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Matt Fons/5 min read

Designing a Newsletter: Adding Images and Text to the Front Page

Newsletter Front Page Checklist

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This tutorial walks through designing a newsletter: adding images and text to the front page, covering essential tools and techniques for your projects.

In this video we're going to be working on the first page of actually designing our newsletter. So before beginning, let's go up to our workspace and we'll simply reset VDCI to make sure that everything is consistent and any panels or anything else that's been moved around is reset.

Next, for our first step, we're going to be importing the image for our front page. We'll go into our properties panel and we'll select import file. From here, as directed by our Domus newsletter information document, we need to import our office on beach JPEG image.

We'll select open and let's right-click to fit it and in this case we'll fit it content-aware fit. In order to resize this more, we can hit A on the keyboard and select our image and if we zoom out using CTRL MINUS (-) (-), we can drag and hold shift and feel free to size it holding shift to your liking. I'm going to adjust mine right about there and zooming back in, I think this looks good.

For our next step, we're going to be adding different overlay text and the text on our top section is going to be the date May 20th. Because we already have a material designed for Domus, let's open up our ribbon-cutting file and we'll copy the same date used in that file. We'll go to file, open and from here, let's open up our ribbon-cutting invitation and click open.

As we can see here, we have our file on top as well as our newsletter file in a separate tab. This allows us to have multiple files open so that we can use different materials from those files. We'll then hit V on the keyboard to select our May 20th date text frame and with it selected, let's hit CTRL C to copy it.

We'll then go into Domus newsletter and we'll hit CTRL V to paste our text. With that, we can close out our ribbon-cutting invitation file and we can now work with this text. Shifting our perspective to the right, let's drag it up on top and we need to do a couple things to make this text fit within this rectangle.

The first thing we want to do is change our text from black to white and so, triple-clicking, we'll hit CTRL A to select all the text, then for the fill, let's change it to paper. Next, utilizing our selection tool, we're going to want to rotate our text. Let's go to one of the corners and drag, holding Shift, until it's rotated 90 degrees.

If we zoom in a bit here, our next step is going to be fitting this within our rectangle. If we drag it to the left, we'll see that it's currently behind the rectangle because it was imported into our images layer. To fix this, we can simply click and drag it into the Overlays layer, selecting the square on the right-hand side.

Now that it's in overlays, we need to fit it within the rectangle. While we could go into our text frame and resize it, the other thing we can do is actually resize both the text and the text frame proportionally. We'll hold CTRL to change it and hold shift to change it proportionally.

After resizing, we can drag the text and text frame together. I'll hold CTRL and shift again, make it just a little bit bigger, and from here, without holding CTRL and Shift, I can adjust the size of the text frame to match the rectangle behind. As one final change, let's highlight 20th here and let's simply increase the size just a bit so that it matches the size of May right above it.

We'll go back to our selection tool and to center it, I'm just going to use the left arrow key so that it's centered within the rectangle. Zooming back out, our next step is going to be adding our title and the address below. Before we do this, let's actually change the color of our overlay.

In order to change the color to our overlay, let's match the same color as the logo. To do this, we'll want to place our logo. Let's make sure we're in images and then go into file, place.

We're going to be selecting our Domus Interior Design JPEG and we'll click open. Right away, we'll see that our logo has actually been imported into our rectangle. This commonly happens when you have something selected that you didn't necessarily intend to be the frame for the object you're placing.

So let's hit CTRL Z to undo, and InDesign will recognize that we wanted to place the image properly. Let's click and drag, and then using the Eyedropper tool (I), select the green from the logo.

Let's now copy this color and add it to our CC libraries. We'll go to CC libraries and clicking the drop-down, we're going to actually create a new library. We'll title this Domus and click create.

From here, we can go down to add and let's add the fill color. We'll retitle this Domus Green and hit ENTER. And we now have this fill color for the future which we'll be utilizing throughout our newsletter.

With this change, let's now hit CTRL S on the keyboard to save our work and in the next video, we'll begin adding the title within our overlay. See you there!