Athenia Design

I tend to use the text inset option in Quark quite a lot. You can also create white space around your text by placing a text box within another box but the text inset option allows you to specify exactly how much you want to leave, making the final publication a bit neater.

On this example below you can see that the text is flush to the frame giving it a rather untidy and squashed appearance.

You can access the text inset option through the Modify menu either by selecting Modify from the item menu or by pressing Apple M. The inset option is found in the text tab as shown in the picture below.

Here you can specify whether you want multiple insets by ticking the text box. If you leave the text box un-ticked then the same inset will be applied to each side of your text box. Generally I prefer to specify multiple insets because I find you tend to end up with too much space at the bottom otherwise. After entering the values you require click apply and ok and you can see that the text in the box now has a nice even white space around it leaving it room to breathe within its frame.

Have you ever designed a layout that includes blue only to find when it goes to the printers the colour prints as purple or pink. This is because in the CMYK process some blues that look blue on the computer screen tend to print purple. Also, the lighter the blue, the more purple it gets. For example, a blue gradient that starts with a deep blue will more than likely start to turn purple as it gets lighter. Also if you use the 100% blue in Quark you are likely to end up with a purple-looking colour in CMYK because the levels of magenta it contains are too high. Many people get around this by using a Pantone colour blue that will print as you see it on screen. I also find that a blue with the following values seems to print correctly. C 100 M 65 Y 0 K 0.

I tend to use automatic page numbers in Quark, mainly because if you need to add or a delete a page from a layout, Quark will automatically renumber the pages for you. To use the automatic page numbering feature, you need to go into the master pages double clicking on the master page item below (where it says A-Master A).

The master pages in Quark can basically be used as a templete to create any items that you want to appear on each page of the publication. I tend to use them for headers and footers but you can also add columns, text boxes and other elements depending on what you need. You can also create different sets of master pages for different sections of your publication.



















To add the automatic page number to the publication, simply create a text box and press the apple key and 3 where you want the page number to be placed. If you have done it correctly you should see and icon that looks like this <#> (see below). This acts as a place holder and you will notice when you create pages, Quark will automatically number them throughout the publication, starting from the number you specify.




To specify which page number you want the publication to start on double click on the page you want the numbering to start on, then choose page, section from the menu and enter the number you want to start on and the format, ie if you want the numbering to be numerical, alphbetical or roman numerals.

One problem I come across is people who send through images that are web quality, around 72 dpi and expect the image to be good enough for a printed publication. Often people think just because the images looks fine on their screen it will print well in a publication. As a rule most images for printed media should be at least 300 dpi. Resolution refers to the number of dots per inch (dpi), or the amount of detail the image has. Higher resolution means a more detailed image and also larger file size. You can check this by opening the images in Photoshop and checking the resolution in the image size menu. Also, as a rough guide you can click view actual pixels, to check the quality. If it appears blurred or grainy or very small, then the file is poor quality and this is how it will print.

This is a very basic tip which can affect the quality of the printed publication. The difference between CMYK and RGB is as follows.

CMYK is made up of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. These are the colours that are used in the printing process. For example if you use a colour printer you will notice it usually has four cartridges one for each of these colours.

RGB is made up of Red, Green and Blue. These are the colours used by screen displays such as your monitor.

Basically all images that are to be used to for printed media should be in CMYK format and all images to be used for web format should be in RGB. You will notice that there are limitations with the range of colours that can be produced using CMYK, RGB colours often appear much brighter on the screen but these colours cannot be produced to the same brightness when printed.