Skills Development

Making sure that the Indesign document was set

up correctly was crucial to creating a successful

product. The means the page must have the right

margins, columns and other factors to make it look

right.Setting up an InDesign document

When opening up a new InDesign document, you will be presented with this window. This gives

you the control to edit the structure of the page, which ultimately controls how the final product will look. It is important to know how you want

the document to look before you begin your construction, as it is much more difficult to

change the layout of the document after you have started working on it.

The first box controls the number of pages, and the size of those pages. It is important to make sure that the image is in A3, as it will give you

more room to work with. Do not edit the width or height unless you want a custom size. Also, for

this project, make sure that the orientation is portrait, as this is the standard rotation for

magazines.

The second because controls the number of columns on each page. Bare in mind that these are only guidelines, and do not actually decide

where the text can be placed. The gutter changes the distance between the columns so

they are not connected to each other.

The third box controls the margins. These change the size of the actual box which you are supposed to work in. Once again, these

are only guidelines and you can go outside of the box if you choose to. So, the bigger the

margins, the smaller the working box.

The final is box is hidden in a drop down box. This contains controls to the bleed and slug. These are rarely used, and can sometimes be

difficult to get right. The bleed controls the size of a border outside of the page. This is to change the size of how much of the page will be printed. This to make sure that there

is no white border on the page when it is printed. The slug also controls how much of

the page will be printed, but this instead adds white border to the page.