Discover the process of creating a comprehensive staff page for your website or business proposal. This article provides a step-by-step guide on how to build an individual staff page, using detailed descriptions, professional qualifications, and key areas of expertise.
Key Insights
- The article explains how to construct a staff page by starting with a title, applying appropriate formatting, and aligning it to the page's design.
- The process involves creating frames for images and text, and adjusting the size and placement of these elements to create a visually appealing layout. Threading is used to ensure the text flows seamlessly from one frame to the next.
- The guide also emphasizes the importance of periodically saving your work to prevent loss of progress, suggesting this practice be incorporated throughout the page construction process.
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'll be working on page 7, and we'll be creating our first staff page. So let's begin first by opening up our Request for Proposal found within our folder.
Within our Request for Proposal, if we look on page 8, we'll see that we can list the professional qualifications for key individuals. So in this case, we're going to create three individual pages for our staff members. To begin this, let's open up our staff descriptions document.
Here, we'll see that we have three key members: Clark Kent, Roxanne Ritchie, and Victor Stone. So let's begin with Clark Kent, our Project Manager. We'll start by selecting this top text here, and let's hit CTRL + C on the keyboard to copy.
Next, let's go into InDesign, and we'll begin working on his page. We'll hit W on the keyboard to see our view, and let's remove the grid in our Properties panel and go back to our baseline grid. From here, we're going to want our title, and we can apply the B Master to page 7 by selecting page 7 and clicking Apply Master to Pages, and we'll apply B Master and hit OK.
From here, we'll hold CTRL + SHIFT, selecting our title so that we can edit it. Next, let's type out Clark Kent's name, and let's add two spaces and then type his title. For this staff page, we're going to want Project Manager to be a little bit smaller and a different color, so let's adjust this.
First, selecting Bold instead of Black, and let's drop the font size down. Double-clicking, we'll type 18 and hit ENTER. Finally, let's change the color of this. We'll go to CC Libraries and select our other color. With all of this now, let's left-align it for our personal pages.
As we can see here, we've got our name and our Project Manager role, and we're now ready to begin placing materials on this page. So let's start first by creating a frame for our actual individual picture. We'll simply click, and in this case, we want a 2 × 2 frame, so we'll type 2, and for our height, we'll type 2 as well and click OK.
As we can see here, it lines up perfectly on the baseline grid with the top-left corner at 9 inches and the Y at 1.167 inches. From here, we can add our photo. We'll select our staff photo and simply drag it in, right-clicking and going to Fitting > Fill Frame Proportionally. Next, we're ready to add the text that we copied.
We'll utilize our Type Tool and simply click and drag all the way from the edge of the frame, and we can paste by hitting CTRL + V on the keyboard. As we can see here, it all fits within this text frame. Let's scoot it over a little bit. We can do this one of two ways.
We can utilize our Selection Tool and actually move the text frame over, or if we hit CTRL + Z on the keyboard to undo, we can also inch it over by going down to our paragraph settings and adding a left indent. In this case, we'll add a quarter-inch indent, and this looks pretty good. Next, let's add our next elements.
Right below this, we're going to want to add our Key Areas of Expertise, including these bullets, and on the right, we'll begin working on our Work Experience and adding the rest of the Work Experience. So for now, let's copy our Key Areas of Expertise so that we can use them by selecting it in our file and hitting CTRL + C on the keyboard to copy. We'll add a text frame here. Before doing so, let's split up our page by leaving a guide halfway across our page, right at 12.75 inches.
On page 2,12.75 is halfway across the page. We'll then create a type frame, simply clicking and dragging until we're lined up with this guide. From here, we can hit CTRL + V on the keyboard to paste. Now, let's create another one. We'll do the same thing, starting at the guide, clicking and dragging until we're at the edge of the margin, and we're going to place our other text here.
We'll open up our document, and this time, rather than just selecting the first part, we're actually going to select all of this Work Experience all the way down through Project Engineer. We'll hit CTRL + C on the keyboard to copy, and now going back into this document, let's hit CTRL + V in the right text frame to paste. Obviously, all of this text doesn't fit because we can see the overset text symbol with the red plus, but for now, we're going to work with it.
Let's start by stylizing our text here, highlighting Key Areas of Expertise, and we're going to use our paragraph style In-Text Title. For the bullets below, we'll select those as well, and we'll be selecting Bullets. For our next one, we'll again select Work Experience and give that an In-Text Title styling. For these two right here, I'm not sure that we need the space between, but they're currently set as different paragraphs. So to undo that, we'll start at the beginning of Project Manager and hit Backspace. Then, holding SHIFT, we're going to hit ENTER, and this will force it down to the next line without adding the space after that's typical of these paragraph settings.
From here, let's italicize these since they'll be a little bit different from the actual text and responsibilities. We'll go here to Regular and select Italic, and here we can see that we've got our Work Experience and our Key Areas of Expertise roughly aligned. Let's adjust this frame too, just to the bottom of this here.
Now our frame is only showing the first Work Experience. From here, we can then access this overset text by clicking the plus sign, and we'll see that the rest of the text is loaded into our cursor. In order to put it on the page, we'll simply drag a new text frame all the way to the bottom here, and we've now added the rest of the text.
This text is all now connected through what's called threading. Threading, as we can see, is essentially the text flowing from the top of one into the next frame if they're threaded together. If we reduce the size of this one, we'll see the text go down below. I'll hit CTRL + Z to undo.
Again, we could continue threading here by simply clicking on the red plus and continuing to add threading. If we want to actually see the connection between each of these type frames, we can go to View > Extras, and on the right-hand side, we're going to go to Show Text Threads. As we can see here, we'll see the actual threading between each of these frames.
Let's undo this for now by going back to Extras and selecting Hide Text Threads. We'll hit CTRL + Z again to undo and leave all of our text at the bottom here. For now, let's save our work by hitting CTRL + S on the keyboard to save, and in the next video, we'll continue stylizing this page.
See you there!