The "Sad Sack Zebra" Approach to InDesign

When we were designing the last issue of this year's Warrior Ledger, my then EIC made a bet: Given that he had all the content he needed for his news page, he could design it in under 10 minutes. 

In the end, it took him a little more than 19 minutes to finish, but he made a valiant effort that served as a great model for future Journalism 1 and 2 students unfamiliar with designing a page in InDesign.

Kristy Roschke showed us some great tricks to be more efficient, and overall more uniform designing pages with multiple designers by introducing how to set up and save templates as well as paragraph and character styles which will help students to make sure they are using established layouts, fonts, and styles with much greater consistency.

She also touched on InDesign libraries, which save certain page elements so that students just need to plug them into their pages. This is something that my school's paper has been really successful with, especially after we completely re-designed elements like the name plates, folios, and mastheads.

In her lesson, Kristy used what my students like to refer to as the "Llama Page". To introduce others to InDesign, my now EIC had several of my students create Llama Page in which they experimented with text boxes, fonts, picture placement, cropping, layout, and text-wrapping.

Kristy showed us how to crop out backgrounds, write on paths, and create shapes by using what I mentally refer to as "The Sad Sack Zebra Approach". Just like my students learned about text-wrap using llamas, I learned more about the pen tool and how to place an image into text and helpful shortcuts using a rather sadly cropped zebra.

I'm sure that setting up section-specific templates and remembering helpful shortcuts will definitely help avoid style guide mistakes like using wrong fonts or inconsistent byline formatting and it will also help bold bets like my former EIC's succeed or at least fail by a narrower margin.

Stephanie Floch
Taylorsville High School
Taylorsville, Utah