Basic Typesetting Exercise
Use InDesign to create a multi-page document. Work in black and white. Start with an 11• 8.5-inch [horizontal format] page. Create a text box at a 1.5-inch margin from the top, a 1-inch margins on each side and a 2.5-inch margin on the bottom. Vertically align display type to the center of the text box. Typeset your name in an 8-point sans serif in the bottom left-hand part of each page, 2 inches from the bottom and aligned flush left to the text box above. Your assignment is to typeset 5 pages of text to the following specifications:
Page 1
Text: Truth
Specs: 225/225 Times New Roman Regular. Flush left. Look at the space between the letters. Does it look even?
Page 2
Text: The rules of typography can be broken, but never ignored.
Specs: 36/48 Helvetica Neue. Flush left. Make line breaks at a logical break in the text. Avoid widows.
Page 3
Text: Type design is rarely, if ever, about being wholly original. At root, there is the need to conform to a great tradition of letterforms, a tradition which enables us to have the notion of a readable alphabet. And yet, a totally unreadable font driven out the familiar territory of a keyboard is created within the context of language-making tools. Something familiar through which we know our instructions are being codified, our orders remembered. Forget the book the magazine, or the television—they are secondary realizations of typography. It is the keyboard and screen that are our typographic mediators now, and our typographic intelligence is bonded with that of computers.
Type is about much more than questions of legibility or readability. Fashions and technological change are just part of the backdrop. What makes typography fascinating, and an essential enquiry for anybody involved in design, is that this activity is a manifestation of our search for greater efficiency and greater power in the written word. It reveals personalities, politics, and economic factors, along with advances in science. It is a celebration of humanity, and a vital and subtle indicator of values.
Specs: 10/18 Garamond Roman /Regular. Set justified. Be sure auto-hyphenation is on. Modify the text box so that you have a medium column width [60–80 characters]. Indent .125 to indicate the second paragraph. Don’t
