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So let's have a quick overview of our poster. It's going to be for a production
of Romeo and Juliet by the Royle Shakespeare Company at a theatre in Brighton,
England called the Twilight Theatre. It doesn't exist, but that doesn't matter.
Let's have a look at our exercise files and the assets that we are going to use
for the poster are in the Links folder. Let's take a look at what's in there.
I'm going to drag this Links folder on to Bridge and we want to make sure that
we are looking on the Desktop/exercise_ files/Links. These are the images that
we have to work with or at least the images that I have to work with.
To be fair you are not going to have all of these; some of these images are
stock photography that I don't have the rights to distribute. But you can go to
the istockphoto.com website and download low-resolution comping versions of
these images. Or you can use similar images. I'm talking about all of these
that begin with the iStock name. So we have got images of iconography popularly
associated with Romeo and Juliet. Daggers, roses, wilted roses, different kinds
of roses, young lovers, Juliet's balcony and then for some of our more
contemporary interpretations, we have got some textures which we are going to
use in the background. I am working here in Bridge. And Bridge, if
you are not familiar with it, is a fantastic file management, asset management,
kind of Swiss army knife of a program. It does so many things. Many different
things to many different people. What it's going to do for us though
is it's going to allow us to easily evaluate what we have, the assets that we
are working with and their quality and I'm working now in full view. And in full
view you have got various different workspaces. If I switch from Essentials to Filmstrip I
then get a much bigger preview, and in this bigger preview I can click on any
portion of the image. You see that my cursor becomes a magnifying glass and when
I click on that, that portion of the image is displayed at 100%. So we can check
out how good the image quality is without having to take the time and trouble
of actually opening the image in Photoshop itself. Let me switch now back to
Essentials. Another thing I should mention is that here
is the text file of the text that goes into the poster. Although, when we make
the template I'll include as part of the template that text file. It's a very
short body of text. But if you do want to begin completely from scratch, here
is that Word document that you can place into your InDesign document. Throughout
the course of creating these posters, I'm going to be using a wide variety
of fonts. Some of these you may not have. So you may find yourself in this
situation where you open up one of the finished InDesign documents and you see
a missing font message. Here is how to handle it. It tells us that we are missing
Odeon Condensed. I'm going to find that font. Select it right there and
I'm going to need to choose what I replace it with. Now Odeon Condensed is a
very condensed font and we need to replace it with a font that is also very condensed.
One that I know we'll all have is this one, Myriad Pro Condensed. Now
this isn't always going to be a smooth transition because the different weights
of the characters is going to mean that the text in the new font may not
necessarily fit in the old size text frame. So we might have to adjust a few things. I
click Change All and not much has suffered except that we have lost the text
in this text frame here. If I click on that I would then need to expand the size
of that text frame. So that it's big enough to accommodate all of the text.
Now that's obviously too big in this case because it's overlapping the image. So
we would need to go a step further. Perhaps we can move it down a little bit and
we would then also need to size it down. I'm using keyboard shortcuts to do that
and once I have got that size right there, I'm actually going to come up
to my Control panel. Select it there, copy it from there and select the word
Juliet and paste that size into there. So that is the same size as the word Romeo.
So things are going to change slightly. It's important to know that you might
need to be adaptable here. To see the posters with the fonts as I intended you
can open up the final PDF versions and if we go to Desktop in the
exercise_files folder, there is a folder called poster pdfs and this one is
number seven. We can double-click on that. So you can always compare that to your work
in progress. That's my finished version and of course, yours doesn't have
to end up like that. This is just how mine ended up. So in conclusion, we have a
folder for linked graphics and these are the images that we are going to be using
in the posters. You may have to substitute some of these images for your own
similar images or download low resolution comping versions of these images
from the iStockphoto web site or from any other stock photography web site
and also a lot of the fonts that I'm using, you might not have so substitute your own
similar fonts. Now I think we are ready to roll up our shirtsleeves and
get started.