InDesign: Learning a new skill

Sometimes it's hard for me to believe, but there are some slow times here in the Roundup office. It's just the nature of the business that sometimes all the deadlines loom at once, and other times we're all caught up, like on Friday afternoons in January.

So one Friday afternoon a couple weeks ago I was in the office by myself and  I started to design this invitation in my InDesign program, and killed two birds with one stone as I also figured out how to type on a path, which is pretty tricky to pull off, and I'm still not a master at getting the text to do what I want.

Click for zoom image

Something else I haven't mastered is screen shots in programs, otherwise I might have attempted to put together a tutorial on type on a path. As it is, I found several helpful tutorials through search engines, and that's how I was able to figure it out.

The inspiration for the invitation was vintage advertisements like this one for Northland SnowShoes. That's where I stole the 'Vigorous health and a million thrills' from. 'The greatest sport of the season' also came from a vintage advertisement.

I find my images and inspiration on Google image search, most times, including the snowshoe, dogsled and pine bough graphics I put in my layout. Finding images is a lot of trial and error for me - there are at least five others in the file that I started using and then discarded because I didn't like them well enough.

This ad for hot cocoa was the inspiration for my text layout, and why I wanted to learn to make curved words.





So even though there's some down time in the office, I was able to put together an invitation for our snowshoeing party on Sunday, and learn a new InDesign skill to use in building the paper and designing ads in the future. There are endless things to figure out and experiment with in the Photoshop and InDesign programs, if only one has the time (and patience) to tackle them. Online tutorials are wonderful things.