Moorpark College Graphic Design

No matter what type of publication you’re working on: newsletter, magazine, brochure, catalog, greeting card, etc., once the design problems are resolved, the rest is mostly production work. Because production work tends to have repetitive procedures, there are a whole slew of “tricks” that can speed the process up and take the tedium out of the work.

The Page Palette

1. Duplicate a page with all of its elements, including guides – Click on the page in the page palette, hold down the option key and drag it below the existing page. Voila, a twin!
2. To edit and remove master elements from a page in the publication – Click on the page palette pop up menu>Override All Master Page Items. They are no unlocked and free to move about the cabin.
3. In the same palette, you can steal master pages from other documents by first saving, then loading master pages.
4. For that matter clone a page from a different file by dragging its page icon from one file to the other.

Step and Repeat

1. One of my favorite and one of the more useful features for production is Step and Repeat found under the Edit Menu. Use it to duplicate and position elements with a single operation.

Assign Color to Line Art

1. In photoshop, convert your line art to Bitmap. If you scanned it in RGB, you’ll need to convert the file to grayscale before converting it to Bitmap. In the conversion dialog, choose 50% threshold, which converts all pixels under 50% gray to white, and those greater than 50% to black.
2. Place the bitmap file into InDesign.
3. Select the content of the frame with the Direct Select (white) arrow tool and the “fill” swatch active.
4. Choose a color from the swatches palette to convert the contents to the desired color.
5. To fill the background with a color, use the Black Selection arrow tool.

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