Lessons

Lesson Info

Understanding Layout Tools

layouts is the next tab, and the layouts could also be called templates, which you can see here reside all the way across the screen and blurred has been nice enough here to allow you to create templates for you as a starting point. And you can pretty good range of things. You have simple for way, bleed style, photographic templates like you see here, and you've got very complicated image and text containers that you can use. You'll also see a drop down menu that says all layouts, and when you click on that, you're going to see that they've designated the layouts into different categories for you, in case you need to just look for a specific kind of layout. And so the layouts tab is where you're going to choose basically the internal design of your document of how things work. So let's say, for example, I'm going under the first spread here, and I want a photo document here, and I'm gonna use this template this four way bleed. I can go up here, grab a photograph, drag it down into the ...

software, and I've got a four way bleed. So again you have the ability to choose anything you want. Now I know what you're saying. You might be saying, Well, I see these templates and some of these air working pretty well. But there I sort of like my own templates. I want to be able to do my own thing. Well, luckily, we go down here to another blank spread right next to the layouts tab. You're going to see two more buttons you're going to see under the title of Draw. You've got a photo draw container and you've got a text draw. So let's take the photo draw, go down here and draw a photobox moving around to wherever we want. And then let's take a text boxes. Well, let's put the text box on the opposing page and put it there. Now if I click in that text box, it brings up my window where I can add text. I can go in here and right. I can choose what font I want also on the font note. Before we go any further, you'll notice that when you click on fonts in the blurb software, the entire top section of the available fonts are labeled under e book friendly and What that means is blurred has licensed these fonts for you to use in an e book publication, because when you do an e book, your funds have to be licensed specifically for that application. So if you use a font that's not licensed, it's not good, and you'll also often receive a warning sign that says, Look, you're not supposed to be using those kind of fonts. If you're on Lee going to be doing print, then you've got this whole other section of fonts down here at the bottom. And as you can see, there are a lot amazing fonts available today, so it's definitely something toe work worth investigating. Don't just use the regular default drop downfall font to use something that really fits the look and feel of what your work is. Okay, so I've added my little text box here, and I'm back to my layout, and I've got my text box on the right and my photo box on the left and I This is a layout that I think I would use all the time. Well, if you've noticed right here underneath your layouts tab, you can see the design that I just created underneath a button that says Save layout. So what this is doing is watching what I've created and all I have to do is hit save layout. And it asked me whether or not I want to save the left hand page, the right hand page or both as a spread I'm gonna hit as a spread. All I have to do is name, name, this save it. And then every time I go up to my layouts, the tab here layouts tab, you'll see at the bottom my layouts. And lo and behold, there is the layout that I just created. So this is again a really efficient system, and this is saved into into the system and allows you to re use this template over and over again instead of having to rebuild it every single time. I use this feature pretty much every time I make some sort of publication. I always try to make each one a little bit different, and this is, ah, tool inside the software that can save you a tremendous amount of time. Okay, we are now going to move on the photos tab we talked about initially, but I just want to bounce through it again. This is how you're going to import your photographs into the program. And all you've got to do is click on the add photographs button, select the photographs you want, and it will import them in. You're gonna want s RGB J pegs. You're not going to drag in large tiff files or any sort of complicated file type. It's an S RGB system, and that's the file type that's gonna be most preferred. So let's move on here. Move over to the next set of tools and these are tools that are basically about design and logistics. So, as you'll see, I just hit. This is gonna close this for now. I just hit this little scissor button here, and what the scissor button did is it turned on a couple of things. It turned on this little outside red line, and it turned on this pink area. And if I click on this button again to turn it off and click to turn it on again, it brings up a little dialog box that says, Look, what you're looking at on this pink diagram is the pink area is showing. Is that represents the print safe area of the document. So in essence, what that means is, if you've got a piece of content or a photograph that you're very concerned about, and it has to be seen in its entirety, you want to make sure that it resides inside of that pink line. If you go outside the pink line, you're running the risk, and I'm just adding a photograph in here. You're running the risk of something being cut off, so it's using photo of myself again. So if any of this picture, if I really secure about it I really wanted to be shown in entirety has to be inside the pink safe area. So this is again a tool that you can turn on and off to remind yourself. Personally, I leave it on all the time. I want to know where that safe area is, and there's one thing I want to bring your attention to. In addition is, if I zoom in a little bit here, I want you to notice the inside the gutter of the book, and this line that runs up and down is the dead center of the book, and you'll notice that that pink area expands on both the right and left side of that, and this is an area that's very sensitive. And if you put critical information in that section, then chances are when you open the book, you're gonna lose the ability to see it. See it as the pages when you open a book are going to spring up from the inside. There's going to be a little area that's very hard to see the gutter area. So be careful about dragging work into that area. That does not mean that you can't use an image that crosses the gutter. And I think this is something that happens a fair amount. People are very excited when when Blurb added this and I'm going to go back toe layouts here and I'm going to go over and I'm gonna find the template, which is all the way over here on the right. This is what I would call a double truck or a template that allows you to run an image all the way across the gutter. So let's take this one and this, believe it or not, is my father and I again back in Wyoming in the seventies. That's me on the right. The tiny, tiny person. Now, if I left this image alone, you see where the pink area is. I'm losing my father's running right down the middle of this area. So if I printed it this way, you would not be able to see him. So in essence, what you would want to do is move this image. And again, you're still running across the border. This is a very cool look. This is what I would call an editorial. Look, you can run across the gutter. You just want to make sure that you're not putting anything critical in that space again. This is going to take a little practice, a little patients, a little experimentation. And you're gonna utilize these objects in this this these little tools that you have inside here to create something that is very personable, personal to you as an individual bookmaker. Okay, now moving on across here, I want you didn't notice something. Originally, this was only three tools over here, and now you notice that there's 1/4 button that has jumped up over here on the right, and it's kind of an alarming button It's an orange or yellowish triangle with a warning sign in it, which definitely doesn't feel like like, you know, everything is all right. And that is a great But what that's warning you of and you'll notice When I dragged this photograph in this popped up. What? That's warning you. If I click on this, it's basically telling me that the image that I use that I chose for this page is to lower resolution. So maybe I made a mistake. I dragged in the wrong folder of images, and instead of 300 dp I I've dragged in a 72 d p I image, which is a problem, and what it says is Okay, Dan, you've done this. What do you want to dio? Do you want to fix this particular image? Do you want to fix all of the images or do you want to ignore this and just leave it the way it is? I'm gonna hit fix, and then I'm gonna hit. Submit Now, what's happened here is when you notice when I hit that button and hit fix, it shrank my main photograph and it shrank it to a size that it will print. Okay, even though it's not the resolution, it should be. The software has automatically made it a size that's print friendly, as opposed to the size that I wanted it to be because the resolution just wasn't there. So this is like a little safety net that you have. And any time you've done something incorrectly in the software, you're gonna get this little warning sign up here. So it's a nice thing to have. It's also a great reminder when you're at the end of your publication and you're ready to upload when you see that triangle you want to go back through and you want to fix everything that you've done in that situation. OK, so we've got a few tools left here. The 1st 1 is book information, and when you click on this, it basically allows you to title the book at a subtitle. Just gonna add Sub. And then I can enter my author name here, but spell my name correctly and I can also a sign and I ESPN number and I ESPN zehr, also something that pop up a lot of time in conversation about books Blurb has given us the ability where blurb is provided a free I ESPN number. If we choose to use it, you can also provide your own. Some people go out and buy sets of ESPN numbers. They can provide your own etcetera. Again, you can use a free one or you don't have to have an eye. ESPN number Most of the publications I make are not for sale. They're not for public consumption. So I don't use ESPN numbers. I would only use one if I had something that I was gonna publicly So So I'm just gonna hit cancel for now. But that's what the book information does. This next button is something I use non stop when I'm making books in publications, and that is the preview button. And when I hit this button and hit preview, you'll notice that it basically cleans up the entire screen instead of seeing all the tools and all that everything else on the page. All I'm seeing is how this is gonna print and Aiken jump back and forth to the book just by hitting on that page. So every time I do a spread, I always go up to preview and see if I've made any glaring mistakes or justify like the overall feel. So this is wonderful, as you will see here when you're in this preview mode, you also see a very interesting strategic button here called Export PdF Proof. So let's say that you have made a book your 2030 40 pages in and you're not really sure about the direction you're going. You're not really sure that this is that. It looks right. Maybe you're on the right path. You're not on the right path, and you want to share this with someone else. All you've got to do is hit this export PDF book button, and it will export a pdf version of the project that you've created that's going to allow you to send us to other people. Get a second opinion now. It's not a pdf that's intended to be printed, but I do know some people that print out very low rez versions of it on their desktop printer, and some of these people are very good bookmakers. So I think there's something to be said for this. They'll take these low rez pdf's, and it doesn't matter the print quality. They just want to lay the pages out and see how they flow. And if we go back to what we talked about earlier editing and sequencing, this is a huge part of the process. And I'm one. I always make a lot of small prints of the books that I'm trying to make, and I do the same thing. I lay them out, I rearrange them. I lived with them for a while before I go to print. This is a great way to do that again. It's under the preview button export PdF proof. So if we go back to the software we've basically covered from left to right, all of the major things that you're gonna use and utilize on a daily basis with the software, so again practice patients experimentation, even just importing photos, practicing that a couple of times going through each one of these tools, my advice is to when you first open. This software is don't even really try to make something specific. You could try to just understand the tools and then toss that project out and start with your real project. So before we get to upload, which is the last button that we're gonna talk about. I want to close this project and I want to open another project that's a little bit more complete. I'm just going to discard these changes and close this. I'm gonna close this and I'm gonna open a book that someone else at blurb has constructed. And I think it's a really beautiful book. That's a great example of the kind of thing that you could do in book write software. And I'm just gonna hold this up for a second. This is a book about food, and this is a book about food books, and a lot of people use blurb to make cookbooks. I think cookbooks Right now, Children's books, etcetera, really hot properties. I think there's a lot of people out there making them, and thankfully, because we've now been exposed to a lot of people who aren't known as professional chefs who are able to make their own books, and I think that's a wonderful thing