Discover how to create engaging staff pages with a step-by-step guide to stylizing your materials using rectangles, adjusting text frames, and editing text to fit your design. Learn how to add depth to your page with inset spacing and rounded corners, and how to make the page stand out with the addition of a unique background.
Key Insights
- The article covers detailed steps on how to enhance the visual appeal of a staff page. It suggests using rectangles as callout boxes for key areas of expertise, adjusting the position of these elements, and rounding the corners for diversity.
- Managing text is a crucial part of the design process. Strategies include adjusting the text frame to fit the design, working with inset spacing to add padding, and making necessary edits to the text to ensure it fits within the allotted space.
- To make a staff page stand out, the article recommends adding a background color and adjusting its transparency. It also advises creating a master page based on the edits made, which can then be used as a template for other staff pages.
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In this video we're going to continue working on our staff page. Currently we have all of the materials, but if we hit w we'll see that we need to stylize this a bit more.
So to do this let's begin first by adding a rectangle behind our key areas of expertise as a callout box. We'll select our rectangle tool and we'll simply drag a rectangle right up until the guide in the center. We'll remove the stroke and feel free to choose whatever color you'd prefer.
Next let's send it to the back hitting CTRL shift open bracket. And with the shape now it's a little bit close to the work experience on the right, so let's move it over a quarter of an inch. We can do this either by dragging it or going to properties and for our width we're going to type 3.5 and hit ENTER.
And we've now given ourselves a quarter inch space between these two. Next let's click outside and we'll select our text clicking on top. Our text frame is still sized a little to the right so let's drag it in so it's the same proportions as the box below.
Next let's work on our inset spacing. We'll right click go to text frame options and we can begin working with our inset spacing to add a little bit of padding. I'll add as much padding as I can before we start to lose text which is 0.1875. Additionally I'll go to our baseline options and anytime we're centering with Chivo we want to offset with cap height.
We'll then click ok. Make sure that our text is centered within our text frame and this looks good. Let's add a little more diversity by again keeping the curved corners.
We'll right click go to select next object below so that we have our rectangle selected. And then we'll change up our corners making the left corner rounded at 0.5 inches and the top right corner rounded at 0.5 inches. And we'll click ok and see what this looks like hitting w on the keyboard.
All right we're starting to get there however if we look at the bottom here we still have a little bit of overset text and with this overset text we have a difficult situation that we simply need to make a decision on. If we click the bottom of this text let's see how much text we have to work with. Looks like we only have a couple of words and so we need to weigh the pros and cons of either reducing the size of all of this text or simply cutting out a couple key words.
In your sample we'll see that we've reduced the text to a size 12 rather than 13. However in this case we're going to work with the words and try and cut out any words that aren't especially important so that we can maintain the same proportions and the same styling for our text. In this case I've gone through the text and I think there's a couple ways that we can cut the characters.
First we can provide LA instead of Los Angeles and second looking at the text we can probably remove during construction since that's apparent to his job. When we remove these we can now fit our text. Within InDesign it seems like we may just be laying things out on the page however a lot of the times when we're designing things especially text heavy items we're going to come up to situations where we need to determine whether to remove
text whether to add text how to stylize and how much we're willing to compromise our style based on the text.
This is one of those situations. So let's hit W on the keyboard to take a look at this and in this case we're simply missing a couple things. We're going to italicize this text right here going from regular to italic and we'll do the same thing right below going from regular to italic.
Additionally I like to have this last line empty but in the case of this page it's more important to me that we have all of this information than we continue cutting just to leave that line empty. So for now I like the look of this. As one final change to this page let's add a background.
Many of our other pages have different elements but I really want our staff pages to stand out and be their own pages. So let's add a background by utilizing our rectangle tool. We're simply going to drag a rectangle over the entire page and release and I'm going to choose pd color 1 for mine and we're going to send it to the back hitting CTRL shift open bracket to send it all the way to the back.
Next since this is a little bit bold let's change the transparency go into the top and we'll adjust this to 15 and hit ENTER. I think we can push it a little bit more maybe let's do 20 and hit ENTER and I think that looks good. That helps it to stand out a bit and if we hit w on the keyboard this just defines this individual page and shows that it's a little more unique than the rest of the pages.
Finally with this page now done let's copy all of these materials selecting all of them and hitting CTRL C on the keyboard to copy and let's make a master page with the edits that we've made since we're creating two more staff pages after this. We'll hit CTRL C to copy all and then going into pages we're going to right click b master and select new master and for our prefix rather than c let's type staff. We can only use four characters but that's okay.
We're going to also base it on master b since that's the closest master and for our number of pages we'll just type one since it's really only one page and we'll click ok. From here we can edit the page and rather than working with these elements let's delete the title hitting CTRL and shift to select our title and removing it and then we're going to hit CTRL V to paste all of the elements that we already had. We'll then drag them over into place and with this we now have a working template that we can use for our other two staff pages.
Let's click outside and go back into b and even though this is still assigned b that's okay because we have everything set exactly as we'd like it. When we move on to pages 8 and 9 we'll utilize the template that we just created of our master staff master page. For now let's hit CTRL S on the keyboard to save our work and in the next video we'll continue.
See you there!