InDesign & Experimental Layout Techniques

In our 'Altered States' project we also worked a fair bit with using Adobe InDesign and learning about the layout of different sorts of written publications - from newspapers, magazines and tabloids and how they may be structured. We also experimented with different ways of arranging an article and its text, headers and imagery (for this exercise this was all placeholder articles). This was done in an analogue fashion, using a blank template of columns, although it could have been done digitally too - but it's considerably easier to move around bits of paper than it is to drag elements around with a cursor. Below is a contact sheet of different layouts I played around with.

Above are different ways of laying out margins, paragraphs, pull quotes (quotes that are intended to grab the reader's attention - 'we've normalised it' in this case) as well as imagery in an article. In addition I attended an InDesign workshop on the Friday of the same week about layout and structuring which was digital. We were supposed to create a sort of publication for our Altered States work documented in InDesign, but at that point I hadn't had too many pictures of my work. So I used a new technique I learned to paste similar images for each bit of work into an intricate square pattern I had made for each page.

On each page I used a similar but contrasting image to fit into the boxes using the 'Place Into...' command. The right page was essentially a mirror of the left page but turned upside down to create an interesting effect. I was quite happy with the final product and I liked the structured tiled design.