Bournemouth — Mar 18th 2014

Tony (Still) gave us a master class on page layout. Unsurprisingly, he used Pages! He told us he was familiar with the 4.3 version and thought it very good, but at Alan’s behest he had used the current and recent 5.1 version for this talk. This is very different from 4.3 and lacks some its useful facilities (eg. Roman numerals) that could be critical to a particular project; he hoped these would be restored in future updates. Despite this, he finds Pages makes experimentation easy and fun.

Tony showed us the final result of his project and then demonstrated the way in which he had achieved this enabling him to explain the features of good page layout. While Pages provides many templates which can be useful (and modified to the nth degree), he preferred to create a basic layout for this talk to illustrate the principles. In this instance, he chose to have 3 columns, two of equal width and larger than the third. He then ‘populated’ the page using a text box for the heading, pasting text into columns and images where he wanted them, and showed how a different, darker font in the third smaller column made it stand out as a different ‘story’.

He emphasised several important features of general application including: matching the design to the expected reader, the use of standard paragraph styles, choice of font whether upper or lower case, regular or bold, serif or sans serif etc, letter spacing especially in headings, the grouping of objects, and the need to be aware of the effect of any change in one area on another whether in page layout or word processing mode. Tony illustrated all these and many more besides.

Finally, while disclaiming any personal interest in sales, he recommended a book called “The Non-designers Design Book” by Robin Williams who enunciated four basic principles of good page design: Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity - there must be an acronym in there somewhere!

Such was the interest, that there was no time for Qs&As, and there didn’t seem to be any anyway.

[This is a PS to an attender at the meeting who paid his subscription but didn't tell us how to contact him. So . . . Tom W. you know who you are and if you read this contact the Membership Secretary, Michael Corgan. See The Contact page for details.]

Comments

Page 1

Drew McFarlane said…

This must have been an interesting evening for all who attended, unfortunately I was on holiday and missed it.

Drew McFarlane said…

I have just discovered that the recommended book, "The Non-Designers Design Book" by Robin Williams, can be downloaded free of charge.

Alan Cox said…

And I paid for it - grr! Still it's well worth having if you do any work involving words and/or images.
Page 1