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 by hitting CTRL+Shift+[. 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 select our text by 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. 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. We'll click OK and see what this looks like by 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 of 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 to 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 are a couple of 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 time, 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 of 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 to 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. We're going to send it to the back by hitting CTRL+Shift+[ 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 by 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. For our prefix, rather than C, let's type Staff. We can only use four characters, but that's okay.
We're also going to 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 by hitting CTRL+Shift to select our title and removing it. 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!