Quick InDesign Trick: The Folio

Designing a newspaper could be a bit tricky if you do not know how to use the resources and tools properly. Once you get to know about the tools and have enough idea about your design you are good to go. Adobe InDesign comes with numbers of features which would make your design process smooth like a knife on butter. Lets just take a quick dive on how you can design tricky elements like a pro. In this blog I am showing you how you can play with paragraph styles to have attractive professional looking folio design.

I am assuming you can simply place a big text on the top of your paper as the title of your paper. No big deal. Different newspaper uses different styles in their design to stand out their newspaper in a pile and they call it signature. When you design your paper, you need make sure that all the subsequent editions follow the same design, so as to give your paper a consistent design.

The Folio

Let’s take a look on how to design folio. Folio can be designed very easily with minimal efforts. First take a textbox and write the Volume, Edition, Date, Place of Publication, Nos. of page and Price of your paper. That’s it! That’s your folio. Make the text vertically middle to the textbox. To do that go to Textframe option (Shortcut Ctrl + B). Now take the text box below the title of your paper and drag the textbox all across the margin. And align horizontal middle to the margin. Sort of like this -

Now go to Paragraph panel, check the Border checkbox below. 

This will give your text a border. To adjust different parameter, hold  ALT  and click on the Border Colour icon.

This will open the Paragraph border window. Adjust Offset a little bit if the border appears too close to the text. 

Now, its completely up to you how you want your folio to be like. Play with the different settings and see how its works.

Here I am providing few designs to practice with.

• Stroke - Top: 0.5pt, Bottom: 2pt, Left: 0pt, Right: 0pt

• Stroke - Top: 1pt, Bottom: 1pt, Left: 0pt, Right: 0pt

• Stroke - Top: 0.5pt, Bottom: 0.5pt, Left: 0.5pt, Right: 0.5pt

 You can also use Paragraph Shading in your design. To use paragraph shading, go to Paragraph Panel and click on the Shading checkbox. Similarly hold Alt key and click Shading Icon to open up the paragraph Shading and check out different settings.

Here’re some examples:

Once you are satisfied with your folio design, make it a style so that you can use it later whenever necessary. To make it a style go to the Paragraph style panel and click on the ‘+’ (Plus) icon below the panel. While you click make sure your cursor is at the folio textbox itself.