working with, we'll right-click and go to Text Frame Options and Baseline Options. For our first baseline, we were working with Ascent.
As we can see here, it looks just off-center toward the bottom, so it looks much better with Cap Height. We'll click OK. Great work.
We've now centered our top text, and let's change it up a little bit by giving it All Caps. We can do this by going to our Properties, found either within the VDCI Workspace or within Window. Let's add our Properties panel.
From here, I'm just going to drag our Properties panel window here into Pages. As we scroll down, I can change this to All Caps.
I'm also going to increase the size just a bit. I'll utilize the Selection Tool and hit W. I think this looks pretty good. So let's now save our work by hitting CTRL + S on the keyboard to save.
In the next video, we'll continue adding to this page. See you there.