Tips for brochures and text placement?

[BatteriesInc]

Hi,

 

I am looking at converting a text (2 pages A4 in LibreOffice) into a double sided A3 brochure, and I figured I could use Affinity Designer for it because it should allow me to play with the layout side of things (as Affinity Publisher doesn't yet exist - big beta tester nudge here :) ).  

 

I can also do it in LibreOffice, but What You See Is Not What You Get in LibreOffice once you drop the image in the place you are expecting it to go, and Affinity Designer has already been spectacularly helpful in helping to create good looking drawings so it has rather grown on me :)

 

Content is ready so I don't have to worry about any ability to edit it later, but is there anything I as amateur need to know about doing this?  The two images on these pages have been drawn with Designer and are 100% vector mode so they'll fit right in, and there is plenty of breathing space as the 2 pager was drawn up with headers and footers which the A3 version can ditch (as that ends up on the outside).

 

I was thinking about creating text boxes per section and for each section header, and set up a general colour for the section headers so I can change them quickly in one go and more or less start from there, probably with grid snapping in place so it's quick to align.  There may be a background image, but that would be very light/faint so we don't have to fling a lot of ink onto pages.  I'll do inside and outside as separate files as that makes printing easier.

 

Once this project is funded we'll get a professional who will probably take 30 seconds to do what might take me a full day, but part of me relishes the opportunity to learn something in the process :).

 

Thank you in advance for any tips, gotchas I need to look out for, and any tutorials on brochure making.

[Oval]

 as amateur need to know about doing this?

AD has not all needed features. For example optical margin alignment.

[BatteriesInc]

Thanks, but I think I'll still be able to coax better result out of AD than LibreOffice :rolleyes: .  I appreciate that I won't have absolute precision, but with the text controls in AD I can better coax things into place than fill justify alone.  The only challenge I really worry about is that I need the text to follow the contour of an image - I have something in a circle and I'd like the text to flow around the image.

 

Maybe I'll post that as a separate question..

 

There is also an outstanding issue with printer margins, but as I'm the one that filed it I also already have a workaround (AD doesn't pick up actual printer margins so you have to enter them manually - where it gets the values from it suggests by default is anyone's guess ;))

[Oval]

Users that don’t know what is needed in typography, don’t miss professional features badly.

[BatteriesInc]

Users that don’t know what is needed in typography, don’t miss professional features badly.

 

 

True.  Having said that I'm missing a fairly basic one: text contour flow.  

 

I've worked out how to flow text into oddly shaped boxes and how to make text transparent to a background (both turn out to be very easy to do in AD), but to place an object in a swath of text and have the text flow around seems not easy to do.  I can create a container for the text no problem, but to work out where the object fits needs a live reflow of text, and that seems impossible as AD is not really meant for what is in essence DTP work.

 

As I don't have the time to work this out I'll do a LibreOffice or Pages hack tomorrow - thankfully I don't need precision yet.

 

(and yes, I'll probably buy Affinity Publisher the moment it's released  :P)

[MEB]

 The only challenge I really worry about is that I need the text to follow the contour of an image - I have something in a circle and I'd like the text to flow around the image.

 

Hi BatteriesInc,

You can get around this limitation drawing a bigger circle (blue circle in the attached image) around your content (the image in the example below) to work as a margin for the text, then selecting the rectangle shape (green rectangle) and subtracting the blue circle. With the resulting shape still selected, place the Frame Text tool over it and click to fill it with text. See screenshot below.