From the course: Type Tips

Creating movie poster credits

From the course: Type Tips

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Creating movie poster credits

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- [Nigel] Hi, I'm Nigel French, welcome to Type Tips. This week, I have a tip about creating movie poster credits. The challenge here is that we have the smaller type on two lines next to the larger type, side-by-side paragraphs, which in InDesign, does present something of a challenge. One way to attempt this would be to use tables and to have each piece of text in its own table cell, but the problem there is that you cannot auto-fit columns to your text, so you have to manually adjust the width of the columns and therefore, it takes a bit longer than you'd like. So, instead, I am going to use inline objects and object styles. The style of font that I'm using here is a very compressed typeface, this one is actually called Balboa Extra Condensed. You'll find that on Adobe Fonts, but if you don't have access to Adobe Fonts, there's this front here, Movie Letters, on dafont.com, which would serve the same purpose. So, let me come and turn on Layout Two, where I have my starting text all at one size on a single line. And to this text, I've applied the Credit paragraph style. My type size is 48 points and my small paragraph style is slightly less than half of that. I'm going to begin by selecting what will become the first piece of my small type, cut that, and paste it into its own frame and then apply that style. I need to specify the size of this frame and I also need to set up the fitting options of the frame. I want it sized to the exact height of this type, the larger type, but before I do that, I'm going to select the text frame that contains the larger type and I'm going to change its first baseline options. You'll notice that, currently, there's a little extra space between the top of the type and the top of the text frame. So if I come to Text Frame Options, Baseline Options, Cat Height, that will address that. I do now need to just double-click on the bottom-center handle to fit the frame snugly around the type. And that gives me the exact height that I want to use. So I'm going to copy that value and then we'll come over to this type right here and press Command or Control + B to go to my text frame options. Come to auto-size. I'll turn the auto-sizing to height and width and then the minimum height is going to be that value that I just copied from the Control Panel. In addition to that, I should mention that the alignment on this paragraph style is set to right-align. I'll then come to my general options and I'm going to set the vertical justification to justified so that ultimately the letting that is applied here becomes somewhat irrelevant because the top of the first line will touch the top of the text frame and the baseline of second line will touch the bottom of that text frame. Now, before I drag this into or onto the line as an inline object, I'm also going to add a text wrap to it and the text wrap is going to create a little buffer between this text and the text which follows. So I'll come to my Text Wrap panel, which I have down here, but I also have the options up here on the Control Panel and I want my text wrap turned on and for my left offset and my right offset, I'm going to specify three points. From the blue square at the top-right of the text frame, I'll drag, holding down the Shift key, drag that in front of my main text. I'm going to capture these settings as an object style, so with that frame selected, I'll choose New Object Style, and I'll just call it Box. Apply Style to Selection is checked. I'll then copy that and come in and insert it right here where I've got my second piece of small text, paste it. I'll select this text, delete it, click inside the smaller box, highlight all of that text, and then choose Paste Without Formatting. You may find this problem occurred. Because the text is now running shorter, we get this extra space here. All we need to do to fix this is come to the object styles, apply None, and then reapply the Box object style. So I can just carry on with that process. I'll do one more. So I'll select the box, copy it, paste it, highlight the text that we actually want to go in there, cut that, and then Paste Without Formatting or the keyboard shortcut there is Command + Shift + V. And if that runs shorter or if we to just need to sort of refresh it, apply None and then reapply the object style. So that's how we can approach side-by-side paragraphs, in this case, used for movie poster credits.

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