Discover how to effectively design a staff organizational chart using Adobe InDesign. This detailed guide will take you through the process of creating and customizing boxes for each staff member, aligning them, and adding text to each box.
Key Insights
- The guide explains the use of the rectangle tool to create staff boxes. You can customize the boxes to be 2 inches wide and 1 inch tall, and also adjust the location of the box on the X&Y axis.
- You can add text to the boxes using the type tool. The text can be customized in terms of font, size, style, alignment, and color. The text can also be centered within the shape and can be styled to match the color of the box.
- The process of aligning staff boxes based on the chart is also explained. You can create multiple boxes by holding alt and dragging below. The guide also offers insight into how to represent the importance of staff members on the team by using different colors and strokes.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
Welcome back in this video. We'll begin working on page 6 and we'll be creating a display of our team So to begin we're going to be adding the title for project team and we can do this with the template We've already created from our B master so we'll select page 6 here within pages and we'll right-click and apply master to pages And from here, we're going to be applying B master And clicking OK we'll then adjust our title hitting the CTRL and shift and selecting our title and We'll replace this with project team Next we're ready to review what we need for a project team image. So let's open up our folder And if we look at our request for proposal We'll need to show a display for our project team here.
We can see that we need an organization chart. And So let's open up our folder Where we can see that we have our staff organizational chart If we open this up here, we can see the chart in an Excel spreadsheet We'll see that we have two on top and then we have admin staff as Well as many other roles feel free to print this out or we can follow along with it on the side Next let's begin creating this In order to do so, let's remove our baseline grid now by going into properties with nothing selected and We'll simply click the baseline grid. Then let's open up our document grid Here we can see that we have a document grid with a whole lot of lines that may not be necessarily super helpful Since we have so many avenues that we can snap points to So let's change up our document grid by going to edit We'll go down to preferences and then over to grids From here for our horizontal, we want a grid line every one inch, but rather than eight subdivisions We're simply going to type two For a vertical we're going to do the same thing with two subdivisions.
We'll then click OK From here We now have a grid that we can snap items to and easily visualize as we began creating our boxes So let's begin creating our staff boxes We utilize our rectangle tool So let's simply start by creating our first staff box And we'll have it be two inches wide by one inch tall If we need to make modifications to what we've just drawn we can go into our properties panel and our transform and Simply make sure that it's exactly two inches wide By one inch tall and hit ENTER We can also adjust where on the X&Y this box is located, but for now we'll simply be working with this Next we want to remove our stroke So let's go to the top and remove our stroke from 1 down to 0 and from here We can pick a color for our first staff box We're going to CC libraries and feel free to choose whatever color you'd prefer. I'm going to choose color 1 and We're now ready to add some text We could utilize our type tool and simply draw another box to type our name in I'll hit CTRL Z on the keyboard to undo We can simply click inside the box when we see the circle and we can type inside the box In this case, let's type out our first name we have Niles Alder and Right above that. We'll put principal And hit ENTER And with this text currently it's still aligned to our baseline grid so let's unalign it and Let's stylize the text We'll keep it at Chivo and Regular, but let's increase the size to 15 points Additionally, let's also change the styling from regular to bold Finally we'll Center the paragraphs And if we click outside and hit W on the keyboard we can see what this looks like Definitely still needs a little bit of work.
So let's select it and We're going to Center the text within the frame in this case within our shape Remember that with Chivo we'll want to hit text frame options go to baseline options and We'll offset it with cap height and click OK As one final change. Let's again select our text to stylize the text and we'll change it to paper Or if you're utilizing another color feel free to choose black or another color altogether Here we finally have our text within our box
And if we hit W on the keyboard Now we're ready to begin aligning it Based on this actual chart, we're going to have eight different boxes stacked on top of each other Therefore one inch is going to be a little too high for each of our boxes Let's change this now going into our properties from a one inch height to 0.75 and hit ENTER as We can see one benefit of having the text inside of the frame is that it'll modify within the frame here or within our shape Unfortunately, we won't be able to remove this text from the frame though. So it does have some drawbacks Next let's line up this box in the center of our page we'll drag it up and Let's leave it right here the top middle is Right at 4.25 inches halfway and our Y is at 1.15 inches down Next we can recreate this box entirely for each of our staff members or we can simply hold ALT and Drag below holding shift.
Let's drag our second staff member right below or release And let's make sure within our properties that we're exactly aligned in this case, we're just a bit off so we'll retype 2.5 and hit ENTER and Now we can retype the name For a second staff member, we're going to type Project Manager And we'll replace the name as well Next we have our two staff members. Let's continue adding for a third we'll hold ALT again and click and drag below and This time it snaps directly into place, but it should be at 4.25 and 3.5 This staff member however is going to be off to the right hand side And so let's hold shift as we drag over and let's line it up with the right margin and release And in this case, we'll replace our name again This will be our admin staff And we'll replace the name And while these two members are a little bit more important to the team, let's show that within the staff page here So to do that, let's select this third one and Rather than it being filled with the red color let's simply swap the fill and stroke and in this case, we now have a red stroke and No fill on the inside so let's triple click And hit CTRL A to select the text and for our text now, let's change it from white to black If we use our selection tool and click outside and hit W we can see what this looks like By selecting this box, we'll see that we have a red stroke But I think we can increase it a bit more We'll leave it at three points. This looks pretty good We'll then hit W again, and we now have our first three staff members set on our page let's now save our work hitting CTRL S on the keyboard to save and In the next video, we'll complete our project team.
See you there