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.
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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. We'll select page 6 here within Pages and we'll right-click and apply Master to Pages. From here, we're going to be applying B Master and clicking OK. We'll then adjust our title by hitting CTRL + SHIFT and selecting our title. 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. 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 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 begin creating our boxes. So let's begin creating our staff boxes. We'll utilize our Rectangle Tool. 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 and 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. From here, we can pick a color for our first staff box. We'll go to CC Libraries, and feel free to choose whatever color you'd prefer. I'm going to choose Color 1. 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. Right above that, we'll put Principal and hit ENTER. With this text, currently it's still aligned to our baseline grid, so let's unalign it and stylize the text. We'll keep it at Chivo 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. If we click outside and hit W on the keyboard, we can see what this looks like. It 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 it, 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.
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 by 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 will 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 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 while holding SHIFT.
Let's drag our second staff member right below or release. 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. Now we can retype the name. For our 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. 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. So let's hold SHIFT as we drag over and line it up with the right margin and release. In this case, we'll replace our name again. This will be our Admin Staff, and we'll replace the name. While these two members are a little bit more important to the team, let's show that within the staff page here. To do that, let's select this third one. Rather than it being filled with the red color, let's simply swap the fill and stroke. 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. 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 by hitting CTRL + S on the keyboard to save. In the next video, we'll complete our Project Team.
See you there.