Baseline Grid

How to create a custom layout in InDesign for Booksmart, Blurbs propriety software. To create a book using blurbs software is quite limiting you have to use templates for pages or create templates using their software. The problem of streaming text into boxes is not as easy as using InDesign. This piece of writing details the process of creating custom layouts in InDesign and then exporting as a .pdf, then exporting the .pdf as image files so they can be auto flowed into the Booksmart software. This is the best way of doing this and I will detail why in my conclusion at the end of this essay. The first part of the essay is just a simple tutorial on using InDesign for typography

How to apply a Baseline Grid in InDesign Good clean and crisp typography is a rudimentary skill of any designer. Most designers believe they have good typography but in my experience, it is something that is developed through time and experience. I think we all begin our design careers with a desire to be outrageously creative, and only as we mature, begin to realise that simplicity and structure is just as, if not more important. In this article, I will go through some simple steps to achieve good clean well-structured typography in Adobe InDesign.  The first step is to choose your type font. In this case, I have chosen a simple standard font of Neue Helvetica. I have set it up at 10pt size and 12pt leading. It is important to consider legibility at this point. I try not to go below 9pt for any brochure or printed material, but if the document is to be viewed digitally such as a .pdf, it is worth doing it larger.  (Next, choose how many columns you want the page to be. Here you must consider aesthetics and legibility. Columns are important as they help give the page more structure, but also make a printed document easier to read. Studies show that 8-10 words per line is the most legible and I have tried to reflect this by choosing a 4 column layout. Also, consider border dimensions and the space between the columns. It is common for the space between columns to be half of the border length. In my example, I have chosen a 10mm border and 5mm between the columns. Already we see that the page is taking shape. As I have already said, I believe structure is the key to good typography, and these four columns and borders will provide the structure for the entire document. If it is a brochure, it will help bring consistency to the whole thing. Images and quotes should all submit to this grid.

 So we have set up a grid vertically, the next step will be to set up a horizontal or baseline grid, which all our text will stick to. This is a key factor to good typography and InDesign is a great bit of software as it has all the tools to make this process simple. We have already chosen our leading (12pt) so we will set up a grid to reflect this. Go to the top bar menu InDesign>Preferences>Grid. This menu box should display.

 Start the grid at 10mm in accordance with your borders. Type into the Increment Every box, 12pt in accordance with your type leading. Press OK. The grid is now set up, to make it visible, go to the top bar menu again, View>Grids and Guides>Show baseline Grid. You will now see guides running across the page horizontally at the same leading as your type. Now make your type stick to the grid. Bring up the paragraph display box, Window>Type and Tables>Paragraph. Select your type box and click on the Align to baseline grid button in the bottom right hand corner. All type lines should now stick perfectly to your grid lines. All further type we will insert from now on, will be made to align to this grid.

 Now we will add a heading. The key here is to set the leading up that it will align nicely to our already set up baseline grid. I have set my title at 95pt with a leading of 72pt. Basically I have made the leading to be a multiple of the 12pt our baseline grid is already set up to. This way each line can naturally line up with a line of the body text. The title size also allows it to sit nicely and not overlap at all. If the tops of letters such as “h” is hitting a lower curve of a “g” it can reduce legibility and also make it ugly. Do not forget to click the Align to baseline grid button on the paragraph formatting box again. You must select a text wrap so the text will not overlap the heading but flow round it. It should look like this.

 I shall now add an introduction paragraph in the exact same way. This time I will select 24pt leading, again a multiple of our 12pt grid. Align it to the grid and it should look something like this…

As you can see, everything is aligning perfectly giving the page a neat structured feel. In most cases I try to keep the alignment consistent, but in this case I have been a bit creative and made the intro and title right aligned to stick to the body text paragraph and give a crisp centre line.

That was a simple bit of typography. Joseph Muller Brockman developed the underlying principle of the grid system; my book for blurb has been formatted to a three column with a quartered grid with trim and bleed, also included in the guides as shown here: the bleed is 1/8th of an inch. This is the 13x11 template i will next time include margins of at least ½ inch.

The previous pages are examples of two page spreads from my book using the above template. You can see the versatility of the three column grid The cover is designed inside the booksmart program from Blurb. Therefore, I had limited creative opportunities for the cover.

How to import your custom design into BookSmart Here is a helpful course for those who wish to design pages in other applications without too many problems and then wish to import them into BookSmart. By starting your designs at the correct size outside of BookSmart and saving your pages out as images, you can preserve your custom layouts from your design software of choice: Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, among others. Once you save them, you can import them into BookSmart’s full-bleed single-page image templates. First step: Size your document to the measurements listed in my section on baseline grids. These measurements include our 1/8-inch trim and help you preserve custom designed layouts and 1/8inch bleed Export: I have done several tests to figure out the best way to get your pages saved out properly to drop into our full-bleed image pages. From Adobe InDesign, I recommend exporting your file, as a high resolution PDF (pdf/x-1a2001) as single pages, not spreads. In Adobe Acrobat CS4, you can then export directly as png from that program to any folder you want, these can then be batch processed for a colour profile and then you can save them.

If you do not have the CS4 suite, you need to follow the following instructions especially if you have an earlier version of Adobe Acrobat

Then drag that PDF directly into Photoshop; a dialogue box will come up, asking for DPI, and colour settings. Select all of your pages at once, set your DPI to 300, and set your colour to sRGB profile or if you are a member of B3 Blurbs professional colour service use their CYMK profile. Save your files as .png files to import into BookSmart. You can see a small difference if you look at the following sheet with the comparison of .png to the .jpeg images. The .jpeg having slightly more artefacts.

*If exporting from Adobe Illustrator, set your export dialogue box to 300 DPI.

Save: all of your individual pages they will be left open on your desktop, unsaved. I would tell you if there was a less agonising approach. You will then have to save each one. This process is a bit agonising if you have many pages. I would suggest that you should be naming your files starting with 001_ etc., to keep your page order page one, page two, etc. *Note: You can have Photoshop auto-number your files after you save them using a Photoshop’s batch setting, but you have to set up an “action” to create this three-digit numbering. Import: Numbering lets you use Blurb’s Autoflow feature to flow these pages into your BookSmart layout in the correct order. The Autoflow feature in BookSmart can be a big help. You can also manually add these images/pages to your layouts like any other photos, by dragging and dropping.

Finish: You can quickly flow your pages into BookSmart as mentioned above or take your time to design the perfect book. Remember, all these tips work in any of our available book formats.

To Autoflow pages into Booksmart Make sure you have all of your pages saved as high-resolution .png’s at 300dpi (dots per inch). If you have, everything still saved as a spread (two pages side by side) you will have to crop them in into two pages.

Open up Booksmart and pick the size book you want to make. Leave the title and author blank if you have created your own cover with that information on it. Next, choose photobook, the location of your page .png’s, and your theme.

For my book, I kept the first couple copyright and title pages because I wanted to open the book up to a picture. To use your custom pages you need to make sure you use the full bleed picture option (the completely gray box). If you created all the pages yourself, you will need to select that template for each page. However, you do not have to create each page yourself. You can just create a few custom pages and use the provided templates for the rest. In this example, I am using all custom pages so I need to delete every page that is not completely gray and add several of the solid gray

pages. To do this quickly select a bunch of the completely gray pages by holding down the Shift key while you select and then simply copy and paste.

Next, you need to put your pages in the templates. If you do not have the pictures already imported into Booksmart, do so by clicking the Get Photos button. Then click on the sort by drop down list and sort the pictures by their title. That is why numbering the pages is so important. Finally, select the first page of your layout and click the Autoflow button. All of your pages should be put in order but you should go through and check the order and that you had enough pages for it to fill.

If you want to make your own custom covers, you can add your own typeface and put it where ever you want. *Note: the covers are different sizes than the inside pages. When you have completed this process I export my book to its own folder in the Booksmart file format and save just in case of any problems and not usually on my same hard drive. My completed book weighed in at 670mb for 65 pages at 13x11 inch. When processed by the Booksmart program and uploaded to Blurb the size is compressed to 117mb. One of my friends made a 10x8 landscape book with 80 pages and his upload was compressed to approximately 80mb, just to give an idea of file sizes hope this helps.