PRODUCTION GUIDELINES

Transcription

1 PRODUCTION GUIDELINES 1

2 CONTENTS Contents...2 General advice for producers...3 Computer access...3 Templates...4 Page layout...4 Main text...4 First paragraph...4 Widows and orphans...4 Author details...4 Titles and illustrations...4 Footer...4 Colours...4 Images...6 Acquisition...6 Application...6 Captions and credits...7 These guidelines are a collaborative project, bringing together work from the original production manual of 2004, as well as Wing Ying Chow s, Tim Middleton s and my own remarks. If you feel anything should be added or you have any queries regarding any of the sections, please get in touch with managing-editor@bluesci.co.uk. Finally, thank you for taking the time to help with production. We hope that seeing the magazine in print is sufficient reward for your hard work. Tom Bishop, BlueSci Managing Editor, November

3 GENERAL ADVICE FOR PRODUCERS The job of the producer is to lay out the final pages of the printed magazine. This involves formatting the text, adding pictures and captions, and choosing a colour scheme. BlueSci uses a number of template files to ensure that everything conforms to our house style. The magazine is produced using Adobe InDesign. If this is your first time at production it is worth spending a bit of time familiarising yourself with this software. It is also worth spending time getting to know the layout of the BlueSci (B) drive on the Varsity computers using Windows Explorer. If at any stage you are unsure of how something looks (for example a page s colour scheme or a certain image), just ask someone else on production for a second opinion. If you happen to be on your own, drop the editor an (editor@bluesci.co.uk) and explain your concerns. If you are ever stuck on something, just ask. Your time is spent far more productively (!) if you ask others for help, rather than spending ages struggling with one specific problem. COMPUTER ACCESS Most production is done over 3 or 4 weekends at the end of term, with the editor or managing editor present to let people into the Varsity offices and be there for advice. Everything you need for production is on the BlueSci B drive on the Varsity computers. Each issue has a separate folder, with sub- folders for each page or double- page. Within these sub- folders there should be the InDesign document for those pages, the article(s), and any images or illustrations collected so far. Alternatively, if you have InDesign on your own computer you can help with production remotely. We do not generally advise this unless you have done some production with BlueSci before. However, if you are interested, managing- editor@bluesci.co.uk. 3

4 TEMPLATES PAGE LAYOUT BlueSci uses a two- column page layout throughout. Text should always appear within these two, equal columns. The only exceptions are the editorial page, which has one column, and the News, Reviews, and Weird & Wonderful pages. Columns never have justified text. Apart from the footer and any images that are flush off the edge, nothing should be closer than 20mm to the sides. MAIN TEXT The main text is all Adobe Garamond Pro, regular and size 10pt. The tracking (spacing between words) can be changed between - 20 and +20 for each article to make it fit in nicely (see also Widows and orphans), but avoid changing it by more than between adjacent paragraphs. Generally, it is best to decide where the images are going to go first, then set the spacing of the whole article so that it fits, and finally adjust the spacing to get rid of any widows or orphans. FIRST PARAGRAPH The first paragraph differs from the rest only in the first few words (no more than 4). These words should be small caps, bold and size 12pt. The first letter is not capitalised. WIDOWS AND ORPHANS Widows and orphans refer to single words on a line at the end of a paragraph and single lines of a paragraph at the top or bottom of a column. Both of these should be avoided if at all possible throughout the magazine for aesthetic reasons. Change the tracking (see also Main text), to get rid of them. AUTHOR DETAILS We want to keep these to a consistent format throughout. They should all be of the form X is a Y student in the Department of Z and be Gill Sans Std, light and size 10pt. TITLES AND ILLUSTRATIONS The title font is Gill Sans Std in light and can change slightly in size (normally 44 or 46pt) depending on the word count (five maximum). It should only rarely go onto two lines. The sub- title should always be 14pt and the same font as the title. Every word in a title should start with a capital, except for things like and or of, but the sub- title is not capitalised. FOOTER Always check the page numbers, article title and issue date. The page numbers should correspond to the files sub- folder name and are in black on the outside edge. The article title is also on the outside edge and is in regular font. In the centre there is then the term (remember this will be the term it actually comes out in) and year in light font next to the BlueSci logo. COLOURS The colour used for each page or double- page article is at the discretion of the producer. For obvious reasons, outrageously bright or horrendously dull colours are not advised. Generally, 4

5 the colour is decided based on the images that appear on that page, so do not do it first it should be one of the last things you do. (The colour picking tool is useful here if you want to exactly match a colour in one of the images.) In post- production the colour may need to be changed if it is the same as another page, especially if they are near each other, but this is not of concern in the primary production stages. The colour is altered by changing the swatch colour for that page. This should adjust the title, sub- title, footers and captions. 5

6 IMAGES ACQUISITION If pictures are not received with an article or are not able to be collected before production, they will need to be sourced at the time. There are three criteria that must be met for photos to be used in BlueSci: they need to be Creative Commons licensed, of relatively high quality (300dpi, or around 1-2MB on average) and, very importantly, they must be interesting. These websites are useful image sources: Wikimedia Commons Flickr Commons NASA have a range of good images US government sites Press releases often have usable images This website allows you to look at multiple ones quite easily: If the perfect image is copyrighted, you can always get in touch with the original source author and ask for their permission to reproduce it. If you get permission, inform the Issue Editor or Managing Editor of what you have done and mark the picture credit (see Captions and credits) with a symbol. Save any images you find to the article s folder and include the source website and reference name in a Word document. APPLICATION All images must be opened in Adobe Photoshop initially and saved as CMYK colour (Image Mode CMYK) for printing. This also allows you to crop or resize the image if necessary. Open Image Image Size and check the resolution. If it is less than 300dpi (pixels per inch, i.e. defining the quality) adjust it, making sure Resample Image box is unticked. (When the image is then opened in InDesign it will be at 300dpi, so do not enlarge it by more than 10-20% as this will reduce the resolution.) When you save the Photoshop file, save it as either a JPEG or a TIFF (although TIFFs are usually unnecessarily large) and adjust the image name to include CMYK and its new resolution. Changing to CMYK may alter the colour of the image slightly, in which case you can readjust it (Image Adjustments Brightness/Contrast). Curves and Levels (Image Adjustments) allows you to modify the input- output graph for each individual colour channel or all the channels at the same time. The former case might be useful if, for example, an image looked too pink. Then a slight reduction of the Magenta channel might solve the problem. Pictures that go to the edge of the page need to run off by a certain amount to allow for printing errors. If you have the grid up (just press W) you can see red lines running just off the page. Images to the edge of the page should go this far. Large pictures that start in a writing column but go further out should not stop in the white margin but be flush off the edge. 6

7 CAPTIONS AND CREDITS Every picture should have a credit line with the picture s source. If you don t know the source of a picture it means that someone needs to find out! Even if the image is Creative Commons, it still needs to be attributed. Picture credits are positioned vertically, reading up from the bottom of the picture either on the right or left side, depending on picture positioning. For cutouts, credits may be placed unobtrusively elsewhere on the page, so long as it is clear which picture it refers to. Captions are placed below, above or next to an image, with a 5mm gap between the image and the writing. This gap should be set as an inset spacing on all sides of the caption boxes (right click Text Frame Options to check). Make sure the caption box is then touching one side of the image and is in line with another. The text is Gill Sans Std, 9pt and matches the page colour scheme. The first 2-4 words are in regular, the rest are light and it should not exceed 10 lines (generally should be around 5 or 6) or be more than 25mm wide. 7