From the course: Designing a Book

Setting margins and grid - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: Designing a Book

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Setting margins and grid

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- [Instructor] Setting the margins. Before we get into the margin values, let me just say a word about the measurements, currently in inches. I'm now going to change that by coming to where the rulers intersect. If you don't see your rulers, command or control R, or show them. Right clicking where they intersect and changing to points. That's my personal preference type and lettering are always measured in points. And we want our other spacing values to relate to the type. But as you are working on the project, feel free to switch back and forth between measurement systems as often as you like. I'll come to the pages panel and then double click on a parent to go to the parent page spread. It's a spread because we chose a facing pages document. This means that when I change the margins, I'll be changing the margins for all document pages that are based upon this parent page. For as long as people have been designing books, they've been theorizing about the optimum size of the margins. In my case, I'm considering the following. I want the margins to frame the type area. I want the margins to be big enough for the reader to be able to comfortably hold the book in their hands without their thumbs overlapping the type area. And of course, we also need to consider economy. If the margins are too big, we'll be using too much paper. I'm going to start with the inside margin, what is often referred to as the gutter. In design terms, this is the inside margin and I want to make this big enough that we don't lose any content in this area. I'll make sure that my make all settings the same button is selected and change the inside margin to 60 points. So we now have 60 points for top, bottom, inside and outside. I'm going to use the same value for the bottom and the outside, but I want to make the top margin bigger. I'll now need to break the chain and I'm going to make it bigger by one line space. I've already decided that I am going to have a line spacing value of 16 points. So I want a top margin of 76 points. And the reason I'm making the top bigger is because the page number and the running header will go at the top of the page. One more thing I'd like to do as part of this step, view grids and guides, show baseline grid. I would now like to change the increment of that grid. Preferences, grids. I will start at zero relative to the top margin. And then I want my grid increment to be 16 points. So this gives us an incremented ruling on which the baselines of our type will sit. And we have from the top margin down to the bottom margin, 32 lines per page.

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