Chapter 16

Ten Great Design Ideas

In This Chapter

Keep your design simple and consistent

Draw attention with your use of graphics

Create the best effect with text frames

Get feedback

Consider these ten general design tips for all your publications.

Borrow the Best Ideas of Others

Ideas cannot be copyrighted, but designs can. The more people you borrow from, the more original it makes you!

Design the Publication with Your Audience in Mind

Your audience is more likely to read your work if it’s relevant and appeals to them.

Use a Design Grid

Create a grid guide and align your page elements to it, to impose consistency on your pages. See Chapter 4 for information on how to work with grids.

Use Pictures Well

Pictures are attention getters. If your picture tells your story, your readers get the point more quickly if they see the picture. Give it an appropriate caption and group the two (picture and caption) together. It’s an excellent way to get your story noticed.

Check Out the Design Gallery

The Design Gallery has many attractive page elements and other excellent stuff you can use: headlines, sidebars, pull quotes, ornaments, and tables of contents, for example, in several great styles. Use these elements and the Drop Cap feature to break up pages and make them interesting. If you don’t find what you like, create your own Design Gallery category and store your own, favorite design elements. You may want to flip over to Chapter 9 for more help in transforming your design into a masterpiece!

Use Master Pages

Put repeating design elements on your master pages. If you put items on the master pages, you don’t have to repeat them on every page, and you can’t mistakenly delete them or move them. Master pages help ensure consistency throughout your publication and — more important — cut down on your design time. Chapter 4 tells you how to make the most of master pages.

Keep It Simple, Silly!

KISS is a guiding design principle. Simplicity can be elegant, and it lets the reader focus on your message. Make your design consistent and simple to follow by using repetitive elements well.

Create Templates and Use Them

Any design that stands up to time deserves repeating. Save work you like as a template, and then use templates as starting points. Microsoft spent lots of time and money on professional designers to create the sample designs included in Publisher. Make yourself look good — use them.

Use Multicolumn Text Boxes

If you use multicolumn text boxes rather than lots of single-column text boxes, you have fewer objects on your layout to worry about. Text autoflows easily, columns align without strife, and your life flows as smoothly as water flows downhill to the sea.

Live with Your Designs Awhile

Revisiting the scene of the crime is an excellent way of improving your publication: Go back and take another critical look at your work. If you can, show your publication’s page proofs to others and get their comments.