Ok here we are so far…
Text boxes drawn and threaded, copy text formatted and aligned, heading backed by a coloured and manipulated rectangle, little cutesy photoshopped chicken on the grouped header and a giant photoshopped chicken as the main image. Oh and its been saved… frequently.
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More images are required. These are going to sit on the left page of the DPS. In total there are 11 images. All of which I wanted to be quite small. So same as before image layer, locking all others , select ‘place’ in the’ indesign’ menu, find the image and draw the box outline for it, resizing if need be with the direct select tool (double clicking the box to get the blue resize outline).
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As you can see above they are all wee little chickens. Horrah!
They also have distorted outlines that in turn distorts the ‘window’ and what part of the image you can see. This was done to make it a little more quirky. Chickens are anything but conservative and this produces a little edge that suits the tone of the copy. To do this you require the direct select tool. Normally to resize you select this tool and double click on the image to produce the blue outline. This time you want the red outline but with the direct select tool. To achieve this, simply switch from the selection tool to the direct selection tool and click ONCE on the image. Then when you hover the mouse over one of the outline sides you can click and drag it about skewing the perception- but only of the outline box! Not the image. As mentioned before imagine the outline box as a window. You can only manipulate the window not the image.
Clicking on the corner handles of the box allows you to further distort it.
When you have finished playing about and painstakingly skewing the outline, select them all with the selection tool and drawing a box around them to edit simultaneously. This is so much easier as I couldn’t be bothered to change each of the 11 images one at a time.
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Then to accentuate the skewy quirkiness I increased the stroke weight using the bottom right floating palette and rounded of the corners via ‘object’ and ‘corner effects…’.
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To deselect simply click elsewhere with the selection tool.
As you can see in the image above, at the moment the images are on top of the text. You cannot read the text behind them. So you can either move the text boxes again, in the same fashion as before, using a ruler guideline, or, use a text wrap. Text wrapping works best when you have a few images sitting across a lot of text or wider columns as you need a denser copy to make the wrap look more fluent.
You ‘text wrap’ by selecting the image and selecting ‘text wrap’ from the window menu. If you haven’t already got the text wrap menu up it will pop up now.
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This menu presents you with 5 clickable box options. Each one has a small diagram to suggest what wrap it does. Below them are 4 input boxes so you can control exactly how much space is given between the image and the text when wrapping around it.
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The contour options are related to the clipping path. As contour suggests you can make the text follow the exact outline of an image that has a transparent background. The clipping path if selected produces a ‘dot to dot’ line that runs around the entire outline of the image. This creates a ‘barrier’ or margin that the text sentences will run along.
Once the image has a designated wrap it remains a constant attribute until it is removed.
S0 thats text wrapping in a nut shell. Which I’ll reiterate I haven’t used yet. I just shunted the text boxes up to create a space for the sake of aesthetics.
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I opted for the shunting of text boxes purely because it suited my layout better (see the above image). The text wrap would have messed up the positioning of the copy and also have made the copy overflow more into the other text boxes. The way these images are positioned also means the odd letter or word would have been squashed between some images and it would look stupid. I don’t really have enough text to wrap around it as the columns are quite slim.
Viewing in preview mode I now have this…
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I’ve added a caption to anchor the images that just reads the chickens names/ breeds left to right, and positioned it on the left of the small 11 chicks.
Almost there!
