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
Photoshop and Illustrator cheat sheets for designers For many creatives, it can often feel like there's never enough hours in the day. With ever-demanding clients and constantly looming deadlines, applying time-saving techniques to your workflow is essential, and these helpful cheat sheets for Photoshop CS6 and Illustrator CS6 can help you do just that. Whether you're following a new Photoshop tutorial, or simply practising how to draw something in Illustrator, these cheat sheets will help creatives at all skill levels – and most of the CS6 shortcuts are applicable to Creative Cloud versions of the software, too. The team at Zerolag created the sheets specifically with graphic designers in mind, providing code below the graphic so it can be shared and help improve the productivity of fellow creatives. They've also made printer-friendly versions available for quick referencing. So what are you waiting for? Like this?
Creative Magazine Layout Design Ideas Check out these unique, innovative and creative magazine layout designs and get some great ideas while designing your next magazine! These are a selection of ready-made InDesign and Photoshop magazine templates that you can buy and customize with your own details! InDesign Magazine Paper Ripped Ad // 9 Variations – Premium Paper Rip Advertisements for Brochures & Magazines // A4. 9 clean, modern & fresh and stylish advertisements made in InDesign. Modern Magazine Western Vintage Magazine 22 Pages Modern Magazine Templates Business Magazine – A simple and modern template designed primarily for magazines, but can also be used for newsletters, brochures, booklets, and annual reports to name a few. 40 Pages Magazine #2 – This is the most complete magazine template you can find! eXtreme Magazine Template – This template is for anyone looking for a urban, degraded magazine style. Teenage Magazine Indesign Template Surfing Magazine Magazine! Travel Magazine and Magazine Template HandySquares Magazine
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. 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 Selecting a font in InDesign is a little bit different than selecting a font in most other page layout programs. InDesign’s user interface for selecting fonts mirrors this approach. Size
How to Make an Animated GIF in Photoshop [Tutorial] If you've spent any time on the internet at all, you've probably come in contact with an animated GIF. It's an image file that allows you to feature animated images that makes it seem like the image is moving. Think of them as a hybrid between a still image and a video. Why are GIFs great additions to your marketing? They're easy to consume, provide a new way to capture your viewers' attention, and can have a serious emotional impact. The best part about GIFs is that they aren't too hard to make. Click here to download our free guide to learn how to design high-quality graphics. In the following tutorial on making animated GIFs, I'm using the Creative Cloud 2015 version of Photoshop, but the steps should be similar in other versions. How to Create an Animated GIF in Photoshop Here's an example of an animated GIF you might make using this tutorial: Alright, let's get started! Step 1: Upload your images to Photoshop. If you already have images created ... Step 2: Open up the Timeline window.
25 Magazine-Style Layouts for Your Design Inspiration Magazine and news-style designs have become increasingly popular. Content management systems like WordPress have a wide selection of themes for this type of site, making it easy for the average website owner or blogger to achieve a look that is similar to a news site. In this post we will feature 25 sites that provide inspiration for magazine-style layouts. Looking for hosting?
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. 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. If all is looking good, increase the stroke weight of the path to thicken up the linework.
How To Create Wet Plate Collodion Styled Images In Photoshop (My Tutorial) I’m sure this will cause a bit of stir in the photography community, but retouching images is my kind of art creating something original. This is the first of hopefully many retouching and photography tutorials that I will be doing over the next months. This tutorial is about wet plate collodion images which I’ve been trying to find a way to emulate in post production. I really like the look and feel of these kind of images. For me, the basic photograph is the starting point and I try to capture people as they are. Then I go ahead and try to create something more, and for this series I have tried to capture a bit more of that old feel to the images. More info: anttikarppinen.com
Tips for Creating a Magazine Layout in InDesign Adobe InDesign is the most popular application in the world for creating book or magazine layouts. The program is flexible and full of options, yet intuitive. After you get used to it, you will find out it is very easy to use. It differs from the other Adobe applications from some points of view. I know a lot of quick ways to work in Photoshop and Illustrator, but first when I have used InDesign I have realized that I need to learn the shortcuts again, because they are different. I am not an InDesign expert myself, but I have a strong knowledge of the program and I can make a list of things you would like to know before starting to work with it. Image by shutterstock Master Pages If you design a single-page layout, you can handle it with Photoshop. To set those pre-defined elements you have to access the Pages palette and double-click on “A-Master”. Margin and Bleeds The margin and bleeds are mainly important to keep in mind when you design a layout for print. Frames Proper Images Color
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. In other words the gradient isn't linear or radial, which are the only options to choose from in Illustrator. 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 Select Art Brush from the brush type options Draw a circle
Wait, We Still Like Paper!: How to Screen Print on an Inkjet When designer Briana Bolger-Schuth took a break from advertising work, she wanted to make art. She had no art studio, but she did have access to a new Epson inkjet. Working on a project one night, she had a revelation: “I suddenly thought, ‘Hey, I wonder what would happen if I set these up as separations and ran the paper through each time for different colors?'” The results are pretty wonderful. She calls the project Let’s Put the Black on Last, and the setup is really simple. “The idea of getting something different out of the printer other than just what I expect is so exciting to me,” says Bolger-Schuth, “Where is the fun in knowing exactly what’s going to happen when you press the print button?” When Walter Benjamin penned The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, he bemoaned the loss of authenticity and aura in mass-produced printed works. With Let’s Put the Black on Last, I have my answer. Click to Open Overlay Gallery The other joy is that the process is dead simple.
Create a Large Face, Cat Illustration from Stock in Adobe Illustrator I'm not hiding it... I'm a crazy cat lady. When the trend of having t-shirts of large faces of animals, merged into the canvas started, I was going through all the t-shirt design sites to find the perfect one for me. So inspired by that trend, I'd like to show you how to create your own design, from a stock image, in Adobe Illustrator. 1. Step 1 It all starts with a cute stock image. Step 2 So let's bring the stock image over into Adobe Photoshop. I have my crop now, ready to move over to Illustrator. 2. Let's first prepare our document. Then create a new layer, this is where the magic is going to happen. One of the main reasons to have your kitty looking straight on and with the eyes balanced horizontally, is that we're going to mirror the strokes and shapes you add to the canvas. Use the Line Segment Tool (\) to draw a vertical line down the middle of the portrait. Let me explain the theory behind this. Step 3 Did you know you can apply an effect to a whole layer, not just a shape? 3. 4.