- Find examples of frames.
Look through books, magazines, newsletters, newspapers, and your mail to find good and bad uses of frames, boxes, and borders. Identify how and why the frame has been used? Does it group, set part, or emphasize information? Is it a simple or elaborate frame. Is it appropriate to the message of the piece? How would you change the use of frames to improve the look of these pieces?
- Create your own document for frame experimentation.
Create a new document using the text from the assignments in Lesson 1, Lesson 2, Lesson 3, and Lesson 5. All that material comes from various lessons in the Start a Business tutorials on this site. Arrange the text anyway you like as if you were creating a small newsletter or a brochure about starting a desktop publishing business. Add your own headlines, pull-quotes, drop caps, and other text and embellishments. Use everything we’ve covered so far about spacing, alignment, and puncutation to create your document.
- Frame your document.
Create several copies of your document so you can compare different versions. Begin by boxing in just one small portion, such as a sidebar article. On other copies of your document add more frames and boxes. In some documents use the same type of frame or box throughout. In other documents mix it up. Put a border around the entire page. Print out your results and compare them to each other. Can you identify why you used each frame? Show your documents to family and friends and get their opinions.
- Unframe your document.
Now try taming your frames. Trade a bold box for something more subtle — thinner lines, a tinted box. Try methods other than boxes to group, set apart, or emphasize parts of your document — a different font, colored text, more space (an invisible box?). Print your results and compare them to each other and with earlier versions. Show your documents to family and friends and get their opinions.
Share your experiments with frames and boxes with your peers. Log into the DTP Classroom and attach a screen shot or a PDF demonstrating good and bad use of frames. Tell us which ones are just right and which are just too much.
Clip art is the topic of the next lesson in this series. Get some tips on using clip art effectively.
Found this page by accident? This is one of 12 lessons delivered as part of the Rules of Desktop Publishing free email class.
Quotable Design
| “Right and wrong do not exist in graphic design. There is only effective and non-effective communication.” — Peter Bilak - Illegibility |
| Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. |
| “Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or doing it better.” — John Updike |
