Discover how to add accent colors and proof a newsletter in Adobe InDesign. This article covers the importance of rechecking text elements after modifying styles, adding accent shapes in different layers, and altering the opacity of these shapes to enhance the appeal of the newsletter.
Key Insights
- The article highlights the importance of rechecking text elements after redefining styles in Adobe InDesign. This step ensures that the changes do not adversely affect the existing text in the newsletter.
- To add more visual diversity to a newsletter, the author suggests creating accent shapes in a new layer. These shapes, filled with color, can be placed behind everything else in the newsletter for a subtle effect.
- Opacity of accent shapes can be adjusted to make the design more interesting without detracting from the actual content. The author recommends using a 15% opacity for a balanced design.
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In this video we're going to add a couple accent colors as well as proof our newsletter. So let's begin by going to page one and right away we'll see that our first text element, May, is changed and no longer shows 20th.
If we click on it, this is because we redefined the basic paragraph style after we created these text elements. Therefore, when you're redefining styles, it's important to go back and make sure that it doesn't affect the previous text you've made or you can go back and switch it then. For this text now, it's changed because we've added space after to basic paragraph.
We'll simply reduce it down and we're back to normal now. In addition, our title here has also been affected by the leading we added. So, let's increase our leading a little more, reduce the space after, and I'll bring the leading up to 31 points.
Finally, we'll change this for our address, reducing the space after and adding a little more leading to 25. Now that we've fixed page one, let's move on to page two. Within page two, if we hit W, we'll see this looks pretty good.
However, it does feel a little plain with plain white paper behind. To add a little more diversity, let’s add a couple of accent shapes full of color. To do this, we'll go into our layers panel and we're going to create a brand new layer.
We'll go to the bottom to create layer four and double clicking. Let's title this accent shapes and hit ENTER. In addition, let's move our accent shapes to the bottom since they'll be behind everything else.
We'll also lock each of our other layers and work only within accent shapes. Next, let's create our first shape. We'll utilize our rectangle tool and for our fill color within the control bar, let's go all the way to the bottom and select Domus Green.
Finally, let's create a rectangle the same size as our picture, and then, hitting V on the keyboard, let’s drag it to about here, just so it’s off the other image. As one final change, let's change our opacity from 100 percent down to 15 percent and hit ENTER. If we hit CTRL SHIFT A to deselect, we can see what this looks like, and I think 15 percent is a good opacity that makes it look a little more diverse and interesting, but doesn’t detract from the actual content on the page.
Let's move on to page three now. For page three, we're going to utilize a new tool, our pen tool, and the pen tool essentially works by clicking and adding points to a shape. If we hit W on our keyboard, let's add the first point right where the intersection of our margin and the bottom right hand side of our text frame are and we're going to create a triangle.
Clicking to the left on the text frame and then clicking on the left margin and then we need to close off the shape which the pen tool will show on the cursor of the pen by showing a circle on the bottom right side. We'll close it off and we now have our triangle. Let's create one more triangle by hitting V on the keyboard and holding ALT to drag up below.
Additionally from here, let's flip our triangle right clicking and going to transform and we're going to flip it horizontally. From here we're then going to drag it over to the left hand side and selecting both now. Let's just stretch them out so they fill the margin space.
As one final change, we'll change our opacity again to 15% and hit ENTER. If we click outside and hit W, we'll see that these triangles just add another small element that kind of show the flow of the page. Let's move on to our next page now.
For the remainder of these pages, feel free to add your own shapes and choose whatever shapes you prefer between the pen tool as well as the other shapes. In this case, I'm going to utilize circles by using the ellipse tool and I'm simply going to add a couple of circles holding shift and I'll copy these holding ALT and I like the way that this looks. It's not too perfect, but they are slightly associated with the titles.
I'll then hold shift and select all of them and change the opacity to 15%. Again, feel free to create your own shapes on these pages. We won't create shapes for this page since it has a full picture and for this bottom shape here, I'm going to create rectangles.
I'll hit V and hold ALT, selecting both now. I'll change the opacity to 15% and hit ENTER. And for this final page here, I'm just going to add a couple of circles.
We'll hold shift and hitting V, I'll hold ALT and create an additional circle here. In this case, I want these to both be lined up and I'll line these up so that they're about halfway down. I'm going to use shift and the arrow keys and I'm just going to adjust these circles and change the opacity again to 15% and hit ENTER.
I think it adds just a nice little element here. As a couple final changes, let's simply proof the rest of our newsletter and I'll lock the accent shapes now. And next, let's just look through the pages here and double check the rest of our work.
If you see any small changes that you'd like to make, feel free to do so. And right here, see that we have a hanging line and we try not to do this because it distracts from the flow and looks a little awkward. So I'm going to unlock the text layer here and hit W on the keyboard.
And since it's not typically too important, since it's lorem ipsum, I'm still going to fix it. In this case, I'm going to highlight a line of text and hit control C and then I'm going to move this top paragraph up, add another line here and I'll add it again here. And I'm just going to make it look a little bit nicer.
I've completed that. I'll utilize the selection tool and double check the rest of the work. And this looks good.
When you finish proofing and adding accent shapes, let's hit control S on the keyboard to save our work. And in the next video, we're going to be exporting our work. See you there.