Yearbook Spread Project
Learn two-page layout design with a photo-oriented yearbook spread
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Save The Template |
| Navigate
to the last alphabetical item of the server, which should be a file
called YB template. Open it and save as a document
to your folder, naming it "yearbook" or something similar.
Go to Layout>Margins and Columns and set the number
of columns to anything from 8 to 12.
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Create Your Dominant |
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Unlike
your newsletter, the yearbook spread will be designed to feature photographs
rather than text. Good yearbook designs will let one good photo tell
the story of the entire page, so it should be twice as big as the other
photos. We call this the dominant photo. Once it is
in position, the rest of the design will fall into place around it.
The dominant will also determine much of the eyeline, or horizontal
division of the page, which falls roughly one-third from either the
top or the bottom of the spread. The dominant will also bleed across
the gutter, meaning it appears in the middle of the spread on both pages,
split by the vertical division where the pages are bound together. Draw
a large photo block with the frame tool 
across the center of the spread and about two-thirds the height of the
page, making sure to start and end it at the edges of your columns.
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Give Me Five (More) |
| Remembering
that visual information should be united somewhere near the center of
any page design, and that your design should contain a minimum of six
photos, draw in at least five more photo blocks, none more than half
the number of columns as wide as the dominant. Use the vertical gaps
between columns as white space that separates all the photos by one
pica. Don't completely fill the two pages with photos, because you will
still need room for your body copy, story and headlines.
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Captions for Everyone |
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Shifting
to the text tool  ,
draw an equal number of text blocks that will serve as captions for
your photos. These do not need to be very large, as most captions only
contain two sentences. Be careful not to put a caption for the dominant
photo in the space where the eyeline will go, and especially don't place
the dominant's caption in the gutter where it will be impossible to
read. Fill them with placeholder text for the time being. |
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Space Savers |
| Once you have your photo blocks and captions established, adjust the separation on their horizontal sides by pulling guide lines down from the ruler on the top of the window to near one of your photo blocks. Watch the pica measurement on the Y axis of the Transform palette and attempt to select a whole number (one that ends in zero, such as 37p0) before locking it in place. Pull a second one down one pica below the first (38p0 in the above example). Then stretch the bottom of one photo block or caption block until it touches the top guide, and stretch the top of the photo block or caption block below it to touch the bottom guide. | |
Dominant Pizza |
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| Let's go looking for images to place in your photo blocks now. The most important one is your dominant photo. This should be the best photo you can find to tell the story of your page the moment people first see it. Because we are about journalism and journalism is about people, find a photo that contains at least two people but no more than four or five. Since you will also be cropping the photo around the gutter of the spread, get a photo that contains some empty space near the middle of the photo, perhaps a gap between two people. The photo at left is an ideal example. If you are using a web image find one that is at least 500 pixels wide. Even better, download a photo from your Photo Gallery from last semester! | |
| Gutter Check | |
Select your dominant photo block and run the Width & Height script
in the Scripts Panel (Window>Automation>Scripts or option-⌘-F11), making a note of the dimensions. Drag your image to the Photoshop icon in the dock or control/right click it and Open With Photoshop. Choose the Crop |
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| Fill 'em Up | |
| Now, one at a time, find the dimensions of your other photo blocks and crop your other photos to fit them. None of your smaller photos should cross the gutter, so this will be a quick and easy exercise. When you have completed them all, place them in the correct blocks and watch your spread come alive with color. If you still need a more complete review of cropping, review the Picking Crops section of the Newsletter Tutorial. | |
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Library Fine |
| Next let's put in a design for the catch phrase, the part of the spread that serves as an attention-getting headline. You already have some great ideas in your library you created before the newsletter project, so open it up and drag something out into the area we left open for our body copy, then edit it to fit your page space and content. Your catch phrase needs to be paired with an informative subhead, so find a place to include a small headline using the same style rules we learned in the newsletter project. | |
| Messin' with Text | |
| Now it's time to bring in the text frame for the body copy. It will contain two columns of equal size with the baselines properly aligned. Instead of linking separate text frames together and using the baseline grid, however, we will contain everything inside one frame. Draw a text frame large enough to fill at least four column guides, then go to Object>Text Frame Options, choose 2 columns, then click OK. Eventually you will copy and paste the six paragraph story you wrote for your newsletter, but for now open the Paragraph Styles palette from the Type menu, select Body Copy, then fill the columns with placeholder text to see how it looks. | |
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Touch
It Up |
| You can enhance your design a bit further by adding an initial letter to the beginning of your body copy. Click with the text tool inside the first paragraph of your story, then go to the paragraph palette and change the number up to three or four lines to enlarge the first letter and wrap it into rest of the text. Another enhancement would be to change the letter to an attractive art font after enlarging it, or changing its color in the Swatches palette. | |
Line
'em Up |
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| Also remember that adding lines to the design is a great way to add some flair to your design. Use lines to separate, to lead the eye from one element to the next, and to border items to make them stand out. Use the line tool \ and the shift key to draw straight, level lines, then alter their thickness and style with the Stroke palette, and their color with the Swatches palette. | |
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Check
It Out |
Let's check off what you must have in your yearbook spread now.
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Good Job and Good Luck! |
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| Congratulations! You are now a page design guru. |
tool. Enter the Width and Height in the Crop Options fields under the Menu bar and draw your crop marquee. Move or resize it. Now make a note of the center mark in the middle of the marquee. It marks the same point as the center of the X in your dominant photo block. Determine where it sits in relation to the gutter, which is the black line dividing the two pages at zero on the horizontal ruler. Move the crop marquee back and forth until you have positioned any gap between people to fall where the gutter lies relative to the center mark. Hit Enter to complete the crop, then Save As with a new file name, in case your crop does not turn out as planned. Finally, place the photo to see if the gutter (the zero X line) falls where you wanted it, making sure no faces, hands, or other important parts of the photo disappear into it. If something is wrong, reopen the original file, not the cropped one, and try it again. 
