THE REAL USEFUL DTP-BOOK

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12. To break up the logical blocky feel to a DTP page, try rotating the crop of a picture rather than the picture itself (or in DTP terms, rotate the picture within its frame, not the whole picture box). This preserves your design and readability but adds depth – action even – to the layout. Many a dull picture and layout can be livened up this way.

13. When you want to run several pictures of similar subjects, decide which are the most important and vary their size accordingly. Not only does this tell your readers what to look at first, but you are in effect controlling how they read. Try putting the pictures in a sequence to tell a story, possibly overlapping them to indicate the continuity.

14. Go ape with your picture cropping. This enables you to put unusual shapes on a page and make it striking. Who needs the entire crop anyway? Pictures of famous people are even better – you can easily focus in on particular areas of their faces without losing reader recognition.

15. Avoid the bathtime layout principle, whereby all your interesting elements float to the top like toy boats, while the body text rests at the bottom like water. Add variety by putting pull quotes across the bottom for a change. They’re not just there to break up slabs of text – if you give them space, you give them authority too.

16. You can add visual ’colour’ to a layout by using fonts creatively. Sure, it’s good form to stick to two or three typefaces to maintain consistency and readability, but who says you can’t throw in unusual drop caps for fun, or play around with headlines now and again? And remember that Zapf Dingbats is as much clip art as it is a font. so use it.

17. Don’t be afraid to experiment. After all we’ve said about bad design, don’t be put off taking a risk. There’s no jail sentence for bad layout. The best design comes from breaking the rules. Not all of them all at once – that just produces a mess. But by breaking one or two of the rules you can attract attention to a page, and elevate good page layout into creative design.