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How to Create a Professional Magazine Layout

How to Create a Professional Magazine Layout
A few times a each month we revisit some of our reader’s favorite posts from throughout the history of Vectortuts+. This tutorial by Otto Coster was first published on August 4th 2010. Have you ever wondered how professional designers strike the perfect balance between text and image? Using InDesign's powerful type tools, you will learn techniques to help you set and arrange a magazine layout. Step 1 Setting up the Document We'll be using a standard A4 size document for this tutorial. Step 2 Creating a Grid To set up the page grid, go to the "A-master spread" and choose Layout > Create Guides. Why? Step 3 Placing a Background When creating a magazine layout, you'll want to keep a good balance between the white space, images and text. Go to page 2–3 and place your photograph in the bleed space so that the entire spread is covered. Step 4 Creating Body Text Step 5 Setting up a Baseline Grid To make our text look good we need to set up a baseline grid. Step 6 Changing the Basic Paragraph Style

Character Formatting | Why Adobe InDesign CS6 Is Now the Best Desktop Typesetting Program Character formatting controls the appearance of the individual letters in your publication. Font, type size, color, and leading are all aspects of character formatting. (Longtime QuarkXPress users won’t think of leading as a character format, but we’ll cover that next.) We refer to all formatting that can be applied to a selected range of text as “character” formatting, and refer to formatting that InDesign applies at the paragraph level as “paragraph” formatting. Tab settings, indents, paragraph rules, space above, and space after are examples of paragraph formatting. In addition to these distinctions, InDesign’s paragraph styles can include character formatting, but apply to entire paragraphs. Character Formatting Controls To display the Character panel and shift the focus to the panel’s Font field, press Command-T/Ctrl-T. To display the Control panel, press Command-Option-6/Ctrl-Alt-6. Font Family and Font InDesign’s user interface for selecting fonts mirrors this approach. Size Leading

40 Online Generators for Web Designers Should Bookmark Online Generators for Web Designers can be a great way to save time in your web design projects. High-quality generators can create graphics or code or even layouts in a matter of seconds or minutes, things that might take an hour or more if done by hand. Online generator are those tools that help us to create those popular “XHTML valid” CSS banners, micro buttons or css website templates in seconds. Advertisement 1. XML /SWF charts are used to create attractive graphs and charts from XML data, Create a source either manually or generate dynamically then pass it to the XML chart’s flash file. 2. The web form generator from Web Form Factory automatically generates he necessary backend code to tie your form to a database. 3. Typetester is used to compare three different type of fonts on screen making your designing job easier , Just specify the specifications and compare them 4. 256 Pixels 5. 80 x 15 brilliant Button Maker 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. pForm pForm is a free HTML form builder.

Dreamweaver CS5 Tutorial: How to Design a Website with Dreamweaver CS5 Chapter 1: Build and Create a Site with Dreamweaver CS5 by Christopher Heng, thesitewizard.com Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 is a computer program that you can use to create and maintain a website. It lets you design websites visually on your computer, almost in the same way you would use a wordprocessor like Microsoft Word or Office. It combines ease-of-use with power, making it a favourite (or "favorite" if you use US English) among both new webmasters as well as seasoned professionals. Overall Goals of This Tutorial Series This tutorial series guides you through the process of creating a complete, fully functional, multi-page website using Dreamweaver CS5. As a result, not only will you have a working site at the end of this series, you will also have gained the skills and knowledge to create, design and publish any other website you wish. Goal of This Chapter In this chapter, you will create a basic two-column web page and put it on the Internet. What You Will Need Start up Dreamweaver.

Create a Distressed Vector Typographic Poster Design Follow this step by step walkthrough of my recent design process for the ‘Spectrum’ poster. Starting with custom made type in Illustrator, we’ll move our vector graphics into Photoshop for some serious distressing with Photoshop brushes, blending modes and more! The Spectrum poster takes inspiration from the old ZX Spectrum computer of the 80′s, the feature of the design is the custom made abstract type, which is mixed with a full spectrum of colours then grunged up to the max with textures and muted background tones. The overall theme is a cool mix of 80′s retro and modern day grunge. Start work in Adobe Illustrator. Aim to follow each letter from the previous to form one continuous line. The word Spectrum is split in half to help compose the design and to add that extra touch of abstractism. Drag out a few guides to match on key points of the path. Once all the type has been aligned and tweaked, take a step back to review the design as a whole. Continue tracing segments of each letter.

Lackadaisy Expressions Boy, I didn't know what I was getting myself into when I started this. I've had requests for some sort of expressions tutorial dating back a while now, so I figured, "Sure! I can explain expression drawing...and it'll be way better than all those tutorials out there that are nothing but charts of generic expressions. Yeah! Just give me a day or two to whip something up..." Um. Anyway, I found all I could really do was try to explain ways to teach yourself...and then add some pictures. How to start in HTML / Web design Quick links Getting startedWriting basic HTMLViewing the web pageDisplaying imagesUnderstanding directoriesCase SensitivePosting the websiteSetting up a DomainWeb Hosting Beyond the basics Getting Started HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the primary building block of creating a website. Once you have obtained an HTML editor and are ready to begin setting up your website, think about how you want the page to setup or look, maybe even draw out your ideas. How are you going to store all the files? Tip: Realize that your web page will change over time as you find things that don't work. Writing basic HTML After installing an HTML editor and setting up a folder you are ready to begin creating your page. Once you are in the blank index.htm or index.html file, we recommend inserting the below source code into your page. <html><head><title>My first web page</title></head><body>Your web page content goes here</body></html> Viewing the website Displaying images or if you have an images folder: .. ..

Gradient rings in Illustrator Circular graph Here is a very simple example of what I talk about. The gradient in each part of the graph follows the direction of the circle. The graph below has 28 segments and is applied in a more illustrative kind of way. Circular gradient Draw a rectangle Start by selecting the Rectangle tool and draw a small rectangle. Duplicate the rectangle Duplicate the rectangle by selecting the Selection tool (black arrow), and start dragging to the right as shown in the image above. Add color Give the second rectangle the ending color of your gradient. Blend options To prepare our perfect gradient using the blend feature, we first check our blend options. Make Blend Now that the options are all set, select both rectangles and go to Object > Blend > Make (or press Cmd/Ctrl + Option/Alt + B) to create the blend. Create new Art Brush Now that we've created our perfect color blend, we are going to turn it into an Art Brush. Select Art Brush from the brush type options Give the brush a name. Draw a circle

The League of Moveable Type Building your first web page with HTML - Lesson 2 In this ‘hands-on’ module we will be building our first web page in no time. We just need to quickly cover a couple of points beforehand to help get our feet on the ground. The three ways you can build a web page 1. A web site design template is a pre-made website design template which can be customized to reflect your company’s branding. Web site templates can be very useful; they can be used by experienced web designers to ‘jump-start’ the creation of a website. 2. HTML editors make building web pages feel like (to a certain extent) creating a document in Microsoft Word … it’s made pretty easy. 3. That means you type in the HTML code yourself. Ok, now that we know the advantages of hand-coding web pages, let’s jump into just the bare minimum of theory, then we will build our first web page! HTML tags are specifically formatted text that creates ‘markers’ for web browser to read and interpret. Tags are typically words or abbreviations of words placed between angled brackets.

Creating Seamless Textures In Illustrator I think you’ll all agree that Illustrator is just plain awesome, and with the continual improvements we see with each new version, it keeps getting better and better. Previously, I created seamless textures for typography and seamless backgrounds for my web and illustration projects with Photoshop. But we’ve seen large improvements with the Appearance panel in more recent versions of Illustrator, so now I create these textures and backgrounds solely in Illustrator–it’s actually super easy! So in today’s tutorial, I’ll walk you through the steps on how to create a variety of seamless textures and backgrounds all in Adobe Illustrator. Tutorial Details: Seamless Textures and Seamless Backgrounds Program : Adobe Illustrator CC (You should be able to create this tutorial in CS4+ but some of the tutorial images might look different.)Difficulty: Beginner/IntermediateTopics Covered: Appearance Panel, Effects, Pattern Fills, Graphic StylesEstimated Completion Time: 15-20 minutes each Raster Effects

A Guide to Popular Printing Techniques In college in Waterford, Ireland, one of our class projects was called “Techniques.” The brief was to become familiar with every printing technique we could and show them through physical pieces. It was a fun project. However, when you leave school, you don’t always get the chance to work with these really amazing printing techniques or even figure them into your budget, but what I will talk about in this guide are popular and affordable. Note: I will be using a few print design terminologies here, and if you’re unfamiliar with some of these terms, you can get up to speed by reading my guide on preparing your work for print. Embossing/Debossing Embossing and dembossing are similar processes that create a different result. Embossing produces a raised impression on your paper stock, while debossing creates a depressed impression. Things to remember when designing for a piece that includes embossing/debossing: From Amanda Woodward found on Flickr. From tasteofinkstudios.com Varnish Foil Die Cut

Vectips - Illustrator tips, tricks, and tutorials 20 Free Fonts Just Perfect for Retro and Vintage Designs Awww, vintage and retro style designes are simply awesome. By using various design elements such as textures, patterns and brushes to add an aged or used appearance designers can easily pull of timeless look. To compliment retro/vintage appearance it’s also important to use proper typography from the time period you are trying to represent. To help you out, I’ve rounded up 20 perfect retro and vintage fonts to use in your designs. I’m hoping that you found at least one new font to add to your collection.

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