Jointly reported by:
Eugene Wong Zane Shaun Jr1Z(1)
Michael Ng Sr3A
Ever wanted to design your own book? Kuen Cheng Newsletter Club has got you covered with their talk on magazine layout with InDesign held on Sunday, 30th May 2021, through the Zoom video platform. Guest speakers consist of layout directors from various school publications.
The first speaker was Ho Yi Xuan, who held many titles, such as the Vice President of the Newsletter Club and the Editor of the English edition of the “Learning On” Kuen Cheng News Bulletin.
Her part of the talk was very demonstrational. Through a shared screen, she showed attendees how to set up their InDesign document, explaining various presets along the way. Once that’s done, she talked about adding and deleting pages, as well as changing their position and layout (i.e. detached or dual spread). Then, she showed attendees how to create guidelines for rows, columns, and gutters in-between.
Once the base setup was complete, Yi Xuan imported a text file into her program and moved onto textual layout. She showed attendees many ways to manipulate text and to overcome common issues like garbled text. She also taught us the technique of using the A-Master tool to standardise elements across all pages, for instance, page numbering.
Finally, she talked about her go-to websites for finding new fonts: http://www.xiazaiziti.com/tag/ttf for Chinese typefaces and https://www.dafont.com/ for English ones. One can also find inspirations on layout spreads on Pinterest. In a Q&A session right after the end of her talk, Yi Xuan mentioned that her favourite spread was that of Mr King Ban Hui’s. She also taught attendees how to overcome more technical difficulties in that session.
Phoon Mei Gi, the layout editor of “Dreams”, the 33rd edition of the Creative Writing Society’s annual literary magazine, was up next.
She began her section of the talk by introducing attendees to Photoshop. First, she explained how to use shortcut keys to remove items from images. She also taught participants how to change the settings of images which include colour, image size and resolution. She suggested that people should change the default resolution setting of 72 to 100 for digital books and 300 for physical books. Furthermore, she suggested using the TIFF image format when saving Photoshopped images.
Next, she taught the participants how to add photos into InDesign, as well as how to change the position and size of the photo. She also explained a set of symbols and what they mean. These included a yellow triangle, which represents that a picture has been tweaked; and a circle that represents that an image file has been deleted. Both issues can be fixed by simply clicking the symbols and relinking the files. On the note of linking files, she added that embedding links is not encouraged if one has up to a few hundred pages as the file size will be too big.
After that, she encourages one to save their files as a PDF if it will only be checked by teachers or teammates. When it comes to combining files or publishing, however, she encourages saving the file as a package. She ended her section with another Q&A, where she shared her experience of working in layout.
Mei Gi inserting a picture into an InDesign document
Then, the spotlight was passed onto Grace Anoushka Lee Sue Ern and Tan Ginny, respectively Editor and Layout Member of the 2020 edition of the Kuen Cheng News Magazine. In contrast with the previous speakers, their section was spoken in English instead of Chinese.
Grace first talked about fundamentals for layout. She explained that the key points of layout are readability and aesthetics, with readability focusing on three main aspects: fonts, sizing and justification. She emphasised that one should always prioritize readability over aesthetics. Why? According to Grace, “Even though good aesthetics can attract more readers, having people able to read and comprehend the text is still more important in the grand scheme of things.”
Next, she listed out the Do’s and Don’ts of layout. For Do’s, she said that the main text should always be contained within the margins as anything outside that would be cut off during printing. Additionally, she added that the bleeding should be 3mm in all aspects, though one should always check with their editor. She encourages that one should store all their photos in a specific folder and to not change the file name as it will make linking difficult.
The don’ts? She said that one should not edit the text without permission even when they see a blatant grammatical or spelling error. She also added that one should not use low quality photos, put text over images, or integrate contrasting colours. Although it may look nicer, it will be difficult to read. Remember, “readability over aesthetics”!
Ginny picked up where Grace left off by delving into the technical aspects of InDesign, pointing out various tools on the software interface and explaining what they were good for. Similar to previous speakers, she also taught attendees how to create page numbering, deal with margins, and save the file. However, these were covered briefly, and she provided some YouTube links she found handy for attendees to watch on their own.
She then mentioned handy websites to find free high-quality stock images for the magazines, like Unsplash, Pexels, Flickr, Picography, Little Visuals, and Life of Pix. Like Yi Xuan, she also frequents Pinterest for layout ideas.
In Ginny and Grace’s joint Q&A session, they mention that doing layout design is a “learn-as-you-go” process, as accumulated experience only really helps with reducing the time spent on it. Ginny also advised attendees to space out their workload, as “if you procrastinate on layout, it’s going to look bad. On you, and the design.”
Q&A with Ginny and Grace