Learn to create and adjust written pieces for a client's page layout. This article demonstrates techniques for formatting headings, adjusting paragraph spacing, and adding images and overlay text in a design layout.
Key Insights
- The article guides you on how to format headings for three separate written pieces, demonstrating how to adjust the text to different paragraph styles and redefine a style throughout a document.
- It shows how to add and adjust images in a design template, such as filling a frame proportionally and making size adjustments, as well as how to select and apply color from given libraries.
- The article also provides a step-by-step process on how to create and adjust overlay text inside a type frame, including changing text size, aligning text within an overlay and creating a new style for future use.
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.
In this video we're going to begin working on page four. For this page, our client's looking for three separate written pieces of two to three paragraphs for each of three articles.
Let’s begin by starting at the top and typing the name of the first article: "The Art of the Stairway."
And we’ll hit ENTER. Changing this text now, we’re going to highlight it, and this needs to be our heading paragraph style. In addition, let’s also drop the word stairway down to the next line.
If we hit ENTER, we’ll see that it drops down with the spacing. However, if we hit backspace and hold shift as we hit ENTER, we’ll see that it stays together and the spacing isn’t applied as a new paragraph. Next, let’s add the title for our second paragraph.
We’ll replace this text and type "Lighting a Kitchen, " then hit ENTER. For this text, we’ll highlight it, and going into our basic paragraph, we’ll select "Heading." Here we have our normal spacing between paragraphs.
However, I want to add a little more space between the last article and the start of this title. So, to do this, let’s highlight this text right here, our heading, and let’s add a little space before. To do this, we’ll go into our paragraph settings and add space before the paragraph, setting it to 0.125 inches.
If we click, we’ll see that the heading is now redefined. This signifies that it is the heading, but it has some variations from the other heading style that’s already been defined.
If we want to maintain this heading, we can, or by clicking this icon, we’ll redefine the entire style to show that it has a top spacing ahead of it. If we click, we’ll see that the heading is now redefined. This is one way that as we continue to work and make changes, we can redefine our styles throughout, and everything that has the same heading style such as this text here, will now have the new characteristic we've added now that we've redefined the style.
Let’s type our last paragraph title, "Take Inspiration, " and hit ENTER. Again, we’ll triple-click this text, and we’ll change it to "Heading." Here we have the space right before, and the appropriate space after.
To finalize this, we’ll right-click, and let’s edit in Story Editor. We’ll simply highlight all of our overset text, holding shift and clicking to the end, and hitting the delete key. We can then close out our Story Editor, and we’ll hit CTRL shift a to deselect, and hit W to view our work. This looks good.
Let’s now move on to page five. Hitting W on the keyboard, let’s look at this page. For this page, we need to add a new heading and a stairway photo, and we’re told to only have one sentence in the little description.
So, in this overset text here, we’ll add our sentence. First, let’s start by adding our picture. We’ll hit V on the keyboard, and select our image frame, and then we’ll import our file.
In this case, we have two different stairways to choose from, so feel free to add whatever stairway you’d prefer. I’ll add stairway feature one, and click open, and from here, we’ll right-click, and let’s fill the frame proportionally. If you’d like to make any size adjustments, you can do so.
However, I like the way that this looks right now. Next, we need to work on our overset. So, with our overset selected, let’s first change the color, going to CC libraries, and selecting the Doma screen.
Next, let’s add our text. We’ll utilize our type tool, and make sure that we’re within overlays. Next, we’ll make a small type frame here, and right-click, filling with placeholder text.
In addition, we only want one sentence, so I’ll reduce some of this placeholder text until we have about a sentence. From here, we now need to modify our text, to go within the overlay. We’ll hit CTRL A on the keyboard, and for our overlay text, let’s increase it now, and we’ll increase it to about 18.
I think this will look good. We’ll then utilize our selection tool, and drag it over into our overlay, centering it, and we’ll drag it so it reaches from the end, to the end. We’ll then click on it, and hit CTRL ALT C, to shrink our text frame, and let’s select both the text frame, and the overlay, so that we can align it to the key object, selecting our rectangle as the key object, and centering our text.
From here, let’s also stretch out our overlay just a bit, and if we hit W on the keyboard, we can see what this looks like, and personally, I think we need to move this down just a little bit here. We’ll drag down, and release, and at this point, I think it’s a good idea to re-evaluate the image, and I’m going to drag it up just a bit, so we can get the corner in there. Hitting W again, and I like the way that this looks.
With this text now, let’s give this new text a style. We’ll triple-click the text, and hit CTRL A, and from here, we can see it’s a variation of basic paragraph, but we want to create a new style. For this style, we’ll call it overlay light, and hit ENTER.
Now in the future, we’ll be able to utilize that same style. Again, we’ll utilize our selection tool, and hit W, and looking at the entire spread here, this looks good. Let’s scroll down, and save our work, hitting CTRL S on the keyboard to save, and in the next video, we’ll begin working on page 6. See you there!