Explore the process of designing and customizing staff pages in InDesign for a company's team members. The article details the step-by-step method of changing staff member details, editing page elements, and reformatting the layout for different staff bios.
Key Insights
- The article describes how to edit different page elements in InDesign for individual staff bios, including replacing titles, text, and images. It also provides a guide to making elements editable using the ctrl-shift command.
- For varied staff bios, it's possible to restructure the layout to suit individual needs. An example is creating two separate sections for work experience and academic qualifications. The article explains how to create and format new text frames for this purpose.
- Advice on formatting is provided, like using paragraph style for 'Key Skills and Competencies' and bullet points for lists. The author also discusses adjustments such as modifying text sizes, adding spacing, and customizing inset options in text frames.
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In this video, we're going to begin working on page 8 for our second staff member. If we open up our Word file with all of our staff members, we'll see that we have our second staff member, Roxanne Ritchie, and her information.
She's our Lead Structural Engineer. So for now, let's copy this top text here, hitting CTRL + C to copy it, and going back into InDesign, we can now begin designing this page. For this page, we're going to want to use our new master page that we've created, and so we'll assign Staff Master to page 8 and page 9 by right-clicking and selecting Apply Master to Pages, and we'll select Staff Master and click OK.
Now, to edit all of these elements, we can hold CTRL + SHIFT and we'll drag a box over all of these elements, making them now editable. From here, let's now replace our title and replace Clark Kent with Roxanne Ritchie, and for her title, we'll replace this with Lead Structural Engineer. Next, for our text, we can replace this by highlighting it all and hitting CTRL + V with the text that we've already highlighted and copied.
We'll then replace our image by hitting A on the keyboard to select our Direct Selection Tool. We'll simply click on the photo and hit the Delete key. We'll then go to our CC Libraries, find Roxanne and click and drag her in, right-clicking and selecting Fitting > Fill Frame Proportionally.
We'd like to drag it a little bit to the right to center her. We can do so, and next, let's work on this text below. Looking at the Word document with her information, we can see that she has a lot of Work Experience and her format for her staff bio is a bit different from our previous staff page.
So, for now, we're going to separate the Work Experience and have the company Parks and Dwell experience on the left-hand side, while the Phase 10 Construction experience and Academic Qualifications are on the right-hand side. So, for now, let's copy this construction company Parks and Dwell information, hitting CTRL + C on the keyboard. Let's go back into InDesign.
From here, we'll utilize our Selection Tool and we can simply delete a few of these items. We'll delete the Key Areas of Expertise and let's drag this box off to the side so we can keep it. Additionally, we can also delete this text here, and we'll delete it all the way up to here and hit the Delete key, and then using our Selection Tool, we can delete this text frame.
For her Work Experience, let's have this title be right in the center. So, we'll drag this text frame all the way across, and if we click Work Experience, let's center it. Next, let's delete the text below and we're just going to have this text frame only sit here for Work Experience.
We'll add new text frames for the additional information. We'll start by adding a guide right at 4.25 inches. We're going to create two text frames.
We'll start here on the left-hand side, and this is where we're going to paste the information that we've just selected, hitting CTRL + V on the keyboard to paste. From here, we'll format it. So, for construction company Parks and Dwell, we're going to italicize that, going to Chivo and selecting Italic, and then Structural Engineer 2010 to present.
We'll hit Backspace and then holding SHIFT, we'll hit ENTER so it drops to the next line. We'll also highlight this and make it Italic. Next, we have a little description about her, and this default setting for Basic Paragraph is perfect for this, so we'll leave that as is.
For Key Skills and Competencies, however, let's create this with our paragraph style In-Text Title. And finally, below, we have lots of Bullets. We use our Selection Tool. We can see that it extends beyond the area we have for our text frame, so let's highlight all of it, and in this case, we can utilize our paragraph style Bullets.
Unfortunately, using Bullets, it's not going to fit all of these details, so let's make some modifications to this. We'll click down the text size and let's leave it right at 13 points. We click outside, we can see what this looks like, and we'll hit W on the keyboard, and I think this looks a bit more appropriate.
These Bullets are size 13, as well as our regular text. Finally, let's add a little bit of spacing on the right-hand side so that we get away from this right side. We can do this either by adding a guide and dragging it over or we can right-click and go to Text Frame Options, and for our Inset, we won't make all settings the same.
Instead, we'll just add a right Inset of 0.25 inches and click OK. From here, let's simply copy this exact text frame over and we'll resize it to the bottom here. Then, holding ALT, we'll click and drag it to the right, and here we now have the same text frame on the right-hand side. So, let's replace this with the details for her second piece of Work Experience.
We'll open up our document, and from here, let's copy this information. We'll leave out Academic Qualifications for now and then hit CTRL + C to copy, and going back into InDesign, we'll hit CTRL + A to select all and CTRL + V to paste. Unfortunately, this is now pasted with the bullet settings from our paragraph.
So, let's hit CTRL + A or select it all, and we'll go back to Basic Paragraph. For now, let's save our work by hitting CTRL + S on the keyboard, and in the next video, we'll continue working on this page. See you there!