The Zen of Document Production
Page 3

Colors

As long ago as QuarkXPress 4, you could quickly delete all unused colors in a document: In the colors dialogue box (edit > colors), choose show > colors not used, Shift + click the first and last color to select all of them, and click delete. This purged the layout of all those extra colors you might have considered, inherited, or used six months ago. Take a look at figure 3. The nearly 50 colors in the colors palette are not all colors used in the layout or even colors that are acceptable to use in the layout in the future. They are simply colors that were used at one point in a similar layout, or colors the designer created while experimenting.

By simply deleting unused colors, I streamlined the colors palette — not to mention the many colors menus such as those small ones in the new measurements palette — significantly. No doubt about it, the magazine is colorful and the colors are seasonal. The designer will create and use many — but that’s no reason to carry them around in a template.

Figure 3 The colors palette is awash with unused colors. At right, just deleting the unused colors streamlines the palette considerably.

Master Pages

Once each template contains the master pages it might conceivably need, I took a closer look at them. In the past, folios in the magazine have shown a disturbing tendency to wander about the page. So, first I checked the placement of each folio on all the master pages in all the templates, and I’m sorry to say they were not the same. After determining the correct values, I placed all the folios correctly and then locked them into place (item > lock > position) as shown in figure 4. Since the dates in the folio need to be edited for each issue, I skipped the QuarkXPress 7 feature that lets you lock the story.

Read about the new and greatly improved lock features in QuarkXPress 7.

Another thing I noticed on the master pages, which you can’t help but notice, is guide mania. The blue master guides are not used as margin guides as intended, but rather as a grid for the layout. The guides show acceptable picture placement and column adjustments, and they work for the graphic designer, so I left them alone. In general, I would suggest using the master guides for actual margins and using rulers and page guides as necessary for item placement. The final thing I checked on each master page was the text box links, which were all present and accounted for.

Figure 5 The long list of style sheets contains a jumble of naming strategies, none that are intuitive. At right, the time-honored numbered method lets you establish a hierarchy by numbering styles and synchronizing keyboard shortcuts to the numbered names.

Style Sheets

The fact that an artisté even creates or uses style sheets is commendable but, much like the colors, the layouts for the magazine’s redesign contain scores of style sheets having nothing to do with the actual text formatting in the layouts. The style sheets palette is littered with leftover style sheets from the previous design and former layouts, and those trusty style sheets imported from Microsoft Word (heading 1, heading 2, etc.) as shown in figure 5. A smattering of new style sheets exists as well, and at first I tried to root out those by showing and deleting style sheets not used in the style sheets dialog box (edit > style sheets).

 

 

 

 

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | PDF Version

If you enjoy our articles, click here to subscribe.
Free JavaScripts provided by The JavaScript Source