To further the development of my InDesign skills I was asked to create another InDesign document. I am going to create an article showing how disability is portrayed in the media. Firstly I needed to import the images that I am going to use for the article. To do this you click on the grey box with no cross located on the left hand side of the document. You then draw a box to import your image into. You then go to file and then place. You select your image and click import, this imports the image into your InDesign document ready to be used.
Once the images were imported I then needed to add a white boarder effect. I selected the grey box with the cross through the middle and drew a box around the image. I then changed the colour of the box to white. You should not see the image now that the box is white. If you can you need to rearrange your image. You then move the white box and click on the image and click send to front. This moves the image to the front of the page, therefore covering the white box. I then aligned the image on top of the white square to make the image have a white boarder effect. Once I had done this I then clicked on the black arrow tool and highlighted both the image and the white box. I then pressed Ctl+G. This groups both the image and the box and makes then become one. To create an effective white boarder I selected the image with the black arrow tool and navigated to the properties tool. I then clicked on FX and selected drop shadow. I changed the opacity to 40%. By doing this it created a shadow that is not too small and not to overpowering.
Now that I have created a white boarder and a drop shadow I needed to rotate the images to make them effective and look good on the page. To do this I selected the image with the black arrow tool and clicked on the rotate tool, located in the effects bar on the left hand side of the document. I then clicked on a corner of the image with the rotate tool enabled and rotated the image to how I wanted. I then placed the images that I imported on top of one another, as seen above to create a wavy style effect.
Another important feature is the masthead. To create a masthead I opened Photoshop. I set the document page size to a width of 300mm and a height of 150mm. I also changed the resolution to 150 pixels per inch and the background to transparent. Selecting a transparent background is essential as this removes all white background colour when inserted into InDesign. If I did not set the background to transparent, when I save the image there will be a white background behind the text.
Once I correctly set up the document I then clicked on the text option and clicked where I wanted the text to be. I then typed the text that I wanted and resized to fit on the page. To do this you double click on the text and navigate to the formatting options located at the top of the page. I then changed the text colour to white and red and created an outline. I also changed the stroke options of the text, and created a drop shadow. By doing this the text features a unique design that looks good and attractive.
The last thing to do was to crop the text. Cropping the text before saving is essential as it reduces empty space. To crop the text i clicked on the dashed box crop option and I drew a square around the text. This crops the image to the size that i need it.
After cropping I needed to save the text. I went to file then save as. I needed to select the correct format to save my text in and this was PNG 24. This saves the text as it is with no background. If I saved the text as a jpeg, the text would develop a white background. Once the text was saved I simply inserted the text into InDesign, ready to use for my deployment.
A large difference in InDesign is the use of a white and black arrow tool. Both tools have very different jobs. The black tool is called the "selection tool". It is used to select frames and bounding boxes. It can be used to crop down images and change their size. The white arrow is called the "direct selection tool". It is used to select content and editable objects within the frames. This can be used to select and edit images within frames in the InDesign document. If InDesign did not feature both arrows, it would be very difficult to edit content within InDesign as you would have to select multiple images and formatting options with the complication of one mouse.
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