What's due for Tues, April 3

At the beginning of class on Tuesday, you need to have three things done:

1. Your tweaked, finalized six interior pages for the lulu book, exported as a pdf with the bleeds included (to include the bleeds in the export, when you go File >> Export, export it as a an Adobe PDF (Print), and in the dialogue box that appears, from the options on the left, you can choose "Marks and Bleeds." Once you click on that, there is a "Bleed and Slug" dialogue box, and in that, check the box for "Use Document Bleed Settings." That should export the pages with bleeds.

IMPORTANT NOTE: I actually goofed up when mentally converting inches to picas when I gave you the bleed settings for your InDesign document. 1p5 is not an eighth of an inch, it's a quarter inch. And unfortunately the picas setting in InDesign doesn't seem to recognize 0p75 (which would be an eighth of an inch) as a valid value. So you'll need to convert your InDesign document settings to inches, and then set the bleed as an eighth of an inch. to do that, in InDesign, go to "inDesign" in the top left menu, like so:

InDesign > Preferences > Units and Increments
And in the dialog box, select the horizontal and vertical ruler units as inches instead of picas.

After that, in the upper menu, go:
File > Document Setup, and in the bleed section, set the bleeds to .125 inches

Then you should be good to export with bleeds.

2. Your finished cover art for the book -- "The Lunch Box." This should be sized to 8.75in x 8.75in (the book is 8.5x8.5, so this includes and eighth of an inch bleed). You should own all the rights to the images you use on the cover.

3. I want you to bring in some example of an ad or page layout that you find, in a magazine, a book, or online, that you can step us through in terms of how you think the image was put together -- what settings in Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign were used? On Tuesday, I'll have you present the image, an verbally walk us through a kind of "reverse engineering" process for it.

Recap on a couple of the InDesign tips

Spellcheck in InDesign is located under the "Edit" menu: Spelling : Check Spelling

To adjust hyphenation settings, select the text you want to adjust the setting for, and then under the "Window" menu: type and tables: paragraph

Once the paragraph menu is open, click the little triangle in the upper right corner, and in the submenu that appears, click hyphenation. That gives you access to hyphenation parameters and the hyphenation slider.

AND A REMINDER: you six lulu pages are due at the beginning of Monday's class.

Note for Tuesday, March 6

Hi all. My apologies for not showing up today, I'm very under the weather – feeling like death warmed over, pretty much, but I picked up some antibiotics and will definitely be there this thursday, even if I'm still feeling crummy, so we can have a decent check-in before spring break.

I was going to have you look at each others' two-page spreads today, so we could all get some ideas, and you could get some feedback on your designs. Instead, I'll just have you push on and continue to work on your six pages. It would be great if you could have all six pages laid out by the beginning of next class, and then we'll look at your work on Thursday. I'm sure I'll have tweaks and changes from there – I want to be really focused on the text/image balance, and the layout of the text in particular. I have a couple more things to share about InDesign, which I'll do Thursday, towards that end.

There is a link on the left sidebar to this blog that has some online InDesign reference. I'd recommend you show your current work to whoever sitting next to you, to get some feedback in process. Again, sorry to not be there today, but have a good work period – I'm looking forward to seeing your pages on Thursday.