The aim was to recreate this album cover first, with help from the grid in order to place the shapes and type in the correct place. We went into more depth on alignment of shapes as the album cover was recreated, and I learned how to align multiple shapes vertically and horizontally to create a consistent gap between the shapes. This really helped to add to the aesthetic of the piece.
We also learned how to create swatches. This helped to recreate the album cover more efficiently, as it allowed me to eye drop the colours from the original design and save the colours into a custom swatch. This allowed me to use the colours when ever they were needed. This made the process of deigning the cover a lot easier and efficient.
This is my recreation of the album cover. I used arial black for the font as this was the closest i could find to the original. I created the Sutton logo on illustrator and placed it into the indesign document. At this point, paragraph styles were introduced. This was a very useful tool as it allowed for the colour of text as well as the font, size and even leading and tracking to be customised and saved. This is another way of saving time when designing a large document.
We then created incorporated images, placeholder text and a video into the InDesign document. This would allow a button and a contense page to be added later on in the Interactive PDF setting.
I used the 'basic paragraph' paragraph style for the placeholder text. The chapter headings were created with the 'chapter headings' paragraph style. This made it possible for a contense to be created. When creating the contense page, i selected the chapter headings paragraph style. This added the chapter headings to the contense. When each heading on the contense is selected in the interactive PDF, the user will be taken to that particular page in the document.
Another feature of an interactive PDF is adding buttons. This also allows the user to quickly navigate to another part of the document by selecting the button. In this case we learned how to turn an object into a button, therefore we chose to use the inner blue circle on the album cover as the button.
We added an drop shadow effect to the shape in the fx. toolbar in InDesign when the cursor hovers over the button in order to make it visible to the user.
Overall, i learned a lot of new features and functionalities of InDesign in this session. I believe that i may use an interactive PDF in the future, especially if i want to show off an animation in a document format. It is very customisable, and creates a professional finish if done correctly. I will defiantly use swatches, paragraph styles and pay attention to units and increments in the future when using InDesign, as this saves a lot of time in the long run.
