Information Technology and Desktop Publishing

Pagemaker 7

This week, we will concentrate on studying aspects of design and desktop publishing in general, rather than learning new techniques in Pagemaker.

When considering the design of a publication, there are a number of factors to take into consideration:

· What is the purpose of the publication?

· Who will be reading it?

· Have I been given a set specification, e.g. page size, number of pages?

· Where is the content coming from? Am I able to adjust the content to suit the design?

These factors will help us to decide the initial document set up (i.e. page size) and draw up a rough plan, or dummy page. We will come back to planning and creating dummy pages later in the unit, before the assessment for LO3.

Fonts

By now, you should be familiar with some of the fonts available in Adobe Pagemaker, and have some idea of how to change them.

Type in the following text:

Poverty massively increases a person's risk of suffering a heart attack for the first time and dying before reaching hospital, a study shows. The most poverty-stricken people aged under 65 were twice as likely to die suddenly from a first heart attack than the least deprived.

You should find that, like the text above, it is in Times New Roman, size 12, leading 14.4. If not, don't worry - these are the 'default' settings on most PCs with Pagemaker, but not on all of them.

Make sure your control palette is visible (window > show control palette).

Using the pointer tool, delete the old text frame. Create a new text frame that covers the whole page. Type the text 'Times New Roman' and make the text large (50 points).

In the first line, leave the font on Times New Roman. Press enter and change the font to Courier New. Type the text 'Courier New'. Continue down the page, using the following fonts:

· Century Gothic

· Curlz MT

· Impact

· Mistral

· Rockwell

· Stencil

· Tahoma

· Webdings

Which of these fonts do you prefer? Why?

If you were to read a full page of text, which would you prefer? Which would you definitely not use?

Take a minute or two to study the fonts closely. Do you notice any similarities between certain fonts?

There are a number of things we can say about different fonts:

Family - some fonts belong to a family of fonts

Arial

Arial Black

Arial Narrow

Eras Bold ITC

Eras Demi ITC

Eras Light ITC

A family comprises a series of related fonts.

Serif and Sans Serif

Times New Roman is a serif font

Univers is a sans serif font

The difference is in the free end of the stroke on each letter. For example, the letter T:

T T The ends of the 'T' have a line crossing them in Times New Roman, but not in Univers.

Why does this matter?

Serif, or 'Roman' fonts, are more familiar to the reader and are therefore easier to read for a sustained period of time.

Sans serif fonts have only been popular since the 1920s, and are more commonly used for headlines or in advertisements, when you wish to catch the reader's attention.

Other types of font

Other types of font include:

Pi fonts (e.g. Webdings) these allow the use of specialist characters and bullet points.

Slab Serif (e.g. Rockwell) 'typewriter' fonts

Script (e.g. Mistral) made to look like handwriting

Decorative (e.g. Stencil) 'novelty' fonts

Of these, Pi fonts are the most commonly used. While the others can be good for attention-grabbing ads or original invitations, they are tiring to read and should be used sparingly!

Take a few minutes to experiment with different fonts in Pagemaker. You may wish to note down fonts that you think will be useful to you for LO3, producing a two page newsletter.

Note: one common problem with early desktop publishing attempts was that designers were tempted to use too many fonts. This is messy and irritating - not a look you want to go for. Instead, choose one or two fonts and adapt them to meet your needs.

Other ways to get the look you want

Having chosen the style of font to be used, there are a number of other opportunities to adapt the font to the job in hand.

We have already considered the possibilities of tracking (adjusting the space between letters horizontally) and leading (adjusting the space vertically between lines). These techniques, along with adjusting the inset (the space between the text and the edge of the frame), can be very useful when trying to fit the component parts of a publication (headlines, articles, graphics etc) onto a page.

A small adjustment to the tracking, for example, will not be noticed by the reader, but can save a line or two, enabling an article to fit neatly into its allocated space.

Font size

We have looked at resizing graphics, one of the trickier techniques to master in Pagemaker. We have also changed the font size, but it’s worth considering a few possibilities here.

The font size is measured in points and can be adjusted easily by highlighting the text and using the control palette or type > size. We can also use the keyboard shortcut of control + shift + < or >, a very useful shortcut to remember (it also works in Word and Powerpoint).

Points are a type of measurement developed in the print industry. As we have seen, Pagemaker can also use inches and millimetres as units of measurement, although this would mean dealing with small fractions if it were applied to font sizes.

Each font also has it’s own set width and type size. For example, these letter G’s are all font size 20:

G G G G G G

(from left) Arial, Chiller, Franklin Gothic Demi, Impact, Goudy Old Style, Rockwell Condensed.

As you can see, size 16 can vary both in width (set width) and height (X-height). So changing from Arial to Times New Roman, for example, would reduce the amount of space required.

Warning – do not treat this as a way to cram too much into your page!! Condensed fonts like Impact are very hard on the eyes, although they can make effective, attention-grabbing headings.

Justification and alignment

We have also experimented in previous weeks with justifying and aligning text.

Justified text appears like this. It is straightforward and good for reading but can lead to awkward hyphenations or big spaces in between words. There is also an argument that it is difficult for people with dyslexia to read.

This text has been centred. Some people like this look, but it can be irritating and tiring for the reader if it is used too much.

This text has been left aligned. Unlike the justified text, the edges do not all end in the same place.

This text is right aligned. Again, this is an eye-catching look but is best used sparingly.

Try justifying and left aligning articles from earlier weeks. Which do you prefer and why?

Balance

How else can you attract a reader’s attention? What parts of the page are particularly important?

The optical centre of a page is 3/8 from the top, 5/8 from the bottom.

3/8

here!

5/8

We can also consider whether to make the content symmetrical or asymmetrical, i.e. centred along an imaginary line in the middle, or off-centre.

A symmetrical approach suggests a formal, stable approach, but could also be considered boring.

An asymmetrical approach is less formal, but allows more use of white space and more visual interest.

Contrast

Although we don’t have access to colour printers, this doesn’t mean everything has to be black and white. Contrast can be important – e.g. shaded panels, different sizes, shapes and positions.

But beware… too much of a good thing can be visually confusing and difficult to read, which kind of defeats the purpose!

Exercise

Taking into account the techniques we have considered, design a newspaper advertisement for the Psychology Higher course.