Learn how to finalize the design of a postcard in InDesign, including the addition and stylization of text, alignment, and the use of the data merge feature. This guide will walk you through the process of creating an impressive, publication-ready postcard.
Key Insights
- The article provides a step-by-step guide on how to finalize text on a postcard in InDesign, with advice on creating a title, stylizing the font, spacing, and removing placeholder text.
- The guide also offers tips on how to match and align elements in the design for a more cohesive look, and how to preview the final design with an actual name.
- Finally, it explains the process of exporting the design using the data merge feature, with options to create a single record, a range, or all records, and alerts users about potential issues with overset text during exporting.
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In this video, we're going to be finalizing the back of our postcard. So let's begin first by working with our text on the left-hand side.
Right now we just have Laura Mipsum. However, let's add a little more flair. We'll add a title to the top.
To do this, we'll click right on the top left area of our text and hit ENTER. And in this first line, feel free to create whatever title you'd prefer. You could type something like you're invited or new services.
Or feel free to come up with whatever title you'd prefer. In this case, I'm going to type grand opening. Next, we'll stylize our title.
We can highlight the text and I'm going to go black italic. In addition, I want a little more space between this top title and the bottom. So I'm going to go to space after and just add a little gap.
Finally, I'll increase the size up to 12. Next, I'm going to add two different paragraphs here. So I'll delete a line of text and let's add a little bit of space between paragraphs.
I'll capitalize the next letter. And this just gives us an opportunity to finalize this a little bit more and make it closer to publishing, even though we don't actually have the content. From here, I'll simply italicize this bottom section here, going from regular to italic.
And now we want to delete the remaining Laura Mipsum. To do this, we can right click and go to edit in story editor, where we'll see the actual text that we have left. And we can delete it, adding a period and closing it out.
Finally, I'll click outside and hit W on the keyboard. And we can start to see what this looks like. Next, I think I want to make a change to this line here.
This line feels a little out of place since we have the more square lines now. So with this line selected, I'll hit I on the keyboard for the eyedropper tool. And I'm simply going to click this other line here to copy the same styling.
And there we go. We've now matched it to the other lines. And if we want to resize it, we can do so.
In this case, I'm going to align it so that it's centered with the text on the right hand side here. I'm also going to align the text so it's centered within this text frame. All of these are small tweaks that we can make to allow our postcard to look a little bit better.
And feel free to make your own customizations. I'll hit W again to see how this looks. And if we want to select here, we can get a preview of it with an actual name.
Again, I'll hit W. And I like the way that this looks. In addition, for the address, I think we want to add a tension. We'll double click here within the text frame, add attn colon.
And we'll see that that text is now added to bring the attention to each of these individuals. When we look at the format, we'll see we have plain text and the actual field that we'd add. All right, I think we're now ready for export.
So let's save our work, hitting CTRL S. And to export this now, what we want to do is go back to our data merge and select create merged document. To do this, we'll click the icon right below the lines. And from here, we can make changes to the merge we're creating.
We could create a single record. We can create a range, say we only wanted names 5 through 10. In this case, however, we're going to do all records.
And finally, we'll click OK. The first thing we'll notice is that we have this notification here saying no overset text was generated when merging records. This is a notification because sometimes if the text that you're importing doesn't actually fit within the area, it may be overset.
So InDesign wants to let you know, don't worry about that, all of the text fit. This is especially helpful when you have two or 300 different things that you're exporting that InDesign's done the work to double check them all for you. The second thing you'll notice is we now have a second tab in InDesign.
And this is because it's created an entirely new InDesign file for all of our contacts. If we go to our first file, we'll see that we have the original with the format. And the second one here is the data merge.
Look at this, we can go to pages. And we now have lots of pages. We have our front postcard page.
And we have our back postcard page with the contact front and back. And so in total, we now have 22 different pages. Let's look at these side by side now.
We'll close data merge. And if we select a master, the master for all of these pages and go to properties, we can select facing pages. It will now see that we have the pages facing each other.
However, they don't quite stack up because page one here is separate. And then two and three. We have these isolated.
So what I like to do for this is simply create a new page. And right here, we now have our blank page. I'm just going to drag that to the top.
So that the rest of these all have the front of the postcard on the left and the back of the postcard on the other side. We look through these, we can see that they all have the appropriate names and are exported correctly. Let's now save our work hitting CTRL S on the keyboard to save.
And we're going to save this as Domus postcard data merge. And click Save. Great job.
We've now completed our postcard with the data merge of all the individuals.