Timesaving design techniques: with templates, you need not always start from scratch - Tutorial

Home Office Computing, Feb, 1993 by Steve Morgenstern

With Templates, You Need Nat Always Start From Scratch

How do you want to create your publication?

You could start your design from scratch, determining all the margin and column settings, type styles, ruling lines, text and image placement, and so on. Or you could use a prepared desktop-publishing template that poses the design question in a simpler, fill-in-the-blanks format.

A template is a ready-to-use publication file, with spaces for you to insert text and graphics into a prelab layout. Most page-layout programs today come with a variety of templates, and additional template files are available in several program formats, both commercially and as shareware.

GETTING WISE TO THE WHYS

To make the most of any template, you need to analyze it and understand why certain design decisions were made. If you understand the "why" behind the template, then you can customize the elements and adapt the design to fit your needs. And ultimately, by fiddling with elements in an established layout, you develop your own design vocabulary for future projects.

Let's look at each aspect of a templated page and consider where adjustments may be necessary or advisable.

Page size. Nearly every template I've seen assumes a standard 8.5-by-11-inch page. That's fine if you're planning to reproduce your publication straight from the laser printer or with a copy machine, but it may be a significant blunder if you're having the job reproduced in quantity by a professional printer.

Sure, any prim shop can print an 8.5-by-11-inch sheet. But is that the optimal size for your project? That will depend on a number of factors:

* The amount of information you need to convey. It may be more cost-effective to use a larger page rather than add pages. Or you may be able to economize by using a smaller sheet if you don't need much room.

* The impact you are trying to achieve. When it comes to promotional pieces, bigger is often better. An oversize catalog that arrives in a big envelope will stick out among the clutter of the day's mail. A bigger page may allow you to use larger graphic images, too. On the other hand, if you're preparing a publication oriented toward ready-reference purposes (a member directory, for instance), then a smaller page size may be easier to store on a shelf or stow in a brief case.

* Your print shop's equipment. Sometimes the difference of a fraction of an inch in a given dimension can cut your printing costs substantially, because different sizes work better on different printing presses. The only way you'll find out if there are economies available in this area is to speak with your print shop expert before you go ahead and design the job.

If there are valid reasons for using alternate page sizes and templates are standardized on good old 8.5 by 11, we need a way to adjust page size accordingly. With an extreme size adjustment, an otherwise attractive template can become a poor choice. For example, a template that stresses long thin verticals, with several narrow columns and ruling lines, will lose its graphic punch if you lop off the bottom to fit it on a page that's nearly square.

More often, though, you'll be making relatively minor adjustments. The key to making these tweaks is changing the template proportionately. Now if you have a complex multicolumn template laid out for an 8.5-by-11-inch page, but you're printing on 8-by-10-inch paper, the easiest answer is to trim away those outside edges. Otherwise you're stuck adjusting all those column widths and the spaces between them by hand, plus resizing illustrations, ruling lines, and everything else.

Well, friend, you are stuck, because whacking away at the outside margins will guarantee that your page layout will look awful. If you like a template but have to adjust it for size, adjust each element roughly proportionally. Why roughly? Because sometimes the mathematically correct proportional adjustment is just too picayune to be practical. For instance, say you're changing an 8.5-inch-wide template with two 22-picawide columns and a 2-pica space between columns to fit on 8-inch-wide paper. Mathematics would tell you to change the 2-pica space between columns to 1.882 picas, but nobody should ever have to deal with making changes of 0.118 picas except as punishment for the most flagrant design crimes. Instead, lop off 2 picas from the outside of each text column and be done with it.

Balancing design elements. Often you won't have the same number or type of design elements found in the template for your own publication. The most common example involves illustrations, but it can apply to text as well. A template may have three articles on the front page of a newsletter, while you have only two. The banner at the top of the template page may include a bold, impressive logo, while your organization's 1ogo is a feathery, fine-line affair. The template may include a powerful three-line headline for the lead story, while the best you can come up with is a single line.

Your central concern in customizing the tempTate to match the available content is to maintain the sense of balance on the page the designer has created. For example, the newsletter template shown here (taken from the now-discontinued PageMaker Portfolio Designs for Newsletters collection) includes a large, handsome illustration in the lower fight corner, and all you have available is a standard rectangular head shot of Fred, your organization's chairman. Look at the layout and think about the function that illustration serves: It balances the bold initial capital letter in the left column and the bold ruling lines on the right and leads the reader's eye diagonally down the page. Blowing up that boring head shot and popping it in to that spot just isn't going to have the same effect.