Good Thought!
So when Amy and Stephanie had the privilege of having me in Words & Images (*wink) my FIRST semester at UB, I was totaly clueless. As a self-taught graphic designer, I wasn't following the rules of design, especially desiging on a GRID. Amy looked at my designs and was like "I'm not sure what you are doing here. What grid are you using?" (while doing the Amy wave over my designs) And I thought to myself.."Grid??" What's that? Lol. So needless to say, I'm designing on a grid now...and I hope I've improved.
#1 Tip - Setting Up A GRID in ID CS6:
Go to ---> Layout---> Create Guides. Input the rows and columns and design AWAY!
#2 Tip - Use Kuler
Go to ---> Window ---> Extensions ----> Kuler
#3 Tip - Paragraph Styles
There're two ways to do this. #1: You can create the style manually (bold, italics, etc) and then go to Paragraph Style and click the "Create New Style" icon at the bottom right and it will create a paragraph style. Name it. OR #2: create what you want FIRST and then apply it to the appropriate text.
---> I've always been taught to label your paragraph styles like Header, H1, H2, Body, Bullets, etc) for the different parts of your book. So that way, you can generate a TOC easier, among other things.
Ok, that's it for now. Gotta get back to work. I LOVE InDesign. I think it's a powerful and great program. Especially, CS6...the folio addition, interactive forms, and animation (swf) integration is great!
