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Creating a Marketing Piece

Lesson 15 from: Create a Photo Album: Workflow and Design

Khara Plicanic

Creating a Marketing Piece

Lesson 15 from: Create a Photo Album: Workflow and Design

Khara Plicanic

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Lesson Info

15. Creating a Marketing Piece

Next Lesson: Design Principles

Lesson Info

Creating a Marketing Piece

So this is something that you would probably typically export as a PdF, as opposed to the J pegs that you might do for an album company. But you could do a PdF for an album as well, but I'm just gonna build a typical horizontal like layout. So just straight up 8.5 by 11 we'll just pretend that this is basically going to be like a little info pack I might send to my clients if they have questions on pricing or whatever. Eso This one will be kind of kid themed, and we're gonna keep it pretty simple, pretty light. I just wanted to dive in and show you a few more things that you could do with type and then get to show you the pdf export options. So that's my my goal here. But first thing I'm going to do is just drag a frame out, and we'll just kind of we're gonna do some design will drop this guy in. How cute is this guy? He is so sweet when his crazy sucker and, uh, I'm gonna add some color blocks in here so conveniently we have the swatches, so this would be for my brand. So I love my my...

pink and orange So that may or may not be you. You could do what works for you. But I may do like this fennel drag Another one in here. I will fill this maybe with orange and let's go toe wonderful mode. So it just looks wonderful off the bat on. Then I might make oops type frame here, So I'm gonna drawn in their box. And let's call this something, like kids and kids plus families, eso maybe all style. This maybe will go with Helvetica. We will talk a little bit about Helvetica later, um, or something like league Gothic. Um and so I'm just going to kind of play with us, Type a little bit getting it set. One thing we haven't talked about yet is something called leading. And some of you may know exactly what this is. And some of you may be like what? But letting is oh, letting is what we call the spacing between lines. And it actually gets its name from way back when we had presses with actual blocks of type. I mean, like, metal letters blocks that that you would put in, you know, the tray and you put ink on it and run the paper across it, and they would separate the lines of type with strips of lead. Isn't that interesting? And so we still call it letting, in case some people may be mispronouncing it as leading cause it's spelled the same way. But it's actually letting because that's what it refers to. So we still call it that, and it's up here in the options bar. That's what we see underneath the type size we have leading. And we can change the spacing. You see, as I adjust lists, you see how the spacing gets closer together, way we can really find Tune all of this, this stuff here in design so you might adjust this. And maybe I want that color to be white. So I'm going to do that. And maybe this would be something like the cover of my piece. I like to work. I like to meet fund covers so I might do something like that. Let's move down here to the next page, and I'm going to show you how we might do some blocks of types. Some columns of text. I might also drop another image in here. Let's see, Maybe this guy Come on in. There we go. This gal, she's a little girl here, and okay, I'm gonna put some text in here. So the first thing I'm gonna do is draw my text box and get that going. And we have lots of different ways we can enter text. I could type something I could if I want to just design something and I want to use placeholder texts. We call it. You can fill any text box just instantly with a bunch of text. If you come up to type and you choose fill with placeholder text, it will just fill it. So that's some magic for you. Another thing that you can do is actually come up to file and choose place. And if you have something like a manuscript or a word doc or something with text in a format that in design will recognize, like word, I can just take this word, Doc and I can We don't need import options. I can just say open, and it just places it just like that. All right. So kind of magical. You'll notice down here at the bottom. If I zoom in on this, there is a little red plus that tells me that there is over set type, so there's type beyond what fits in this box, and I'll show you how we can deal with that in a minute. But first, let's say that if I wanted this to be kind of magazine style, maybe I want some columns of text here that's really easy to Dio. I can just right click and choose text frame options and then right here underneath columns. The number of columns is currently set to one, so I can just bump it up to two and make sure my previews on so I can see what's happening. And I can even adjust the wish. I can adjust the width of the gutter in between the columns s so we have a lot of flexibility and a lot of control right there on. I'm just going to click. OK, so we'll have to columns here of of text. And then let's say that we want to add some interest over here and maybe included an additional photo, so maybe you're going to come in here and instead of the rectangle frame tool. Let's see. Many grab the Ellipse frame tool. Now we're getting fancy. Um and I'm just going to draw something like this and I'm gonna have it. So it really interrupts that type and I'll get out of wonderful mode so you can see the frame right there, Right? Because remember, if you're in wonderful mode, you won't see the frame unless that's actively selected. And let's say I'm just going to click this and I'm gonna drag. I had one more in here. No, I'm just going to drag this over and drop that in. That looks pretty good. But we have a problem. Which is, of course, that the text is now being covered up by the graphic. We have some ways of dealing with that up here in the options bar. We have some set text wrap options so you can click some of these buttons and their little presets for what we call text wrap, which will influence the way that the text moves around this frame. But you can also come up to window text rap and then you have a whole panel devoted to text wrapping, and I can come in here and shoes to wrap around the object shape. And then I can actually dictate how far out you see what's happening. I can dictate how far out I want the text to push away from that frame. Yeah. Are you peeing your pants yet? Because if not, what is wrong with you know I love this. Let's go back to wonderful mode. Look how cute that is. And that took, what, five seconds? I don't know. I'm kidding. Maybe more. Maybe 10 seconds. But, um, this whole thing is, like, so simple, and it's a really great way to handle the layout, so that's kind of nice. Um, let's make let's scroll down into our other page over here. And maybe on this page, we're gonna add, of course, another image. So I don't know, something like this kind of just tossing this in. Um, maybe we throw this, Maybe not. Maybe we dio all right, We will. So you're gonna put this little guy down here and let's say we need to finish with that text, so we're gonna I'm gonna make another text box here and check. Check this out, get out A wonderful mode quick so we can see a few things. But I've got this text box here and I've got this text box here and what we're going to do is connect them. You ready for this? So I'm gonna come up here, I'm gonna click the little plus at one point. I think this was called On Out Port and I don't know that still holds true, but I call it an out port. So click the little out port and now we see that my cursor is loaded so all simply bring it down here and click. And the text now flows in such a way that I can actually select this Onda pull right up into this. And if I delete that whole chunk, the text will have so much text. You can't really see that. But if I delayed that, the text will actually wrap on up and it just flows. So this is called a threaded text box. And there's a way actually that we can view this under view. Oh, me and my things view extras show text threads or not, you have to click on the box. So now I've got the selected and you see this line here? Connecting them is just a visual indicator that these text boxes are threaded together. So that's just a really great thing for layout, obviously an editing. If you are working with a lot of text, maybe you are. Maybe you are writing an E book and you've got this cool layout and you want to edit your manuscript and all of that fun stuff. You do not want to have to manage text individually between pages. You need to be able to delete whole contents of text and have things wrap and flow up right? So that's a huge feature, and you can see why. This is what layout designers use when they are laying out like a book. You would go to the bookstore and buy their building it in in design, and this is just one of five billion reasons. But it's very powerful. That's a really great thing. And of course, down here, we probably wouldn't really want a column of text that's this wide, so I would come back into text frame options and maybe bump that up to four or what have you. And then I've got four nice columns very magazine very sort magazine look, and that's really great. Maybe we finish this off with another image. The wound I was thinking off is not in here, but we can dio. Maybe we'll just do this and maybe all just that. And maybe we'll put another color block down here. Oops and feel that with in June. Maybe this is our call to action. Let's connect. Yea, let's hit the right keys on the keyboard. Let's do that. Let's do that, all right. And then you can scale your text by selecting it and changing the type size. Or you can also do this, which sometimes is just easier. Let's connect on. Then we could put in Um oh, yeah, I was going to show you hyperlinks here. Silly me. I almost forgot eso. You can include hyperlinks in your PDS, which is kind of awesome because let's say that you're sending someone like that kid piece and let's say you want to have, like, a resource guide, and maybe you want links. Teoh ah store. You might recommend something or links to your website for more information or links to go to your website to schedule a booking or you know, an email or to see your calendar or anything like that you can think of is really easy to Dio. Let's pretend we'll go back up here. Let's say that we've got a link in here for some text whatever. And we want people to be able to click this and go to your favorite kid styling resource. Whatever. You select the text and guess what. There's a palette called, um, under window interactive hyperlinks, and we come down and click the make a new hyperlink button right here. You can select what type of thing you want to have happen. When they click on it, right, you can have it be a file. It can link to a your L and email. You can put text anchors in so they can click, and it'll jump to a different portion. Ah, but we're just going to go with Earl because that's a nice, easy one. And I would just type my favorite resource dot com and you can share that. So you, if you have it in multiple locations, you can easily access it, not having to type it over again. On down here, we can choose what's called a character style for our links, and I'm going to come back to that. So right now I'm just gonna click. OK, so this is now a hyperlink, but it won't look like it because we didn't create a character style. So remember earlier when we talked about this is dummy text, by the way, So it's just gibberish. But when we talked about when we talked about where we saying links, um o object styles, right? And we talked about the strokes and how you can edit the default object style. You can also create character styles, so that's under the window. Menu styles, character styles and character styles are specific for text and things like like underlines our italics or link characteristics. It's different than paragraph styles, paragraph styles or more. Your overall text, like if you are going to create a style for headlines and a style for body copy, that would be a paragraph style, but here we're talking about specific characters within a paragraph, so I'm going to make a new style, and I'm gonna name it links and let's go under basic character formats. And let's add an underlying to it and Let's go under character color and we could add a blue or something. But it will just go with pink cause it's here and that simple. So what else do we want to dio? That's probably good. Oh, maybe we'll bold it. Let's go under will come into century Gothic font style. Bold. All right, so now this is what it will look like when something is a hyperlink. So just to make sure that that this gets tagged appropriately, I'm gonna highlight that and come back to my hyperlinks finding to edit it. I just double click. And now, under character style, I want to make sure I apply the links character style that we just created. And that way, any new hyperlinks that I make. I don't have to re select the text and turn them pink again. I can just apply that style, and it will make it look like that. So let's roll back down to our let's connect page on. Let's say we're gonna add Are you are L so my studio dot com on and we're going to make that a hyperlink, so we'll come clicking new hyperlink and we'll make it my studio dot com you need to share it will make it the links style, and she's am that is styled. It is linked on DWI. Could do the same thing if we wanted to dio an email address. So let's say we're gonna add an email so we don't want the style attached to the spacing in between, so we'll go back. Teoh character styles none. Um, and then we can add maybe, like contact me at my studio whatever dot com and we can make this an email by selecting it and sing thing back to the hyperlinks. Make a new hyperlink Only here. Instead of linked to Ural, we would say email. We would type in whatever address at my studio dot com. You can even set your own subject lines so that when the user clicks that it will pop up their email and auto, fill it with you know, my kids portrait contact or whatever you want it to be. And there you have it. Then you have links is awesome. So amazing, right? So really powerful stuff. And I'm trying to think what else? Another thing that would be handy, as you probably want to style this text. We didn't do that, but I would create. That would be a paragraph style. And what I would want to do for that is make a new style and call it. I would probably call it like body and then, you know, style it How you want Teoh with whatever type face. Another thing you can do is actually style it here and then create the new style and it'll apply the attributes here. So it's really easy to style your text all at once. And the nice thing is, then two. If you have different headlines, for example, and you get done with the design and maybe you've got six different headlines scattered on however many pages, and then you decide that you want to change the color of all your headlines or the typeface. You don't have to go through and select the headlines and change it. You would just change the style, and it will update all of your headlines. So that's a really handy thing, person, really quick. If you had something like a magazine, would you want to create a library for this sort of project so that you had specific character styles just within that project. Oh, that's a good question. The library is more for, like, objects. I don't know. Let's try. Um, let me just open something or recent. Let's open our block, Larry. I don't You can import styles. I don't think that's gonna work. You can really drag. Is this what you mean like drag your object styles here library or you talking about like images? I just thought, like if when you create magazines, when you have a specific projects, if you wouldn't want it to be like on your overall branding on all of your default displays like on your in design, is there a way to set that apart? I don't know if a library would be a way to do that. I'm not sure what you're asking, Like different size it like you're different colors or something and different stuff. If you could just have a convenient location for all of your If it was like a magazine projects, I would just put it all in a folder on your heart. You know what I mean? So just like you have client folders, though, they're basically projects like each client's a different project, right? a different album or different. Whatever. Is that what you're saying? Okay, I think you go. If you have multiple magazines, let's say if you have multiple broaches that you want a design Is there a way that you can save all your brochure styles like a library? And then we use an indifferent Yes, that's a great question. Okay, so I'm sort of hearing two things. They're talking about organizing, like a folder structure. Kind of maybe sort of. So I would just say, you know, when you're when you're creating just the in design documents until you package it. If you package it, you don't have to unless you're moving at arm two different computer or you're going to give it to someone else. Maybe you've designed something. You want them to do it, you have to practice. But like when I'm making my albums, I don't package them because they're all in my system. But that would be one thing. So otherwise, I just have a folder for that project and I put the in design files in there. I might. I usually leave the images wherever they are on my hard drive there, scattered about and I dragged them. When I'm done with the design, I might package it just so that those images are with it, in case I edit them later outside of that project. That's another use, I guess, for packaging it. But what I hear you asking is, how can we reuse any styles that we set up in one document so you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time, and that is awesome. And of course, there is an answer in a solution for that, and it's very simple. You come over to the styles panel and in the options fly out, you can load paragraph styles from another document. So you would simply click on this. You would navigate to your document that has the styles that you already made and that you love and you can load them. And I believe then to now that I think of it, if you did that without any things open, it might load them. They might be there for you just as a default then I've not tried that, but it could work. I don't know. I think about it, but if not, you can always load him this way and the same is for any of the styles you can just load from another and the same with color swatches. If you have swatches in another document that you want to load here, you can just load this Watches from a document? Yep. Oh, no. I just wanted to comment that, like, if you saved your template, you had one thing that was a template with your branding when you copy and paste from one document to another that it would also copy the swatches and the paragraph sells, Yes, if you do. You copy something with that swatch color. Like if I came up here and copied this this orange ify come and see. And I command p that into another document or command V. If I do that into another document because this object has those attributes, it will copy the attributes as well. So Children, pretty amazing. All right. Are you guys timing it? Always? Always. So Sarah Kate says I see you can link to a file, but can you link to a certain place or cage in your current? Yes, you can. And that's what a text anchor is. And you would do that with the hyperlinks. So if you, um you know, one a link, you can do so many things. You can have this link with a new hyperlink to a text anchor as the well on that. Would that that's how that would work for you. So it would link Teoh either europhile and email a certain page and your document or one of you if you've saved something as a shared destination than you just choose from a drop down list of things that may be saved in there so cool. A couple people are asking about worms like your contract and syllable Pdf. That's a really good question. And I, um I'm not gonna go too much into it here because the way that that works and maybe I'm pretty new with the CS six, which is why this is kind of mind Warby for me. So maybe it's a little different. CS six, but previously the way that that would work is you would design your your form so you might. Let's just add another page here. We'll do this. Let's say you've got this form and you might use the line tool and maybe will not have. Let's switch this and make this. No, Phil. All right, So maybe we use the line tool, Teoh, build some sort of form, right? And then we might say, like we have text here and we're telling people to fill out your name or whatever. However you build this, make it nice and user friendly and beautiful and all those things it helps to have the lines like this or a box or something, and you would export. This is a PDS. And then the way that this has worked in the past is that then you would have to open up acrobat to pro, right, And then in Acrobat Pro, it will read sort of the skeletal structure that you've created an in design, and it will convert it into a form. And that's where you can add the incredible fields and all of that. So I didn't plan to get too much into that because we're doing in design, not Acrobat. But it's an in divine acrobat combo. Well and and a way for people toe know how to go about finding more. Yeah. So look up, Acrobat. In you have the sweet. You probably have acrobat to so you've got what you need. I only know this because my one of my previous jobs, That's what you typically what people came to me to do interactive forms. And in CS six now, which is cool, you can design it and in design, and you can design all the fields and everything. Right? And in design. You don't have to go. You have you, acrobat, I waiting for you in the workspace. There's interactive for pdf. Oh, yeah. One of the workspace like essentials is I know your stuff and it'll create. It'll give you all the menus, All the pallets and everything changes to all the form elements. That's awesome. It's the best thing that because before I had to do it that old way good. I'm so glad I was hoping for that. It's awesome. It was so much more that you can do in the in design. Productive. Awesome. Yeah, yeah. Adobe, Thank you for that. Good. Well, good. I'm I am discovering CS six run along with many of you, I'm sure. So this is exciting. I'm so glad that's That's a wonderful new edition. So there you have again the beauty of the Internet and my body, and you better. You bet. Okay, well, let's talk about exporting our pdf's, because that's pretty important. So I'm just going to kind of toss that page for right now. All right, so let's say that this thing is gorgeous. We love it. We've proved it. Hopefully, you're better at catching your own errors than I am, but in design also has spell check. So have at it. All right, so let's pretend we've got this already, and now we're gonna export it. So we would come up to file and we would choose export, just like we did with R J Pegs Onley. In this case, we wouldn't choose J pegs. We would choose PDS. And in this case, I'm gonna go with print. And even though this says interactive and that makes you think Oh, hyperlinks are interactive, Yes, but we're gonna go with print and it will still have hyperlinks. So I've got it set to that. Let's navigate to some place where we can find this later, and we'll call it kids stuff. Whatever I'll click save. And now I'm going to get the PdF options. And there's a couple things that are important to point out, one being that there are different presets, right? So when I'm creating a version of a pdf that I want to be able to email to a client, I don't necessarily want the high quality print presets because that's going to be huge. Like think it defaults to 300 p p I for all your images and all of that. And that's big for email. It can be right, so usually over email, I may jump down to smallest file size. But then, if I get picky about exactly what that means for the resolution and stuff, I can come down here to compression, and I can say, Well, I want I want the down sampling to 150 pixels per inch or something for anything above that. So you can really tweak these things however you want, and you can have different settings for color images. Or if you happen to have anything in grayscale, you can treat that differently. But, um, they would usually smallest size for an email because they're generally going to view it on screen. Or they might print it out on their local printer, something if they want, and that's going to be fine. I think for them, if you do have bleeds built into your document. We talked about that earlier today. If you do have bleeds, you want to make sure and you're exporting a pdf, you want to make sure that you include the bleed marks. Otherwise, you may have built bleeds into your document, but when you export it, they won't be included, Right. So make sure you turn that on. That used to make me bonkers, cause I would always forget that, um are these air bleed marks? Excuse me? You want to come down here to use document bleeds settings part in me bleed marks air different. That just makes a little mark for the trimmers when they print it. And it doesn't. That's a different thing. My mistake. So marks are different. You want to come down here to bleed and slug, and if you've got a bleed or you've got slugs, you want to just turn that on to use that so otherwise it won't be included, and also that doesn't apply here under general. The other thing is, strangely enough, if you have hyperlinks built into your document it doesn't necessarily include them in the pdf unless you click hyperlinks. So you want to make sure that you tell the pdf to include the hyperlinks. It would be nice if it was the default, but I'm not sure why. It's not. So you have to actually turn that on and then click Export. It will warn you I've got over set text, Which means on Page three that's this right here. That's all that dummy text. I just have so much of it. It's more than fit, so it just warns me. But that's fine. I'd click OK and exports, ppd. Oh, and in there was that setting that you were talking about? Um, we'll try this. We'll see if I can do it real quick. Find that options. It's still working, but in there there's a choice. Teoh open the pdf. I think it's under the general settings to open the pdf when it's finished, but I obviously don't think that was turned on. Replace still doing it all right, but that's where it is. And then if you turn that on, it will pop up when the pdf is finished exporting and then you know that it's done, and that's great. So any quick questions on that before we get into our design basics way don't we don't have to have questions that were, I guess, the bleed thing. It's kind of going over a little bit. But someone had said I actually deleted the question because I thought you were talking about Do we have to build in bleeds? I guess that's what you just answered, right? Well, we talked about that at the beginning. If you you would. If you made your document to have leads, you would have to build it in at the beginning. You can add it later, but then you have to go back and you know, in large stuff to fill the bleeds that you would be better off putting it at the beginning. So you build it into the document, and then if you are exporting the pdf, you need to make sure to add the bleeds so that the bleeds get included in the pdf. Otherwise, the pdf would export as if it was trimmed already. But for most of us, I mean, as I mentioned earlier for most people, if you're new to in design and At this point, you're most excited about album design and marketing like pdf materials and things like that. You probably won't have to deal with BLEEDS. They'll probably be built in because again, most of the album vendors are still providing most of the things in photo shop, so there is no bleed option and photo shop. We call it a trim, and it's just what it's built in, right And there's guides. Sometimes they might place a guide, and they're marking the bleed with a guide. The differences in in design you can actually have a bleed, but for most people probably don't have to worry about it just yet. What another just really quick one from Sarah Stark. Did you say whether you pick the interactive option when you're exporting, I would pick print for this kind of thing. It will still be interactive in the sense that those hyperlinks air there, but it's a little bit different. S O. I would recommend for this stuff. Go with print and just be sure that in the PDF export options that you turn on the hyperlinks and you'll be good

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Fast Book Actions.zip
Square Starter Templates.zip

bonus material with enrollment

Resource-Guide.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Yep, love your work Khara! I am now using Indesign to make my first wedding album thanks to you. So clearly explained and nicely presented. Such a powerful program that makes a complicated task seem easy, with as many variables in layout and design as I can imagine. I am just so excited! I would recommend this course to anyone who is running any size photography business. It will help simplify your workflow and increase your output.

1106 Imagery
 

This class is so good! I learnt so much about albums, and selling them the right way. Having never really used Indesign before, I was nervous about using it as my main platform to design albums. I'm shocked, but I really enjoy using the program! It's so simple and easy using Khara's methods of designing. I also never used bridge before too (Lightroom faithful here), and it's fantastic for sourcing images for the albums. I'm learning a few upsell methods too, so it's very exciting for my business! Thank you for such a great course :)

Adrian Farr
 

Khara's advice is so simple yet makes absolute perfect sense! She really knows how to get the best out of her albums and packages. If you want to learn things that will help you improve your business/workflow, then seriously buy this course!

Student Work

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