Fri, 29 Jan 2010 22:11:21 +0000

As someone new to InDesign, but familiar with older versions of PageMaker, this book served as a great guide to the software. Not only does it cover realistic (real-world) tutorial projects, but it spends considerable time filling in the reasoning for certain design decisions or indicates alternate methods whenever possible.

Most importantly, though, this book helped me immensely in providing a background to general back-end issues and the entire printing process. This is an area that I have no familiarity with, and the introductory material provided within this book was a great addition. This material could have easily been left out, but I am very thankful to see it.

My only criticisms are: 1) lack of CD-ROM — nowadays, these sort of project texts often come with CDs or at least a publisher-supplied donwload website. It’s omission is too bad, but liveable considering the quality of the text in general. 2) repetition of material — often, certain text is repeated several times, but this is probably due to way the book is organized.

Even though I have InDesign CS, I am still happy to have purchased this text for all that is has provided (in background). For someone with more backend / 3rd-party printing experience, the book may have too much background material for their liking.
Rating: 4 / 5

It is very useful to create guides as an alignment tool, and we use them all the time in desktop publishing to ‘guide’ us as to the placement of objects.

In InDesign, we can choose to create page guides and spread guides. Here’s how.

1To start drawing page guides, use the Selection Tool (black arrow) – Click on the horizontal ruler and drag a guide to the desired position on the page. Use the vertical rulers to give you an accurate position if you need it.

2When you let go, the guide will be automatically ‘dropped’ – you can change its position by clicking on it with the Selection Tool and moving it. You can also drag it back into the ruler to delete it.

3To create guides that span across a spread of pages, the important difference is that when you drag the guides down or across, you ‘drop’ the guide on the pasterboard, not the page.

4As you can see in this screenshot, I am dragging the guide into the pasterboard, not any individual pages. It helps if you zoom in and out here!

5We’re done! here is the spread showing one horizontal spread guide and 2 individual page guides.