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• • February 12, 2013 at 11:55 am #64132
    Jeffrey Stern

    Member

    I inherited a text heavy, 16pg, 3 column newsletter that was kind of messed up. It's biggest problem was that it used vertical type alignment since the client wanted the text in each column to align top and bottom (no rag bottom allowed). Anyway, the copy is Adobe Garamond 11/15. I took things out of vertical align and put it on a baseline grid of 15pt. Everything has been somewhat ok, although now the client wants some different spacing between paragraphs and bulleted and number lists—for the most part I was using a single line space after the last bullet and before the next paragraph. They now would like a half line space before the 1st bullet as well.

    So not a baseline grid expert, but pretty well-versed in InDesign (CS6), I've been trying to see if I can accomodate this request. I've tried a few things with no success, mostly because I can't seem to maintain the bottom column alignment (i.e., the want all the columns to end at the same point). I've tried changing my grid to 7.5pt and using that spacing before the first bullet and 15pt after the last, but things get messed up, especially when the bulleted type goes from one column to another. Also tried a 3pt grid to see if that might work. Got things closer, but still the bottom of the column problem especially if the bulleted list breaks across columns.

    Is this an impossible task becuase of the bottom column alignment problem? Any other suggestions

    Jeff

  • February 12, 2013 at 12:27 pm #64134
    Matt Mayerchak

    Participant

    Jeff,

    You're fighting the good fight. They may be asking for too many mutally-exclusive things. If everything you do is in even multiples of the 15 pt leading, it will only align when there are even #s in a given column. So, for a given column, you need to prioritize. If the bottom alignment is #1 priority, start with base aligned text columns and allow the tops to be uneven. If tops and bottoms, are BOTH critical, as they usually are, then you have to allow for what happens when you have uneven #s of extra space breaks. 16 pages isn't so bad; you can do manual adjustments on the occasional columns. But somewhere along the line you're going to have extra space or un-aligned text. It's usually better to end a column a half line short than to run a half line longer than the other 2 out of 3 on a page.

    Perhaps you can design around the problem by adding some kind of ornamentation at the top or bottom or in-between lists and text, to take up the odd amounts of space visually. Or, put the bulleted lists inside a callout box and have the box align, etc.

    You can get away with a non-aligned paragraph better if it's in a box or if you do something else to distract the eye from the fact that the baselines don't align.

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