Publishing with Slides

This session introduces you to simple and free solutions for desktop publishing (DTP). We'll start by looking at some essential principles of layout and design, then share some tips and ideas for producing creative content. You'll learn how to manipulate shapes in Google Slides in order to produce designs for brochures, postcards, newsletters, and even school magazines and create some practical hands-on projects.

Design and Layout

In a desktop publishing design tool such as the industry standard Adobe InDesign, pages are designed by being made up of objects. These objects can be freely placed anywhere on the page, and they are often aligned with an invisible underlying grid structure which gives some structure to how they are arranged.

Objects can be...

Text boxes - either large text for headings and titles, or smaller text with readable content
Images - such as photos, logos, cartoons, wordart, etc
Shapes - rectangles, circles, stars, and other shapes, usually treated as blocks of colour
Lines - horizontal, vertical, straight or curved. Dotted, dashed or arrows

The job of a designer is to place content on a page in a way that is both easy to read and pleasant to look at. Use grids! They might seem rigid, but there is a lot of scope for creativity in the way objects can be arranged on a page.

Activity

Manipulating shapes, images, lines and text

By the way, most of these same techniques also work in Google Drawings.

And many of them are fairly standard across other design and layout tools, like Adobe Illustrator.

Make a copy of this Slides file

Working with Shapes, Text and Images

Magazine Scans

Click to view

A Word processor differs from a desktop publishing program because they are designed to perform different functions. Word processors, such as Google Docs, are meant to facilitate writing, and it has some great tools to help do this. But Google Docs is not great when it comes to page layout because it does not support things like text boxes and shapes. People often try to force Docs to “make the page pretty” but that’s not what it was meant to do.

Instead we can use Google Slides.

Think about Slides as though they are pages...

Google Slides supports text boxes, shapes, and images. Unlike Docs, it allows them to be placed anywhere on the page (or slide). It also has some pretty good options to manage fonts, colours, line spacing, image cropping, etc. All the important things a desktop publishing tool needs. So let’s turn Slides into the missing desktop publishing tool that Google never gave us.

Go to the File menu and choose Page Setup.

The standard options are for variations on a presentation slide - 4:3, 16:9 and 16:10 - since that’s what Google Slides is meant to make.

But instead, select the Custom option and enter the dimensions for a typical printed page.

Metric Sizes

A2 42cm x 59.4cm

A3 29.7cm x 42cm

A4 21cm x 29.7cm

A5 14.8cm x 21cm

You can, of course, make your page size whatever you prefer. This site is useful for finding the dimensions of standard page sizes such as US Letter, Postcards, business cards, etc.

Now that you have a “slide” in the shape of a printed page, you can start thinking about it as a page rather than a slide. Add text boxes, shapes, images. Go nuts. Need more pages? Just add more “slides”. There is no way to place an actual grid on the page, but just remember that underneath your design is an invisible grid and try to respect it!

Activity - Your Practical Task

From the magazine page samples provided, pick one. Don't be too fussy. Just pick one and use it. Then create a new Slides presentation, resize the page to A4, and recreate the sample page you chose. Just use the layout but fill it with the content of your own choice. Feel free to modify and adapt the layout if you wish. Replace the content (text, images, logos, etc) with whatever content you prefer. Maybe base it on a topic you teach or a specific curriculum area. Your choice.

Need some dummy text as a placeholder? Try a lorem ipsum generator

Once you make a page you're happy with, open up this project in Slides . Copy the page you made from your own Slides presentation and paste it into this shared deck. Remember, it's a shared Slides deck, so take care not to interfere with other people's work.

If you finish this task, why not try making something else, such as a postcard, trifold brochure or booklet?

Sample Pages

The Upside of Slides for publishing

Using Slides can be a simple and effective page layout tool that is perfect for younger students. Slides Master Pages work great for adding consistent page content like logos, etc. If you don’t need to print the finished product, but can view it online, you can even take advantage of adding video or interactive charts. The biggest advantage of all for using Slides for desktop layout is that, like all Google files, they are completely collaborative! You can have multiple students all working together on the same publication simultaneously.

The Downside of Slides for publishing

Of course, there are some limitations compared to a full-blown desktop publishing tool like InDesign. For example, the biggest issue for making professional documents using Slides is probably the inability to thread long text from one text box to another. You also don’t get the same fine-grained control over text with kerning, leading, tracking, and so on. There is also a lack of control over margins, bleed and gutter settings, etc, but for the casual user this is probably a minor thing.

Publishing your work

When you’re ready to print your finished product (if you still really need print things) just go to File > Download As > PDF to generate a print-ready PDF version of your work.

If you don't need to print it, try doing File >Publish to the web. Then, just give out the URL to share your work!

Where to next?

Using Google Slides as a desktop publishing tool can take you a long way in your page design requirements. Try it yourself! Try redesigning one of the publications at your own school and see how easy it can be.

If you really feel you need a more full featured layout tool, you should try LucidPress, a powerful cloud based publishing tool that works great on Chromebooks. Or Pages if you're on a Mac. Or Publisher if you're on Windows. And if you're really serious about this stuff, then Adobe InDesign is the Big Kahuna of desktop publishing.

JCC February Newsletter 2019

Here's a great example by someone who previously did this workshop, then went back to her school and put it into practise by redesigning their school newsletter. Click to open and view!

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