How to Make a Medical Brochure Template in InDesign

Post pobrano z: How to Make a Medical Brochure Template in InDesign

Final product image
What You’ll Be Creating

Looking for a simple, clean, easy-to-edit medical brochure? This tutorial shows you how to make a brochure template in InDesign.  

Brochure designs play an important role in the impact of your marketing communication. Brochures are a nice way to engage customers by providing key points of your medical center, clinic, or hospital. 

In this tutorial, we will set up a ready-to-print template using color swatches and paragraph styles. These two panels will make it easier for you edit the design in a variety of colors and fonts. This template is fully editable and a time saver! This template is packed with design essentials, ready to get your business up and running. 

What You Will Need

You’ll need access to Adobe InDesign and Adobe Illustrator. If you don’t have the software, you can download a trial from the Adobe website. You’ll also need the following assets:

Download the assets and make sure the font is installed on your system before starting. When you are ready, we can dive in! 

Looking for amazing InDesign brochure templates? Head on over to Envato Elements or GraphicRiver.

1. How to Create a New InDesign File

Step 1

In InDesign, go to File > New. Name the document Medical Brochure Template. We will create an A5 brochure template. Set the file to the following dimensions:

  • Width to 14.8 cm
  • Height to 21 cm 
  • Orientation to Portrait
  • Pages to
  • Check Facing Pages
  • Margins to 1 cm 
  • Bleeds to 0.3 cm (it’s best to seek your professional printer’s preference)

Click Create.

Create a new indesign file

Step 2

For this brochure design tutorial, we will work with two Layers. Organizing layers is an important practice when designing a template.

Bring up the Layers panel by going to Window > Layers. Double-click on Layer 1 and rename it Images/Vector. 

On the Layers panel main menu, select New Layer. Name it Copy. Click OK. This is where all of the text will go.

Create two layers imagesvector and copy

Step 3

Before we start with the design, let’s organize the color swatches. Head over to Window > Color > Swatches to expand the Swatches panel. Select the default swatches, and Right-Click > Delete Swatch.

Delete all the original color swatches

Choose New Color Swatch button from the main menu. Add the following colors:

  • Dark Blue: C=100 M=50 Y=0 K=40
  • Light Blue: C=45 M=10 Y=0 K=0
  • Dark Grey: C=0 M=0 Y=0 K=50
  • Light Grey: C=0 M=0 Y=0 K=15

Click Add after inputting each color value. Click Done. 

create new color swatches

2. How to Place Images and Create Vectors in Adobe InDesign

Step 1

On the Layers panel, make sure you are selecting the Images/Vector layer. 

On the toolbar, select the Pen Tool (P). We will create a path. Click outside the left side of the page to create the first point—this is an anchor point. Next, click inside the page, and hold and drag to create a curve. This is called a direction point, and you can alter this later. Click outside the right side of the page to complete the curve. Close the object by going around the page until you meet the initial point. 

To edit the curve, select the Direct Selection Tool (A) from the toolbar. Select the center point and move the handles around until you’ve achieved a curve you are happy with.

Use the pen tool to create a rectangle with a curved bottom

Duplicate the object by pressing Shift-Option and dragging to the side. Duplicate this once more—we will go back to these two objects shortly. 

Duplicate the object twice

Step 2

Select the original object that is currently on the page. Press Command-D to Place an image. Select the Happy doctor image, and click OK. 

Head over to the control bar and activate the Constrain Proportion Scaling button. Set the Scale to 56%. Use the Direct Selection Tool (A) to Move the image within the object. 

Lock the object by pressing Command-L.

Place an image in the object we created

Step 3

Let’s go back to the duplicate objects. Color each object by going to the Swatches panel. Color one object with light grey and the other object with dark blue. 

Select both objects and press Shift-Command-[ to send the objects to the back. Spread both objects across the page to create a wave below the image. 

Color the duplicated object grey and blue Place behind the image

Step 4

As mentioned before, keeping the files clean is ideal, especially if you will be using this as a medical brochure template. We will cut out the leftover part hanging outside the bleed mark. Using the Rectangle Tool (M), draw a rectangle covering the outside of the bleed and just enough to cover one of the shapes. Select the new rectangle and the grey object.

Bring up the Pathfinder panel by going to Window > Object & Layout > Pathfinder. Select the Subtract button. Repeat the process for the second object. Perfect! 

Use the pathfinder tool to cut the leftover objects outside of the bleed

Step 5

To add a logo, press Command-D and select the logo. Click OK. Drag on the document instead of clicking to place the object at a smaller size than the original. If you click on the document, the software will place the object at 100% scale.

Place the logo on the bottom right side.

Place a logo

To create a cohesive look, draw a rectangle at the bottom of the cover. It should cover the width of the page. I set the Height to 0.6 cm on the Control bar.

Create a blue rectangle at the bottom of the cover

3. How to Create Paragraph Styles in Adobe InDesign

Paragraph styles are a great tool when creating a template. We can set text styles, similar to the colors on the Swatches panel. This will allow us to create a cohesive look throughout the brochure template. It will also be faster to edit to specific brand guidelines.

For this project, we will set styles for a title, tagline, subheading, body copy, and pull quote. 

Step 1

Open up the Paragraph Styles panel by going to Windows > Styles > Paragraph Styles. 

From the main menu, select New Paragraph Style. 

In the New Paragraph Style window, set the Style Name to Headline. Select Basic Character Formats from the left side menu and use the following settings:

  • Font Family: Catesque
  • Font Style: Bold
  • Size: 22 pt
  • Leading: 22 pt
  • Tracking: 20

Select the Character Color option from the left menu. Set the color to the darker blue. Click OK. 

Using the paragraph styles create new styles

Perfect! Now let’s create a few more styles, and then we will be ready to format text boxes. Use the following settings for the tagline:

  • Font Family: Catesque
  • Font Style: Medium
  • Size: 10 pt
  • Leading: 12 pt
  • Tracking: 45

Set the Character Color to dark grey. Click OK. 

Use the following settings for the subheading:

  • Font Family: Catesque
  • Font Style: Black
  • Size: 12 pt
  • Leading: 14.4 pt
  • Tracking: 45

Set the Character Color to dark blue. Click OK.

Use the following settings for the body copy:

  • Font Family: Catesque
  • Font Style: Regular
  • Size: 8 pt
  • Leading: 9.6 pt
  • Tracking: 0

Set the Character Color to dark grey. Click OK. 

Use the following settings for the body copy:

  • Font Family: Catesque
  • Font Style: Bold
  • Size: 14 pt
  • Leading: 16.8 pt
  • Tracking: 0

Set the Character Color to dark blue. Click OK.

Create styles for each hierarchy level

Step 2

Perfect! Select the Text Tool (T) from the toolbar. Draw a text box opposite the logo. Add a headline and a tagline.

Select the headline by highlighting it with the text tool. Select the Headline style from the Paragraph style panel. Keep in mind you can still customize text boxes. For the headline, I will set the second line in the dark grey color. 

Select the tagline and set it to the Tagline style on the Paragraph panel.

Add text to the cover use the paragraph styles to format it

Step 3

If you’ve been working on the Images layer, select the text box. Head over to the Layers panel, and click and drag the blue square to the Copy layer. This action will transfer the objects from one layer to the other. 

Place the text boxes on the copy layer

Step 4

Let’s work on the inside pages of the medical brochure. Using the Rectangle Tool (M), draw a rectangle at the very top of the pages. Make sure it is going over to the bleed mark. Set the color to dark blue. 

Create a few text boxes using the Text Tool (T). Don’t worry about the placement for now—we can move them around as we develop the rest of the pages. 

Add copy to the inside of the brochure use the paragraph styles to format the text boxes

Step 5

Press Command-D to Place these two images: Smiling medical team and Sisters smiling. I’ve arranged the two photos as shown in the image below:

Place images inside the brochure

Profile headshots are an important part of medical brochures. They’ll give the target market a chance to get to know some faces. Select the Ellipse Tool (L) from the toolbar. Click on the document and set the Width and Height to 2 cm. 

Head over to the Control bar, and set the Stroke Weight to 3 pt. Set the Stroke color to dark blue. 

Create a circle with the ellipse tool

Step 6

Duplicate the circle by pressing Shift-Option and dragging. Have a total of four circles. 

To distribute the four objects evenly, place two of them on each side of the page, ideally just inside the margin. Head over to Window > Object and Layout > Align to open the Align panel. Select all four objects and press the Distribute Horizontal Center button. 

Duplicate the circle 3 times to have a total of 4 circles

Step  7

Select one of the circles and press Command-D. Select the Healthcare workers image and click OK. 

Select the Direct Selection Tool (A), and set the Scale to 40%. This image contains several headshots, so repeat this action for the rest of the circles.

Place an image within each circle

Step 8

To bring it all together, we will add some blue vectors at the back. Use the Rectangle Tool (M), and click on the document. Set the Width to 15 cm and the Height to 3.45 cm. Place this object behind the headshots. 

Create another rectangle with the same dimensions. Place it on the opposite page. Using the Direct Selection Tool (A), select the top right point and move it downwards. This will create some movement on the spread. 

Select both items and press Command-L to Lock both the objects.

Add a blue object behind the circled images running across to the second page

Step 9

Let’s add some names to the headshots. Using the Text Tool (T), draw text boxes under each photo. Use the Paragraph Styles to set the styles. Remember you can still change the format of the text box after setting a style. I’ve chosen Body Copy to make sure the size is uniform but changed the color to white and the name to the Bold family. 

To align the text boxes to the headshots, use the Align panel and select the Align Horizontal Center button. 

Add text under each circled image

Step 10

Let’s add some icons on the right page. This is perfect to promote any kind of services. Open the colored version of the healthcare icons in Adobe Illustrator. Select three icons of your choice to copy to the medical brochure design. Use Command-C to Copy and Command-V to Paste. 

Open the icons vector on Adobe Illustrator

Head back to the brochure design. Select all three icons, and on the Align panel, select the Top Edge button

Head over to the Control panel, activate the Constrain Proportions button, and set the Height to 1.5 cm.

Select three icons copy and paste onto the InDesign file

Step 11

This time, to divide the icons equally, we will use Guides. This is a second method of dividing objects across a page. 

Head over to Layout > Create Guides. In the Create Guides option window, set the Columns to 3 and the Gutter to 0.5 cm. Set Fit Guides to: Margins and click OK.

Create a three column guide on the right-hand side page

Step 12

Create three text boxes using the Text Tool (T) on each column. Use Paragraph Styles to format the text. Set the Alignment to Align Center

Create three text boxes in each column

Step 13

Select an icon and a text box. On the Align panel, select the Align Horizontal Center button. The two objects will align; place them on one of the columns. Repeat this with the other objects until you’ve centered each on a column. 

Let’s add a divider in the gutter. Select the Line Tool (\) from the toolbar. Hold Shift and drag to create a straight line.

Using the align tool center an icon and a text box in each column With the line tool create dividers in each gutter

Step 14

Let’s work on the back cover. Press Command-D to add an image. Place the image on the top two-thirds of the brochure. Use the Direct Selection Tool (A) to move the image within the frame.

Repeat the blue stripe by using the Rectangle Tool (M). Set the Width to 15.4 cm and the Height to 0.4 cm. This time, place it under the image. 

Using the Text Tool (T), add a pull quote over the image. Use the Pull quote style from the Paragraph Styles panel.

Place a logo on the bottom right side using the Command-D shortcut. 

Select the Text Tool (T) to add contact information. Place this text box opposite the logo, and use Paragraph Styles to format the text. 

Add an image to the backcover along with a blue stripe Add a text box with contact information and a logo

4. How to Export a PDF File for Printing

Before exporting a file for printing, it is useful to take a look around the edges of each page. Make sure all the objects that are meant to bleed out of the page are touching the bleeds. 

Step 1

To export the file, go to File > Export. Name the file medical brochure template and choose Adobe PDF (Print) from the Format dropdown menu. Click Save. 

Export the file

Step 2

In the Export Adobe PDF window, set the Adobe PDF Preset to Press Quality.

Select the Press Quality Preset

On the left side of the panel, select Marks and Bleeds. Check All Printer’s Marks and Use Document Bleed Settings. Click Export. You will have a ready-to-print PDF file.

Activate the printers marks and document bleed settings

Great Job! You’ve Finished This Tutorial!

In this tutorial, we learned how to make a medical brochure template in InDesign. Marketing is an important part of any business, and brochures play an important role in making it effective. Today, we’ve learned to:

  • Create a ready-to-print Adobe InDesign file
  • Place images within vector objects
  • Use the Paragraph Styles panel
  • Use the Color Swatches panel
  • Export a ready-to-print PDF file

If you would like to explore more template ideas, you can find many customizable brochures and flyers over at Envato Elements and Graphic River. Check it out!

If you liked this tutorial, you might like these:

How to Make a Medical Brochure Template in InDesign

Post pobrano z: How to Make a Medical Brochure Template in InDesign

Final product image
What You’ll Be Creating

Looking for a simple, clean, easy-to-edit medical brochure? This tutorial shows you how to make a brochure template in InDesign.  

Brochure designs play an important role in the impact of your marketing communication. Brochures are a nice way to engage customers by providing key points of your medical center, clinic, or hospital. 

In this tutorial, we will set up a ready-to-print template using color swatches and paragraph styles. These two panels will make it easier for you edit the design in a variety of colors and fonts. This template is fully editable and a time saver! This template is packed with design essentials, ready to get your business up and running. 

What You Will Need

You’ll need access to Adobe InDesign and Adobe Illustrator. If you don’t have the software, you can download a trial from the Adobe website. You’ll also need the following assets:

Download the assets and make sure the font is installed on your system before starting. When you are ready, we can dive in! 

Looking for amazing InDesign brochure templates? Head on over to Envato Elements or GraphicRiver.

1. How to Create a New InDesign File

Step 1

In InDesign, go to File > New. Name the document Medical Brochure Template. We will create an A5 brochure template. Set the file to the following dimensions:

  • Width to 14.8 cm
  • Height to 21 cm 
  • Orientation to Portrait
  • Pages to
  • Check Facing Pages
  • Margins to 1 cm 
  • Bleeds to 0.3 cm (it’s best to seek your professional printer’s preference)

Click Create.

Create a new indesign file

Step 2

For this brochure design tutorial, we will work with two Layers. Organizing layers is an important practice when designing a template.

Bring up the Layers panel by going to Window > Layers. Double-click on Layer 1 and rename it Images/Vector. 

On the Layers panel main menu, select New Layer. Name it Copy. Click OK. This is where all of the text will go.

Create two layers imagesvector and copy

Step 3

Before we start with the design, let’s organize the color swatches. Head over to Window > Color > Swatches to expand the Swatches panel. Select the default swatches, and Right-Click > Delete Swatch.

Delete all the original color swatches

Choose New Color Swatch button from the main menu. Add the following colors:

  • Dark Blue: C=100 M=50 Y=0 K=40
  • Light Blue: C=45 M=10 Y=0 K=0
  • Dark Grey: C=0 M=0 Y=0 K=50
  • Light Grey: C=0 M=0 Y=0 K=15

Click Add after inputting each color value. Click Done. 

create new color swatches

2. How to Place Images and Create Vectors in Adobe InDesign

Step 1

On the Layers panel, make sure you are selecting the Images/Vector layer. 

On the toolbar, select the Pen Tool (P). We will create a path. Click outside the left side of the page to create the first point—this is an anchor point. Next, click inside the page, and hold and drag to create a curve. This is called a direction point, and you can alter this later. Click outside the right side of the page to complete the curve. Close the object by going around the page until you meet the initial point. 

To edit the curve, select the Direct Selection Tool (A) from the toolbar. Select the center point and move the handles around until you’ve achieved a curve you are happy with.

Use the pen tool to create a rectangle with a curved bottom

Duplicate the object by pressing Shift-Option and dragging to the side. Duplicate this once more—we will go back to these two objects shortly. 

Duplicate the object twice

Step 2

Select the original object that is currently on the page. Press Command-D to Place an image. Select the Happy doctor image, and click OK. 

Head over to the control bar and activate the Constrain Proportion Scaling button. Set the Scale to 56%. Use the Direct Selection Tool (A) to Move the image within the object. 

Lock the object by pressing Command-L.

Place an image in the object we created

Step 3

Let’s go back to the duplicate objects. Color each object by going to the Swatches panel. Color one object with light grey and the other object with dark blue. 

Select both objects and press Shift-Command-[ to send the objects to the back. Spread both objects across the page to create a wave below the image. 

Color the duplicated object grey and blue Place behind the image

Step 4

As mentioned before, keeping the files clean is ideal, especially if you will be using this as a medical brochure template. We will cut out the leftover part hanging outside the bleed mark. Using the Rectangle Tool (M), draw a rectangle covering the outside of the bleed and just enough to cover one of the shapes. Select the new rectangle and the grey object.

Bring up the Pathfinder panel by going to Window > Object & Layout > Pathfinder. Select the Subtract button. Repeat the process for the second object. Perfect! 

Use the pathfinder tool to cut the leftover objects outside of the bleed

Step 5

To add a logo, press Command-D and select the logo. Click OK. Drag on the document instead of clicking to place the object at a smaller size than the original. If you click on the document, the software will place the object at 100% scale.

Place the logo on the bottom right side.

Place a logo

To create a cohesive look, draw a rectangle at the bottom of the cover. It should cover the width of the page. I set the Height to 0.6 cm on the Control bar.

Create a blue rectangle at the bottom of the cover

3. How to Create Paragraph Styles in Adobe InDesign

Paragraph styles are a great tool when creating a template. We can set text styles, similar to the colors on the Swatches panel. This will allow us to create a cohesive look throughout the brochure template. It will also be faster to edit to specific brand guidelines.

For this project, we will set styles for a title, tagline, subheading, body copy, and pull quote. 

Step 1

Open up the Paragraph Styles panel by going to Windows > Styles > Paragraph Styles. 

From the main menu, select New Paragraph Style. 

In the New Paragraph Style window, set the Style Name to Headline. Select Basic Character Formats from the left side menu and use the following settings:

  • Font Family: Catesque
  • Font Style: Bold
  • Size: 22 pt
  • Leading: 22 pt
  • Tracking: 20

Select the Character Color option from the left menu. Set the color to the darker blue. Click OK. 

Using the paragraph styles create new styles

Perfect! Now let’s create a few more styles, and then we will be ready to format text boxes. Use the following settings for the tagline:

  • Font Family: Catesque
  • Font Style: Medium
  • Size: 10 pt
  • Leading: 12 pt
  • Tracking: 45

Set the Character Color to dark grey. Click OK. 

Use the following settings for the subheading:

  • Font Family: Catesque
  • Font Style: Black
  • Size: 12 pt
  • Leading: 14.4 pt
  • Tracking: 45

Set the Character Color to dark blue. Click OK.

Use the following settings for the body copy:

  • Font Family: Catesque
  • Font Style: Regular
  • Size: 8 pt
  • Leading: 9.6 pt
  • Tracking: 0

Set the Character Color to dark grey. Click OK. 

Use the following settings for the body copy:

  • Font Family: Catesque
  • Font Style: Bold
  • Size: 14 pt
  • Leading: 16.8 pt
  • Tracking: 0

Set the Character Color to dark blue. Click OK.

Create styles for each hierarchy level

Step 2

Perfect! Select the Text Tool (T) from the toolbar. Draw a text box opposite the logo. Add a headline and a tagline.

Select the headline by highlighting it with the text tool. Select the Headline style from the Paragraph style panel. Keep in mind you can still customize text boxes. For the headline, I will set the second line in the dark grey color. 

Select the tagline and set it to the Tagline style on the Paragraph panel.

Add text to the cover use the paragraph styles to format it

Step 3

If you’ve been working on the Images layer, select the text box. Head over to the Layers panel, and click and drag the blue square to the Copy layer. This action will transfer the objects from one layer to the other. 

Place the text boxes on the copy layer

Step 4

Let’s work on the inside pages of the medical brochure. Using the Rectangle Tool (M), draw a rectangle at the very top of the pages. Make sure it is going over to the bleed mark. Set the color to dark blue. 

Create a few text boxes using the Text Tool (T). Don’t worry about the placement for now—we can move them around as we develop the rest of the pages. 

Add copy to the inside of the brochure use the paragraph styles to format the text boxes

Step 5

Press Command-D to Place these two images: Smiling medical team and Sisters smiling. I’ve arranged the two photos as shown in the image below:

Place images inside the brochure

Profile headshots are an important part of medical brochures. They’ll give the target market a chance to get to know some faces. Select the Ellipse Tool (L) from the toolbar. Click on the document and set the Width and Height to 2 cm. 

Head over to the Control bar, and set the Stroke Weight to 3 pt. Set the Stroke color to dark blue. 

Create a circle with the ellipse tool

Step 6

Duplicate the circle by pressing Shift-Option and dragging. Have a total of four circles. 

To distribute the four objects evenly, place two of them on each side of the page, ideally just inside the margin. Head over to Window > Object and Layout > Align to open the Align panel. Select all four objects and press the Distribute Horizontal Center button. 

Duplicate the circle 3 times to have a total of 4 circles

Step  7

Select one of the circles and press Command-D. Select the Healthcare workers image and click OK. 

Select the Direct Selection Tool (A), and set the Scale to 40%. This image contains several headshots, so repeat this action for the rest of the circles.

Place an image within each circle

Step 8

To bring it all together, we will add some blue vectors at the back. Use the Rectangle Tool (M), and click on the document. Set the Width to 15 cm and the Height to 3.45 cm. Place this object behind the headshots. 

Create another rectangle with the same dimensions. Place it on the opposite page. Using the Direct Selection Tool (A), select the top right point and move it downwards. This will create some movement on the spread. 

Select both items and press Command-L to Lock both the objects.

Add a blue object behind the circled images running across to the second page

Step 9

Let’s add some names to the headshots. Using the Text Tool (T), draw text boxes under each photo. Use the Paragraph Styles to set the styles. Remember you can still change the format of the text box after setting a style. I’ve chosen Body Copy to make sure the size is uniform but changed the color to white and the name to the Bold family. 

To align the text boxes to the headshots, use the Align panel and select the Align Horizontal Center button. 

Add text under each circled image

Step 10

Let’s add some icons on the right page. This is perfect to promote any kind of services. Open the colored version of the healthcare icons in Adobe Illustrator. Select three icons of your choice to copy to the medical brochure design. Use Command-C to Copy and Command-V to Paste. 

Open the icons vector on Adobe Illustrator

Head back to the brochure design. Select all three icons, and on the Align panel, select the Top Edge button

Head over to the Control panel, activate the Constrain Proportions button, and set the Height to 1.5 cm.

Select three icons copy and paste onto the InDesign file

Step 11

This time, to divide the icons equally, we will use Guides. This is a second method of dividing objects across a page. 

Head over to Layout > Create Guides. In the Create Guides option window, set the Columns to 3 and the Gutter to 0.5 cm. Set Fit Guides to: Margins and click OK.

Create a three column guide on the right-hand side page

Step 12

Create three text boxes using the Text Tool (T) on each column. Use Paragraph Styles to format the text. Set the Alignment to Align Center

Create three text boxes in each column

Step 13

Select an icon and a text box. On the Align panel, select the Align Horizontal Center button. The two objects will align; place them on one of the columns. Repeat this with the other objects until you’ve centered each on a column. 

Let’s add a divider in the gutter. Select the Line Tool (\) from the toolbar. Hold Shift and drag to create a straight line.

Using the align tool center an icon and a text box in each column With the line tool create dividers in each gutter

Step 14

Let’s work on the back cover. Press Command-D to add an image. Place the image on the top two-thirds of the brochure. Use the Direct Selection Tool (A) to move the image within the frame.

Repeat the blue stripe by using the Rectangle Tool (M). Set the Width to 15.4 cm and the Height to 0.4 cm. This time, place it under the image. 

Using the Text Tool (T), add a pull quote over the image. Use the Pull quote style from the Paragraph Styles panel.

Place a logo on the bottom right side using the Command-D shortcut. 

Select the Text Tool (T) to add contact information. Place this text box opposite the logo, and use Paragraph Styles to format the text. 

Add an image to the backcover along with a blue stripe Add a text box with contact information and a logo

4. How to Export a PDF File for Printing

Before exporting a file for printing, it is useful to take a look around the edges of each page. Make sure all the objects that are meant to bleed out of the page are touching the bleeds. 

Step 1

To export the file, go to File > Export. Name the file medical brochure template and choose Adobe PDF (Print) from the Format dropdown menu. Click Save. 

Export the file

Step 2

In the Export Adobe PDF window, set the Adobe PDF Preset to Press Quality.

Select the Press Quality Preset

On the left side of the panel, select Marks and Bleeds. Check All Printer’s Marks and Use Document Bleed Settings. Click Export. You will have a ready-to-print PDF file.

Activate the printers marks and document bleed settings

Great Job! You’ve Finished This Tutorial!

In this tutorial, we learned how to make a medical brochure template in InDesign. Marketing is an important part of any business, and brochures play an important role in making it effective. Today, we’ve learned to:

  • Create a ready-to-print Adobe InDesign file
  • Place images within vector objects
  • Use the Paragraph Styles panel
  • Use the Color Swatches panel
  • Export a ready-to-print PDF file

If you would like to explore more template ideas, you can find many customizable brochures and flyers over at Envato Elements and Graphic River. Check it out!

If you liked this tutorial, you might like these:

How to Make a Medical Brochure Template in InDesign

Post pobrano z: How to Make a Medical Brochure Template in InDesign

Final product image
What You’ll Be Creating

Looking for a simple, clean, easy-to-edit medical brochure? This tutorial shows you how to make a brochure template in InDesign.  

Brochure designs play an important role in the impact of your marketing communication. Brochures are a nice way to engage customers by providing key points of your medical center, clinic, or hospital. 

In this tutorial, we will set up a ready-to-print template using color swatches and paragraph styles. These two panels will make it easier for you edit the design in a variety of colors and fonts. This template is fully editable and a time saver! This template is packed with design essentials, ready to get your business up and running. 

What You Will Need

You’ll need access to Adobe InDesign and Adobe Illustrator. If you don’t have the software, you can download a trial from the Adobe website. You’ll also need the following assets:

Download the assets and make sure the font is installed on your system before starting. When you are ready, we can dive in! 

Looking for amazing InDesign brochure templates? Head on over to Envato Elements or GraphicRiver.

1. How to Create a New InDesign File

Step 1

In InDesign, go to File > New. Name the document Medical Brochure Template. We will create an A5 brochure template. Set the file to the following dimensions:

  • Width to 14.8 cm
  • Height to 21 cm 
  • Orientation to Portrait
  • Pages to
  • Check Facing Pages
  • Margins to 1 cm 
  • Bleeds to 0.3 cm (it’s best to seek your professional printer’s preference)

Click Create.

Create a new indesign file

Step 2

For this brochure design tutorial, we will work with two Layers. Organizing layers is an important practice when designing a template.

Bring up the Layers panel by going to Window > Layers. Double-click on Layer 1 and rename it Images/Vector. 

On the Layers panel main menu, select New Layer. Name it Copy. Click OK. This is where all of the text will go.

Create two layers imagesvector and copy

Step 3

Before we start with the design, let’s organize the color swatches. Head over to Window > Color > Swatches to expand the Swatches panel. Select the default swatches, and Right-Click > Delete Swatch.

Delete all the original color swatches

Choose New Color Swatch button from the main menu. Add the following colors:

  • Dark Blue: C=100 M=50 Y=0 K=40
  • Light Blue: C=45 M=10 Y=0 K=0
  • Dark Grey: C=0 M=0 Y=0 K=50
  • Light Grey: C=0 M=0 Y=0 K=15

Click Add after inputting each color value. Click Done. 

create new color swatches

2. How to Place Images and Create Vectors in Adobe InDesign

Step 1

On the Layers panel, make sure you are selecting the Images/Vector layer. 

On the toolbar, select the Pen Tool (P). We will create a path. Click outside the left side of the page to create the first point—this is an anchor point. Next, click inside the page, and hold and drag to create a curve. This is called a direction point, and you can alter this later. Click outside the right side of the page to complete the curve. Close the object by going around the page until you meet the initial point. 

To edit the curve, select the Direct Selection Tool (A) from the toolbar. Select the center point and move the handles around until you’ve achieved a curve you are happy with.

Use the pen tool to create a rectangle with a curved bottom

Duplicate the object by pressing Shift-Option and dragging to the side. Duplicate this once more—we will go back to these two objects shortly. 

Duplicate the object twice

Step 2

Select the original object that is currently on the page. Press Command-D to Place an image. Select the Happy doctor image, and click OK. 

Head over to the control bar and activate the Constrain Proportion Scaling button. Set the Scale to 56%. Use the Direct Selection Tool (A) to Move the image within the object. 

Lock the object by pressing Command-L.

Place an image in the object we created

Step 3

Let’s go back to the duplicate objects. Color each object by going to the Swatches panel. Color one object with light grey and the other object with dark blue. 

Select both objects and press Shift-Command-[ to send the objects to the back. Spread both objects across the page to create a wave below the image. 

Color the duplicated object grey and blue Place behind the image

Step 4

As mentioned before, keeping the files clean is ideal, especially if you will be using this as a medical brochure template. We will cut out the leftover part hanging outside the bleed mark. Using the Rectangle Tool (M), draw a rectangle covering the outside of the bleed and just enough to cover one of the shapes. Select the new rectangle and the grey object.

Bring up the Pathfinder panel by going to Window > Object & Layout > Pathfinder. Select the Subtract button. Repeat the process for the second object. Perfect! 

Use the pathfinder tool to cut the leftover objects outside of the bleed

Step 5

To add a logo, press Command-D and select the logo. Click OK. Drag on the document instead of clicking to place the object at a smaller size than the original. If you click on the document, the software will place the object at 100% scale.

Place the logo on the bottom right side.

Place a logo

To create a cohesive look, draw a rectangle at the bottom of the cover. It should cover the width of the page. I set the Height to 0.6 cm on the Control bar.

Create a blue rectangle at the bottom of the cover

3. How to Create Paragraph Styles in Adobe InDesign

Paragraph styles are a great tool when creating a template. We can set text styles, similar to the colors on the Swatches panel. This will allow us to create a cohesive look throughout the brochure template. It will also be faster to edit to specific brand guidelines.

For this project, we will set styles for a title, tagline, subheading, body copy, and pull quote. 

Step 1

Open up the Paragraph Styles panel by going to Windows > Styles > Paragraph Styles. 

From the main menu, select New Paragraph Style. 

In the New Paragraph Style window, set the Style Name to Headline. Select Basic Character Formats from the left side menu and use the following settings:

  • Font Family: Catesque
  • Font Style: Bold
  • Size: 22 pt
  • Leading: 22 pt
  • Tracking: 20

Select the Character Color option from the left menu. Set the color to the darker blue. Click OK. 

Using the paragraph styles create new styles

Perfect! Now let’s create a few more styles, and then we will be ready to format text boxes. Use the following settings for the tagline:

  • Font Family: Catesque
  • Font Style: Medium
  • Size: 10 pt
  • Leading: 12 pt
  • Tracking: 45

Set the Character Color to dark grey. Click OK. 

Use the following settings for the subheading:

  • Font Family: Catesque
  • Font Style: Black
  • Size: 12 pt
  • Leading: 14.4 pt
  • Tracking: 45

Set the Character Color to dark blue. Click OK.

Use the following settings for the body copy:

  • Font Family: Catesque
  • Font Style: Regular
  • Size: 8 pt
  • Leading: 9.6 pt
  • Tracking: 0

Set the Character Color to dark grey. Click OK. 

Use the following settings for the body copy:

  • Font Family: Catesque
  • Font Style: Bold
  • Size: 14 pt
  • Leading: 16.8 pt
  • Tracking: 0

Set the Character Color to dark blue. Click OK.

Create styles for each hierarchy level

Step 2

Perfect! Select the Text Tool (T) from the toolbar. Draw a text box opposite the logo. Add a headline and a tagline.

Select the headline by highlighting it with the text tool. Select the Headline style from the Paragraph style panel. Keep in mind you can still customize text boxes. For the headline, I will set the second line in the dark grey color. 

Select the tagline and set it to the Tagline style on the Paragraph panel.

Add text to the cover use the paragraph styles to format it

Step 3

If you’ve been working on the Images layer, select the text box. Head over to the Layers panel, and click and drag the blue square to the Copy layer. This action will transfer the objects from one layer to the other. 

Place the text boxes on the copy layer

Step 4

Let’s work on the inside pages of the medical brochure. Using the Rectangle Tool (M), draw a rectangle at the very top of the pages. Make sure it is going over to the bleed mark. Set the color to dark blue. 

Create a few text boxes using the Text Tool (T). Don’t worry about the placement for now—we can move them around as we develop the rest of the pages. 

Add copy to the inside of the brochure use the paragraph styles to format the text boxes

Step 5

Press Command-D to Place these two images: Smiling medical team and Sisters smiling. I’ve arranged the two photos as shown in the image below:

Place images inside the brochure

Profile headshots are an important part of medical brochures. They’ll give the target market a chance to get to know some faces. Select the Ellipse Tool (L) from the toolbar. Click on the document and set the Width and Height to 2 cm. 

Head over to the Control bar, and set the Stroke Weight to 3 pt. Set the Stroke color to dark blue. 

Create a circle with the ellipse tool

Step 6

Duplicate the circle by pressing Shift-Option and dragging. Have a total of four circles. 

To distribute the four objects evenly, place two of them on each side of the page, ideally just inside the margin. Head over to Window > Object and Layout > Align to open the Align panel. Select all four objects and press the Distribute Horizontal Center button. 

Duplicate the circle 3 times to have a total of 4 circles

Step  7

Select one of the circles and press Command-D. Select the Healthcare workers image and click OK. 

Select the Direct Selection Tool (A), and set the Scale to 40%. This image contains several headshots, so repeat this action for the rest of the circles.

Place an image within each circle

Step 8

To bring it all together, we will add some blue vectors at the back. Use the Rectangle Tool (M), and click on the document. Set the Width to 15 cm and the Height to 3.45 cm. Place this object behind the headshots. 

Create another rectangle with the same dimensions. Place it on the opposite page. Using the Direct Selection Tool (A), select the top right point and move it downwards. This will create some movement on the spread. 

Select both items and press Command-L to Lock both the objects.

Add a blue object behind the circled images running across to the second page

Step 9

Let’s add some names to the headshots. Using the Text Tool (T), draw text boxes under each photo. Use the Paragraph Styles to set the styles. Remember you can still change the format of the text box after setting a style. I’ve chosen Body Copy to make sure the size is uniform but changed the color to white and the name to the Bold family. 

To align the text boxes to the headshots, use the Align panel and select the Align Horizontal Center button. 

Add text under each circled image

Step 10

Let’s add some icons on the right page. This is perfect to promote any kind of services. Open the colored version of the healthcare icons in Adobe Illustrator. Select three icons of your choice to copy to the medical brochure design. Use Command-C to Copy and Command-V to Paste. 

Open the icons vector on Adobe Illustrator

Head back to the brochure design. Select all three icons, and on the Align panel, select the Top Edge button

Head over to the Control panel, activate the Constrain Proportions button, and set the Height to 1.5 cm.

Select three icons copy and paste onto the InDesign file

Step 11

This time, to divide the icons equally, we will use Guides. This is a second method of dividing objects across a page. 

Head over to Layout > Create Guides. In the Create Guides option window, set the Columns to 3 and the Gutter to 0.5 cm. Set Fit Guides to: Margins and click OK.

Create a three column guide on the right-hand side page

Step 12

Create three text boxes using the Text Tool (T) on each column. Use Paragraph Styles to format the text. Set the Alignment to Align Center

Create three text boxes in each column

Step 13

Select an icon and a text box. On the Align panel, select the Align Horizontal Center button. The two objects will align; place them on one of the columns. Repeat this with the other objects until you’ve centered each on a column. 

Let’s add a divider in the gutter. Select the Line Tool (\) from the toolbar. Hold Shift and drag to create a straight line.

Using the align tool center an icon and a text box in each column With the line tool create dividers in each gutter

Step 14

Let’s work on the back cover. Press Command-D to add an image. Place the image on the top two-thirds of the brochure. Use the Direct Selection Tool (A) to move the image within the frame.

Repeat the blue stripe by using the Rectangle Tool (M). Set the Width to 15.4 cm and the Height to 0.4 cm. This time, place it under the image. 

Using the Text Tool (T), add a pull quote over the image. Use the Pull quote style from the Paragraph Styles panel.

Place a logo on the bottom right side using the Command-D shortcut. 

Select the Text Tool (T) to add contact information. Place this text box opposite the logo, and use Paragraph Styles to format the text. 

Add an image to the backcover along with a blue stripe Add a text box with contact information and a logo

4. How to Export a PDF File for Printing

Before exporting a file for printing, it is useful to take a look around the edges of each page. Make sure all the objects that are meant to bleed out of the page are touching the bleeds. 

Step 1

To export the file, go to File > Export. Name the file medical brochure template and choose Adobe PDF (Print) from the Format dropdown menu. Click Save. 

Export the file

Step 2

In the Export Adobe PDF window, set the Adobe PDF Preset to Press Quality.

Select the Press Quality Preset

On the left side of the panel, select Marks and Bleeds. Check All Printer’s Marks and Use Document Bleed Settings. Click Export. You will have a ready-to-print PDF file.

Activate the printers marks and document bleed settings

Great Job! You’ve Finished This Tutorial!

In this tutorial, we learned how to make a medical brochure template in InDesign. Marketing is an important part of any business, and brochures play an important role in making it effective. Today, we’ve learned to:

  • Create a ready-to-print Adobe InDesign file
  • Place images within vector objects
  • Use the Paragraph Styles panel
  • Use the Color Swatches panel
  • Export a ready-to-print PDF file

If you would like to explore more template ideas, you can find many customizable brochures and flyers over at Envato Elements and Graphic River. Check it out!

If you liked this tutorial, you might like these:

How to Make a Medical Brochure Template in InDesign

Post pobrano z: How to Make a Medical Brochure Template in InDesign

Final product image
What You’ll Be Creating

Looking for a simple, clean, easy-to-edit medical brochure? This tutorial shows you how to make a brochure template in InDesign.  

Brochure designs play an important role in the impact of your marketing communication. Brochures are a nice way to engage customers by providing key points of your medical center, clinic, or hospital. 

In this tutorial, we will set up a ready-to-print template using color swatches and paragraph styles. These two panels will make it easier for you edit the design in a variety of colors and fonts. This template is fully editable and a time saver! This template is packed with design essentials, ready to get your business up and running. 

What You Will Need

You’ll need access to Adobe InDesign and Adobe Illustrator. If you don’t have the software, you can download a trial from the Adobe website. You’ll also need the following assets:

Download the assets and make sure the font is installed on your system before starting. When you are ready, we can dive in! 

Looking for amazing InDesign brochure templates? Head on over to Envato Elements or GraphicRiver.

1. How to Create a New InDesign File

Step 1

In InDesign, go to File > New. Name the document Medical Brochure Template. We will create an A5 brochure template. Set the file to the following dimensions:

  • Width to 14.8 cm
  • Height to 21 cm 
  • Orientation to Portrait
  • Pages to
  • Check Facing Pages
  • Margins to 1 cm 
  • Bleeds to 0.3 cm (it’s best to seek your professional printer’s preference)

Click Create.

Create a new indesign file

Step 2

For this brochure design tutorial, we will work with two Layers. Organizing layers is an important practice when designing a template.

Bring up the Layers panel by going to Window > Layers. Double-click on Layer 1 and rename it Images/Vector. 

On the Layers panel main menu, select New Layer. Name it Copy. Click OK. This is where all of the text will go.

Create two layers imagesvector and copy

Step 3

Before we start with the design, let’s organize the color swatches. Head over to Window > Color > Swatches to expand the Swatches panel. Select the default swatches, and Right-Click > Delete Swatch.

Delete all the original color swatches

Choose New Color Swatch button from the main menu. Add the following colors:

  • Dark Blue: C=100 M=50 Y=0 K=40
  • Light Blue: C=45 M=10 Y=0 K=0
  • Dark Grey: C=0 M=0 Y=0 K=50
  • Light Grey: C=0 M=0 Y=0 K=15

Click Add after inputting each color value. Click Done. 

create new color swatches

2. How to Place Images and Create Vectors in Adobe InDesign

Step 1

On the Layers panel, make sure you are selecting the Images/Vector layer. 

On the toolbar, select the Pen Tool (P). We will create a path. Click outside the left side of the page to create the first point—this is an anchor point. Next, click inside the page, and hold and drag to create a curve. This is called a direction point, and you can alter this later. Click outside the right side of the page to complete the curve. Close the object by going around the page until you meet the initial point. 

To edit the curve, select the Direct Selection Tool (A) from the toolbar. Select the center point and move the handles around until you’ve achieved a curve you are happy with.

Use the pen tool to create a rectangle with a curved bottom

Duplicate the object by pressing Shift-Option and dragging to the side. Duplicate this once more—we will go back to these two objects shortly. 

Duplicate the object twice

Step 2

Select the original object that is currently on the page. Press Command-D to Place an image. Select the Happy doctor image, and click OK. 

Head over to the control bar and activate the Constrain Proportion Scaling button. Set the Scale to 56%. Use the Direct Selection Tool (A) to Move the image within the object. 

Lock the object by pressing Command-L.

Place an image in the object we created

Step 3

Let’s go back to the duplicate objects. Color each object by going to the Swatches panel. Color one object with light grey and the other object with dark blue. 

Select both objects and press Shift-Command-[ to send the objects to the back. Spread both objects across the page to create a wave below the image. 

Color the duplicated object grey and blue Place behind the image

Step 4

As mentioned before, keeping the files clean is ideal, especially if you will be using this as a medical brochure template. We will cut out the leftover part hanging outside the bleed mark. Using the Rectangle Tool (M), draw a rectangle covering the outside of the bleed and just enough to cover one of the shapes. Select the new rectangle and the grey object.

Bring up the Pathfinder panel by going to Window > Object & Layout > Pathfinder. Select the Subtract button. Repeat the process for the second object. Perfect! 

Use the pathfinder tool to cut the leftover objects outside of the bleed

Step 5

To add a logo, press Command-D and select the logo. Click OK. Drag on the document instead of clicking to place the object at a smaller size than the original. If you click on the document, the software will place the object at 100% scale.

Place the logo on the bottom right side.

Place a logo

To create a cohesive look, draw a rectangle at the bottom of the cover. It should cover the width of the page. I set the Height to 0.6 cm on the Control bar.

Create a blue rectangle at the bottom of the cover

3. How to Create Paragraph Styles in Adobe InDesign

Paragraph styles are a great tool when creating a template. We can set text styles, similar to the colors on the Swatches panel. This will allow us to create a cohesive look throughout the brochure template. It will also be faster to edit to specific brand guidelines.

For this project, we will set styles for a title, tagline, subheading, body copy, and pull quote. 

Step 1

Open up the Paragraph Styles panel by going to Windows > Styles > Paragraph Styles. 

From the main menu, select New Paragraph Style. 

In the New Paragraph Style window, set the Style Name to Headline. Select Basic Character Formats from the left side menu and use the following settings:

  • Font Family: Catesque
  • Font Style: Bold
  • Size: 22 pt
  • Leading: 22 pt
  • Tracking: 20

Select the Character Color option from the left menu. Set the color to the darker blue. Click OK. 

Using the paragraph styles create new styles

Perfect! Now let’s create a few more styles, and then we will be ready to format text boxes. Use the following settings for the tagline:

  • Font Family: Catesque
  • Font Style: Medium
  • Size: 10 pt
  • Leading: 12 pt
  • Tracking: 45

Set the Character Color to dark grey. Click OK. 

Use the following settings for the subheading:

  • Font Family: Catesque
  • Font Style: Black
  • Size: 12 pt
  • Leading: 14.4 pt
  • Tracking: 45

Set the Character Color to dark blue. Click OK.

Use the following settings for the body copy:

  • Font Family: Catesque
  • Font Style: Regular
  • Size: 8 pt
  • Leading: 9.6 pt
  • Tracking: 0

Set the Character Color to dark grey. Click OK. 

Use the following settings for the body copy:

  • Font Family: Catesque
  • Font Style: Bold
  • Size: 14 pt
  • Leading: 16.8 pt
  • Tracking: 0

Set the Character Color to dark blue. Click OK.

Create styles for each hierarchy level

Step 2

Perfect! Select the Text Tool (T) from the toolbar. Draw a text box opposite the logo. Add a headline and a tagline.

Select the headline by highlighting it with the text tool. Select the Headline style from the Paragraph style panel. Keep in mind you can still customize text boxes. For the headline, I will set the second line in the dark grey color. 

Select the tagline and set it to the Tagline style on the Paragraph panel.

Add text to the cover use the paragraph styles to format it

Step 3

If you’ve been working on the Images layer, select the text box. Head over to the Layers panel, and click and drag the blue square to the Copy layer. This action will transfer the objects from one layer to the other. 

Place the text boxes on the copy layer

Step 4

Let’s work on the inside pages of the medical brochure. Using the Rectangle Tool (M), draw a rectangle at the very top of the pages. Make sure it is going over to the bleed mark. Set the color to dark blue. 

Create a few text boxes using the Text Tool (T). Don’t worry about the placement for now—we can move them around as we develop the rest of the pages. 

Add copy to the inside of the brochure use the paragraph styles to format the text boxes

Step 5

Press Command-D to Place these two images: Smiling medical team and Sisters smiling. I’ve arranged the two photos as shown in the image below:

Place images inside the brochure

Profile headshots are an important part of medical brochures. They’ll give the target market a chance to get to know some faces. Select the Ellipse Tool (L) from the toolbar. Click on the document and set the Width and Height to 2 cm. 

Head over to the Control bar, and set the Stroke Weight to 3 pt. Set the Stroke color to dark blue. 

Create a circle with the ellipse tool

Step 6

Duplicate the circle by pressing Shift-Option and dragging. Have a total of four circles. 

To distribute the four objects evenly, place two of them on each side of the page, ideally just inside the margin. Head over to Window > Object and Layout > Align to open the Align panel. Select all four objects and press the Distribute Horizontal Center button. 

Duplicate the circle 3 times to have a total of 4 circles

Step  7

Select one of the circles and press Command-D. Select the Healthcare workers image and click OK. 

Select the Direct Selection Tool (A), and set the Scale to 40%. This image contains several headshots, so repeat this action for the rest of the circles.

Place an image within each circle

Step 8

To bring it all together, we will add some blue vectors at the back. Use the Rectangle Tool (M), and click on the document. Set the Width to 15 cm and the Height to 3.45 cm. Place this object behind the headshots. 

Create another rectangle with the same dimensions. Place it on the opposite page. Using the Direct Selection Tool (A), select the top right point and move it downwards. This will create some movement on the spread. 

Select both items and press Command-L to Lock both the objects.

Add a blue object behind the circled images running across to the second page

Step 9

Let’s add some names to the headshots. Using the Text Tool (T), draw text boxes under each photo. Use the Paragraph Styles to set the styles. Remember you can still change the format of the text box after setting a style. I’ve chosen Body Copy to make sure the size is uniform but changed the color to white and the name to the Bold family. 

To align the text boxes to the headshots, use the Align panel and select the Align Horizontal Center button. 

Add text under each circled image

Step 10

Let’s add some icons on the right page. This is perfect to promote any kind of services. Open the colored version of the healthcare icons in Adobe Illustrator. Select three icons of your choice to copy to the medical brochure design. Use Command-C to Copy and Command-V to Paste. 

Open the icons vector on Adobe Illustrator

Head back to the brochure design. Select all three icons, and on the Align panel, select the Top Edge button

Head over to the Control panel, activate the Constrain Proportions button, and set the Height to 1.5 cm.

Select three icons copy and paste onto the InDesign file

Step 11

This time, to divide the icons equally, we will use Guides. This is a second method of dividing objects across a page. 

Head over to Layout > Create Guides. In the Create Guides option window, set the Columns to 3 and the Gutter to 0.5 cm. Set Fit Guides to: Margins and click OK.

Create a three column guide on the right-hand side page

Step 12

Create three text boxes using the Text Tool (T) on each column. Use Paragraph Styles to format the text. Set the Alignment to Align Center

Create three text boxes in each column

Step 13

Select an icon and a text box. On the Align panel, select the Align Horizontal Center button. The two objects will align; place them on one of the columns. Repeat this with the other objects until you’ve centered each on a column. 

Let’s add a divider in the gutter. Select the Line Tool (\) from the toolbar. Hold Shift and drag to create a straight line.

Using the align tool center an icon and a text box in each column With the line tool create dividers in each gutter

Step 14

Let’s work on the back cover. Press Command-D to add an image. Place the image on the top two-thirds of the brochure. Use the Direct Selection Tool (A) to move the image within the frame.

Repeat the blue stripe by using the Rectangle Tool (M). Set the Width to 15.4 cm and the Height to 0.4 cm. This time, place it under the image. 

Using the Text Tool (T), add a pull quote over the image. Use the Pull quote style from the Paragraph Styles panel.

Place a logo on the bottom right side using the Command-D shortcut. 

Select the Text Tool (T) to add contact information. Place this text box opposite the logo, and use Paragraph Styles to format the text. 

Add an image to the backcover along with a blue stripe Add a text box with contact information and a logo

4. How to Export a PDF File for Printing

Before exporting a file for printing, it is useful to take a look around the edges of each page. Make sure all the objects that are meant to bleed out of the page are touching the bleeds. 

Step 1

To export the file, go to File > Export. Name the file medical brochure template and choose Adobe PDF (Print) from the Format dropdown menu. Click Save. 

Export the file

Step 2

In the Export Adobe PDF window, set the Adobe PDF Preset to Press Quality.

Select the Press Quality Preset

On the left side of the panel, select Marks and Bleeds. Check All Printer’s Marks and Use Document Bleed Settings. Click Export. You will have a ready-to-print PDF file.

Activate the printers marks and document bleed settings

Great Job! You’ve Finished This Tutorial!

In this tutorial, we learned how to make a medical brochure template in InDesign. Marketing is an important part of any business, and brochures play an important role in making it effective. Today, we’ve learned to:

  • Create a ready-to-print Adobe InDesign file
  • Place images within vector objects
  • Use the Paragraph Styles panel
  • Use the Color Swatches panel
  • Export a ready-to-print PDF file

If you would like to explore more template ideas, you can find many customizable brochures and flyers over at Envato Elements and Graphic River. Check it out!

If you liked this tutorial, you might like these:

2018 Staff Favorites

Post pobrano z: 2018 Staff Favorites

Last year, the team here at CSS-Tricks compiled a list of our favorite posts, trends, topics, and resources from around the world of front-end development. We had a blast doing it and found it to be a nice recap of the industry as we saw it over the course of the year. Well, we’re doing it again this year!

With that, here’s everything that Sarah, Robin, Chris and I saw and enjoyed over the past year.


Sarah

Good code review

There are a few themes that cross languages, and one of them is good code review. Even though Nina Zakharenko gives talks and makes resources about Python, her talk about code review skills is especially notable because it applies across many disciplines. She’s got a great arc to this talk and I think her deck is an excellent resource, but you can take this a step even further and think critically about your own team, what works for it, and what practices might need to be reconsidered.

I also enjoyed this sarcastic tweet that brings up a good point:

When reviewing a PR, it’s essential that you leave a comment. Any comment. Even the PR looks great and you have no substantial feedback, find something trivial to nitpick or question. This communicates intelligence and mastery, and is widely appreciated by your colleagues.

— Andrew Clark (@acdlite) May 19, 2018

I’ve been guilty myself of commenting on a really clean pull request just to say something, and it’s healthy for us as a community to revisit why we do things like this.

Sophie Alpert, manager of the React core team, also wrote a great post along these lines right at the end of the year called Why Review Code. It’s a good resource to turn to when you’d like to explain the need for code reviews in the development process.

The year of (creative) code

So many wonderful creative coding resources were made this year. Creative coding projects might seem frivolous but you can actually learn a ton from making and playing with them. Matt DesLauriers recently taught a course called Creative Coding with Canvas & WebGL for Frontend Masters that serves as a good example.

CodePen is always one of my favorite places to check out creative work because it provides a way to reverse-engineer the work of other people and learn from their source code. CodePen has also started coding challenges adding yet another way to motivate creative experiments and collective learning opportunities. Marie Mosley did a lot of work to make that happen and her work on CodePen’s great newsletter is equally awesome.

You should also consider checking out Monica Dinculescu’s work because she has been sharing some amazing work. There’s not one, not two, but three (!) that use machine learning alone. Go see all of her Glitch projects. And, for what it’s worth, Glitch is a great place to explore creative code and remix your own as well.

GitHub Actions

I think hands-down one of the most game-changing developments this year is GitHub Actions. The fact that you can manage all of your testing, deployments, and project issues as containers chained in a unified workflow is quite amazing.

Containers are a great for actions because of their flexibility — you’re not limited to a single kind of compute and so much is possible! I did a writeup about GitHub Actions covering the feature in full. And, if you’re digging into containers, you might find the dive repo helpful because it provides a way to explore a docker image and layer contents.

Actions are still in beta but you can request access — they’re slowly rolling out now.

UI property generators

I really like that we’re automating some of the code that we need to make beautiful front-end experiences these days. In terms of color there’s color by Adobe, coolors, and uiGradients. There are even generators for other things, like gradients, clip-path, font pairings, and box-shadow. I am very much all for this. These are the kind of tools that speed up development and allow us to use advanced effects, no matter the skill level.


Robin

Ire Aderinokun’s blog

Ire has been writing a near constant stream of wondrous articles about front-end development on her blog, Bits of Code, over the past year, and it’s been super exciting to keep up with her work. It seems like she’s posting something I find useful almost every day, from basic stuff like when hover, focus and active states apply to accessibility tips like the aria-live attribute.

„The All Powerful Front-end Developer”

Chris gave a talk this year about the ways the role of front-end development are changing… and for the better. It was perhaps the most inspiring talk I saw this year. Talks about front-end stuff are sometimes pretty dry, but Chris does something else here. He covers a host of new tools we can use today to do things that previously required a ton of back-end skills. Chris even made a website all about these new tools which are often categorized as „Serverless.”

Even if none of these tools excite you, I would recommend checking out the talk – Chris’s enthusiasm is electric and made me want to pull up my sleeves and get to work on something fun, weird and exciting.

Future Fonts

The Future Fonts marketplace turned out to be a great place to find new and experimental typefaces this year. Obviously is a good example of that. But the difference between Future Fonts and other marketplaces is that you can buy fonts that are in beta and still currently under development. If you get in on the ground floor and buy a font for $10, then that shows the developer the interest in a particular font which may spur more features for it, like new weights, widths or even OpenType features.

It’s a great way to support type designers while getting a ton of neat and experimental typefaces at the same time.

React Conf 2018

The talks from React Conf 2018 will get you up to speed with the latest React news. It’s interesting to see how React Hooks let you „use state and other React features without writing a class.”

It’s also worth calling out that a lot of folks really improved our Guide to React here on CSS-Tricks so that it now contains a ton of advice about how to get started and how to level up on both basic and advanced practices.

The Victorian Internet

This is a weird recommendation because The Victorian Internet is a book and it wasn’t published this year. But! It’s certainly the best book I’ve read this year, even if it’s only tangentially related to web stuff. It made me realize that the internet we’re building today is one that’s much older than I first expected. The book focuses on the laying of the Transatlantic submarine cables, the design of codes and the codebreakers, fraudsters that used the telegraph to find their marks, and those that used it to find the person they’d marry. I really can’t recommend this book enough.

Figma

The browser-based design tool Figma continued to release a wave of new features that makes building design systems and UI kits easier than ever before. I’ve been doing a ton of experiments with it to see how it helps designers communicate, as well as how to build more resilient components. It’s super impressive to see how much the tools have improved over the past year and I’m excited to see it improve in the new year, too.


Geoff

Buzz about third party scripts

It seems there was a lot of chatter this year about the impact of third party scripts. Whether it’s the growing ubiquity of all-things-JavaScript or whatever, this topic covers a wide and interesting ground, including performance, security and even hard costs, to name a few.

My personal favorite post about this was Paulo Mioni’s deep dive into the anatomy of a malicious script. Sure, the technical bits are a great learning opportunity, but what really makes this piece is the way it reads like a true crime novel.

Gutenberg, Gutenberg and more Gutenberg

There was so much noise leading up to the new WordPress editor that the release of WordPress 5.0 containing it felt anti-climactic. No one was hurt or injured amid plenty of concerns, though there is indeed room for improvement.

Lara Schneck and Andy Bell teamed up for a hefty seven-party series aimed at getting developers like us primed for the changes and it’s incredible. No stone is left unturned and it perfectly suitable for beginners and experts alike.

Solving real life issues with UX

I like to think that I care a lot about users in the work I do and that I do my best to empathize so that I can anticipate needs or feelings as they interact with the site or app. That said, my mind was blown away by a study Lucas Chae did on the search engine experience of people looking for a way to kill themselves. I mean, depression and suicide are topics that are near and dear to my heart, but I never thought about finding a practical solution for handling it in an online experience.

So, thanks for that, Lucas. It inspired me to piggyback on his recommendations with a few of my own. Hopefully, this is a conversation that goes well beyond 2018 and sparks meaningful change in this department.

The growing gig economy

Freelancing is one of my favorite things to talk about at great length with anyone and everyone who is willing to talk shop and that’s largely because I’ve learned a lot about it in the five years I’ve been in it.

But if you take my experience and quadruple it, then you get a treasure trove of wisdom like Adam Coti shared in his collection of freelancing lessons learned over 20 years of service.

Freelancing isn’t for everyone. Neither is remote work. Adam’s advice is what I wish I had going into this five years ago.

Browser ecology

I absolutely love the way Rachel Nabors likens web browsers to a biological ecosystem. It’s a stellar analogy and leads into the long and winding history of browser evolution.

Speaking of history, Jason Hoffman’s telling of the history about browsers and web standards is equally interesting and a good chunk of context to carry in your back pocket.

These posts were timely because this year saw a lot of movement in the browser landscape. Microsoft is dropping EdgeHTML for Blink and Google ramped up its AMP product. 2018 felt like a dizzying year of significant changes for industry giants!


Chris

All the best buzzwords: JAMstack, Serverless, & Headless

„Don’t tell me how to build a front end!” we, front-end developers, cry out. We are very powerful now. We like to bring our own front-end stack, then use your back-end data and APIs. As this is happening, we’re seeing healthy things happen like content management systems evolving to headless frameworks and focus on what they are best at: content management. We’re seeing performance and security improvements through the power of static and CDN-backed hosting. We’re seeing hosting and server usage cost reductions.

But we’re also seeing unhealthy things we need to work through, like front-end developers being spread too thin. We have JavaScript-focused engineers failing to write clean, extensible, performant, accessible markup and styles, and, on the flip side, we have UX-focused engineers feeling left out, left behind, or asked to do development work suddenly quite far away from their current expertise.

GraphQL

Speaking of powerful front-end developers, giving us front-end developers a well-oiled GraphQL setup is extremely empowering. No longer do we need to be roadblocked by waiting for an API to be finished or data to be massaged into some needed format. All the data you want is available at your fingertips, so go get and use it as you will. This makes building and iterating on the front end faster, easier, and more fun, which will lead us to building better products. Apollo GraphQL is the thing to look at here.

While front-end is having a massive love affair with JavaScript, there are plenty of front-end developers happily focused elsewhere

This is what I was getting at in my first section. There is a divide happening. It’s always been there, but with JavaScript being absolutely enormous right now and showing no signs of slowing down, people are starting to fall through the schism. Can I still be a front-end developer if I’m not deep into JavaScript? Of course. I’m not going to tell you that you shouldn’t learn JavaScript, because it’s pretty cool and powerful and you just might love it, but if you’re focused on UX, UI, animation, accessibility, semantics, layout, architecture, design patterns, illustration, copywriting, and any combination of that and whatever else, you’re still awesome and useful and always will be. Hugs. 🤗

Just look at the book Refactoring UI or the course Learn UI Design as proof there is lots to know about UI design and being great at it requires a lot of training, practice, and skill just like any other aspect of front-end development.

Shamelessly using grid and custom properties everywhere

I remember when I first learned flexbox, it was all I reached for to make layouts. I still love flexbox, but now that we have grid and the browser support is nearly just as good, I find myself reaching for grid even more. Not that it’s a competition; they are different tools useful in different situations. But admittedly, there were things I would have used flexbox for a year ago that I use grid for now and grid feels more intuitive and more like the right tool.

I’m still swooning over the amazing illustrations Lynn Fisher did for both our grid and flexbox guides.

Massive discussions around CSS-in-JS and approaches, like Tailwind

These discussions can get quite heated, but there is no ignoring the fact that the landscape of CSS-in-JS is huge, has a lot of fans, and seems to be hitting the right notes for a lot of folks. But it’s far from settled down. Libraries like Vue and Angular have their own framework-prescribed way of handling it, whereas React has literally dozens of options and a fast-moving landscape with libraries popping up and popular ones spinning down in favor of others. It does seem like the feature set is starting to settle down a little, so this next year will be interesting to watch.

Then there is the concept of atomic CSS on the other side of the spectrum, and interesting in that doesn’t seem to have slowed down at all either. Tailwind CSS is perhaps the hottest framework out there, gaining enough traction that Adam is going full time on it.

What could really shake this up is if the web platform itself decides to get into solving some of the problems that gave rise to these solutions. The shadow DOM already exists in Web Components Land, so perhaps there are answers there? Maybe the return of <style scoped>? Maybe new best practices will evolve that employ a single-stylesheet-per-component? Who knows.

Design systems becoming a core deliverable

There are whole conferences around them now!

I’ve heard of multiple agencies where design systems are literally what they make for their clients. Not websites, design systems. I get it. If you give a team a really powerful and flexible toolbox to build their own site with, they will do just that. Giving them some finished pages, as polished as they might be, leaves them needing to dissect those themselves and figure out how to extend and build upon them when that need inevitably arrives. I think it makes sense for agencies, or special teams, to focus on extensible component-driven libraries that are used to build sites.

Machine Learning

Stuff like this blows me away:

I made a music sequencer! In JavaScript! It even uses Machine Learning to try to match drums to a synth melody you create!

✨🎧 https://t.co/FGlCxF3W9p pic.twitter.com/TTdPk8PAwP

— Monica Dinculescu (@notwaldorf) June 28, 2018

Having open source libraries that help with machine learning and that are actually accessible for regular ol’ developers to use is a big deal.

Stuff like this will have real world-bettering implications:

🔥 I think I used machine learning to be nice to people! In this proof of concept, I’m creating dynamic alt text for screenreaders with Azure’s Computer Vision API. 💫https://t.co/Y21AHbRT4Y pic.twitter.com/KDfPZ4Sue0

— Sarah Drasner (@sarah_edo) November 13, 2017

And this!

Well that's impressive and dang useful. https://t.co/99tspvk4lo Cool URL too.

(Remove Image Background 100% automatically – in 5 seconds – without a single click) pic.twitter.com/k9JTHK91ff

— CSS-Tricks (@css) December 17, 2018

OK, OK. One more

You gotta check out the Unicode Pattern work (more) that Yuan Chuan does. He even shared some of his work and how he does it right here on CSS-Tricks. And follow that name link to CodePen for even more. This <css-doodle> thing they have created is fantastic.

See the Pen Seeding by yuanchuan (@yuanchuan) on CodePen.

The post 2018 Staff Favorites appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

2018 Staff Favorites

Post pobrano z: 2018 Staff Favorites

Last year, the team here at CSS-Tricks compiled a list of our favorite posts, trends, topics, and resources from around the world of front-end development. We had a blast doing it and found it to be a nice recap of the industry as we saw it over the course of the year. Well, we’re doing it again this year!

With that, here’s everything that Sarah, Robin, Chris and I saw and enjoyed over the past year.


Sarah

Good code review

There are a few themes that cross languages, and one of them is good code review. Even though Nina Zakharenko gives talks and makes resources about Python, her talk about code review skills is especially notable because it applies across many disciplines. She’s got a great arc to this talk and I think her deck is an excellent resource, but you can take this a step even further and think critically about your own team, what works for it, and what practices might need to be reconsidered.

I also enjoyed this sarcastic tweet that brings up a good point:

When reviewing a PR, it’s essential that you leave a comment. Any comment. Even the PR looks great and you have no substantial feedback, find something trivial to nitpick or question. This communicates intelligence and mastery, and is widely appreciated by your colleagues.

— Andrew Clark (@acdlite) May 19, 2018

I’ve been guilty myself of commenting on a really clean pull request just to say something, and it’s healthy for us as a community to revisit why we do things like this.

Sophie Alpert, manager of the React core team, also wrote a great post along these lines right at the end of the year called Why Review Code. It’s a good resource to turn to when you’d like to explain the need for code reviews in the development process.

The year of (creative) code

So many wonderful creative coding resources were made this year. Creative coding projects might seem frivolous but you can actually learn a ton from making and playing with them. Matt DesLauriers recently taught a course called Creative Coding with Canvas & WebGL for Frontend Masters that serves as a good example.

CodePen is always one of my favorite places to check out creative work because it provides a way to reverse-engineer the work of other people and learn from their source code. CodePen has also started coding challenges adding yet another way to motivate creative experiments and collective learning opportunities. Marie Mosley did a lot of work to make that happen and her work on CodePen’s great newsletter is equally awesome.

You should also consider checking out Monica Dinculescu’s work because she has been sharing some amazing work. There’s not one, not two, but three (!) that use machine learning alone. Go see all of her Glitch projects. And, for what it’s worth, Glitch is a great place to explore creative code and remix your own as well.

GitHub Actions

I think hands-down one of the most game-changing developments this year is GitHub Actions. The fact that you can manage all of your testing, deployments, and project issues as containers chained in a unified workflow is quite amazing.

Containers are a great for actions because of their flexibility — you’re not limited to a single kind of compute and so much is possible! I did a writeup about GitHub Actions covering the feature in full. And, if you’re digging into containers, you might find the dive repo helpful because it provides a way to explore a docker image and layer contents.

Actions are still in beta but you can request access — they’re slowly rolling out now.

UI property generators

I really like that we’re automating some of the code that we need to make beautiful front-end experiences these days. In terms of color there’s color by Adobe, coolors, and uiGradients. There are even generators for other things, like gradients, clip-path, font pairings, and box-shadow. I am very much all for this. These are the kind of tools that speed up development and allow us to use advanced effects, no matter the skill level.


Robin

Ire Aderinokun’s blog

Ire has been writing a near constant stream of wondrous articles about front-end development on her blog, Bits of Code, over the past year, and it’s been super exciting to keep up with her work. It seems like she’s posting something I find useful almost every day, from basic stuff like when hover, focus and active states apply to accessibility tips like the aria-live attribute.

„The All Powerful Front-end Developer”

Chris gave a talk this year about the ways the role of front-end development are changing… and for the better. It was perhaps the most inspiring talk I saw this year. Talks about front-end stuff are sometimes pretty dry, but Chris does something else here. He covers a host of new tools we can use today to do things that previously required a ton of back-end skills. Chris even made a website all about these new tools which are often categorized as „Serverless.”

Even if none of these tools excite you, I would recommend checking out the talk – Chris’s enthusiasm is electric and made me want to pull up my sleeves and get to work on something fun, weird and exciting.

Future Fonts

The Future Fonts marketplace turned out to be a great place to find new and experimental typefaces this year. Obviously is a good example of that. But the difference between Future Fonts and other marketplaces is that you can buy fonts that are in beta and still currently under development. If you get in on the ground floor and buy a font for $10, then that shows the developer the interest in a particular font which may spur more features for it, like new weights, widths or even OpenType features.

It’s a great way to support type designers while getting a ton of neat and experimental typefaces at the same time.

React Conf 2018

The talks from React Conf 2018 will get you up to speed with the latest React news. It’s interesting to see how React Hooks let you „use state and other React features without writing a class.”

It’s also worth calling out that a lot of folks really improved our Guide to React here on CSS-Tricks so that it now contains a ton of advice about how to get started and how to level up on both basic and advanced practices.

The Victorian Internet

This is a weird recommendation because The Victorian Internet is a book and it wasn’t published this year. But! It’s certainly the best book I’ve read this year, even if it’s only tangentially related to web stuff. It made me realize that the internet we’re building today is one that’s much older than I first expected. The book focuses on the laying of the Transatlantic submarine cables, the design of codes and the codebreakers, fraudsters that used the telegraph to find their marks, and those that used it to find the person they’d marry. I really can’t recommend this book enough.

Figma

The browser-based design tool Figma continued to release a wave of new features that makes building design systems and UI kits easier than ever before. I’ve been doing a ton of experiments with it to see how it helps designers communicate, as well as how to build more resilient components. It’s super impressive to see how much the tools have improved over the past year and I’m excited to see it improve in the new year, too.


Geoff

Buzz about third party scripts

It seems there was a lot of chatter this year about the impact of third party scripts. Whether it’s the growing ubiquity of all-things-JavaScript or whatever, this topic covers a wide and interesting ground, including performance, security and even hard costs, to name a few.

My personal favorite post about this was Paulo Mioni’s deep dive into the anatomy of a malicious script. Sure, the technical bits are a great learning opportunity, but what really makes this piece is the way it reads like a true crime novel.

Gutenberg, Gutenberg and more Gutenberg

There was so much noise leading up to the new WordPress editor that the release of WordPress 5.0 containing it felt anti-climactic. No one was hurt or injured amid plenty of concerns, though there is indeed room for improvement.

Lara Schneck and Andy Bell teamed up for a hefty seven-party series aimed at getting developers like us primed for the changes and it’s incredible. No stone is left unturned and it perfectly suitable for beginners and experts alike.

Solving real life issues with UX

I like to think that I care a lot about users in the work I do and that I do my best to empathize so that I can anticipate needs or feelings as they interact with the site or app. That said, my mind was blown away by a study Lucas Chae did on the search engine experience of people looking for a way to kill themselves. I mean, depression and suicide are topics that are near and dear to my heart, but I never thought about finding a practical solution for handling it in an online experience.

So, thanks for that, Lucas. It inspired me to piggyback on his recommendations with a few of my own. Hopefully, this is a conversation that goes well beyond 2018 and sparks meaningful change in this department.

The growing gig economy

Freelancing is one of my favorite things to talk about at great length with anyone and everyone who is willing to talk shop and that’s largely because I’ve learned a lot about it in the five years I’ve been in it.

But if you take my experience and quadruple it, then you get a treasure trove of wisdom like Adam Coti shared in his collection of freelancing lessons learned over 20 years of service.

Freelancing isn’t for everyone. Neither is remote work. Adam’s advice is what I wish I had going into this five years ago.

Browser ecology

I absolutely love the way Rachel Nabors likens web browsers to a biological ecosystem. It’s a stellar analogy and leads into the long and winding history of browser evolution.

Speaking of history, Jason Hoffman’s telling of the history about browsers and web standards is equally interesting and a good chunk of context to carry in your back pocket.

These posts were timely because this year saw a lot of movement in the browser landscape. Microsoft is dropping EdgeHTML for Blink and Google ramped up its AMP product. 2018 felt like a dizzying year of significant changes for industry giants!


Chris

All the best buzzwords: JAMstack, Serverless, & Headless

„Don’t tell me how to build a front end!” we, front-end developers, cry out. We are very powerful now. We like to bring our own front-end stack, then use your back-end data and APIs. As this is happening, we’re seeing healthy things happen like content management systems evolving to headless frameworks and focus on what they are best at: content management. We’re seeing performance and security improvements through the power of static and CDN-backed hosting. We’re seeing hosting and server usage cost reductions.

But we’re also seeing unhealthy things we need to work through, like front-end developers being spread too thin. We have JavaScript-focused engineers failing to write clean, extensible, performant, accessible markup and styles, and, on the flip side, we have UX-focused engineers feeling left out, left behind, or asked to do development work suddenly quite far away from their current expertise.

GraphQL

Speaking of powerful front-end developers, giving us front-end developers a well-oiled GraphQL setup is extremely empowering. No longer do we need to be roadblocked by waiting for an API to be finished or data to be massaged into some needed format. All the data you want is available at your fingertips, so go get and use it as you will. This makes building and iterating on the front end faster, easier, and more fun, which will lead us to building better products. Apollo GraphQL is the thing to look at here.

While front-end is having a massive love affair with JavaScript, there are plenty of front-end developers happily focused elsewhere

This is what I was getting at in my first section. There is a divide happening. It’s always been there, but with JavaScript being absolutely enormous right now and showing no signs of slowing down, people are starting to fall through the schism. Can I still be a front-end developer if I’m not deep into JavaScript? Of course. I’m not going to tell you that you shouldn’t learn JavaScript, because it’s pretty cool and powerful and you just might love it, but if you’re focused on UX, UI, animation, accessibility, semantics, layout, architecture, design patterns, illustration, copywriting, and any combination of that and whatever else, you’re still awesome and useful and always will be. Hugs. 🤗

Just look at the book Refactoring UI or the course Learn UI Design as proof there is lots to know about UI design and being great at it requires a lot of training, practice, and skill just like any other aspect of front-end development.

Shamelessly using grid and custom properties everywhere

I remember when I first learned flexbox, it was all I reached for to make layouts. I still love flexbox, but now that we have grid and the browser support is nearly just as good, I find myself reaching for grid even more. Not that it’s a competition; they are different tools useful in different situations. But admittedly, there were things I would have used flexbox for a year ago that I use grid for now and grid feels more intuitive and more like the right tool.

I’m still swooning over the amazing illustrations Lynn Fisher did for both our grid and flexbox guides.

Massive discussions around CSS-in-JS and approaches, like Tailwind

These discussions can get quite heated, but there is no ignoring the fact that the landscape of CSS-in-JS is huge, has a lot of fans, and seems to be hitting the right notes for a lot of folks. But it’s far from settled down. Libraries like Vue and Angular have their own framework-prescribed way of handling it, whereas React has literally dozens of options and a fast-moving landscape with libraries popping up and popular ones spinning down in favor of others. It does seem like the feature set is starting to settle down a little, so this next year will be interesting to watch.

Then there is the concept of atomic CSS on the other side of the spectrum, and interesting in that doesn’t seem to have slowed down at all either. Tailwind CSS is perhaps the hottest framework out there, gaining enough traction that Adam is going full time on it.

What could really shake this up is if the web platform itself decides to get into solving some of the problems that gave rise to these solutions. The shadow DOM already exists in Web Components Land, so perhaps there are answers there? Maybe the return of <style scoped>? Maybe new best practices will evolve that employ a single-stylesheet-per-component? Who knows.

Design systems becoming a core deliverable

There are whole conferences around them now!

I’ve heard of multiple agencies where design systems are literally what they make for their clients. Not websites, design systems. I get it. If you give a team a really powerful and flexible toolbox to build their own site with, they will do just that. Giving them some finished pages, as polished as they might be, leaves them needing to dissect those themselves and figure out how to extend and build upon them when that need inevitably arrives. I think it makes sense for agencies, or special teams, to focus on extensible component-driven libraries that are used to build sites.

Machine Learning

Stuff like this blows me away:

I made a music sequencer! In JavaScript! It even uses Machine Learning to try to match drums to a synth melody you create!

✨🎧 https://t.co/FGlCxF3W9p pic.twitter.com/TTdPk8PAwP

— Monica Dinculescu (@notwaldorf) June 28, 2018

Having open source libraries that help with machine learning and that are actually accessible for regular ol’ developers to use is a big deal.

Stuff like this will have real world-bettering implications:

🔥 I think I used machine learning to be nice to people! In this proof of concept, I’m creating dynamic alt text for screenreaders with Azure’s Computer Vision API. 💫https://t.co/Y21AHbRT4Y pic.twitter.com/KDfPZ4Sue0

— Sarah Drasner (@sarah_edo) November 13, 2017

And this!

Well that's impressive and dang useful. https://t.co/99tspvk4lo Cool URL too.

(Remove Image Background 100% automatically – in 5 seconds – without a single click) pic.twitter.com/k9JTHK91ff

— CSS-Tricks (@css) December 17, 2018

OK, OK. One more

You gotta check out the Unicode Pattern work (more) that Yuan Chuan does. He even shared some of his work and how he does it right here on CSS-Tricks. And follow that name link to CodePen for even more. This <css-doodle> thing they have created is fantastic.

See the Pen Seeding by yuanchuan (@yuanchuan) on CodePen.

The post 2018 Staff Favorites appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

The Most Hearted of 2018

Post pobrano z: The Most Hearted of 2018

We’ve released the Most Hearted Pens, Posts, and Collections on CodePen for 2018! Just absolutely incredible work on here — it’s well worth exploring.

Remember CodePen has a three-tiered hearting system, so while the number next to the heart reflects the number of users who hearted the item, each of those could be worth 1, 2, or 3 hearts total. This list is a great place to find awesome people to follow on CodePen as well, and we’re working on ways to make following people a lot more interesting in 2019.

Direct Link to ArticlePermalink

The post The Most Hearted of 2018 appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

WordCamp US 2018

Post pobrano z: WordCamp US 2018

I recently attended and had the chance to speak at WordCamp US 2018 in Nashville. I had a great time. I love conferences that bring people together around a tight theme because it’s very likely you’ll have something to talk about with every person there. Plus, I rather like WordPress and its community. The vibe was very centered around Gutenberg, as it was released in WordPress 5.0 just as the conference started.

Matt’s State of the Word gets into all that:

I took the opportunity to give a brand new talk I’ve been working on I’ve called, “Thinking Like a Front-End Developer”:

There were loads of wonderful people there and loads of wonderful talks. Here’s a playlist!

The post WordCamp US 2018 appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

The Elements of UI Engineering

Post pobrano z: The Elements of UI Engineering

I really enjoyed this post by Dan Abramov. He defines his work as a UI engineer and I especially like what he writes about his learning experience:

My biggest learning breakthroughs weren’t about a particular technology. Rather, I learned the most when I struggled to solve a particular UI problem. Sometimes, I would later discover libraries or patterns that helped me. In other cases, I’d come up with my own solutions (both good and bad ones).

It’s this combination of understanding the problems, experimenting with the solutions, and applying different strategies that led to the most rewarding learning experiences in my life. This post focuses on just the problems.

He then breaks those problems down into a dozen different areas: consistency, responsiveness, latency, navigation, staleness, entropy, priority, accessibility, internationalization, delivery, resilience, and abstraction. This is a pretty good list of what a front-end developer has to be concerned about on a day-to-day basis, but I also feel like this is perhaps the best description of what I believe my own skills are besides being “the person who cares about component design and CSS.”

I also love what Dan has to say about accessibility:

Inaccessible websites are not a niche problem. For example, in UK disability affects 1 in 5 people. (Here’s a nice infographic.) I’ve felt this personally too. Though I’m only 26, I struggle to read websites with thin fonts and low contrast. I try to use the trackpad less often, and I dread the day I’ll have to navigate poorly implemented websites by keyboard. We need to make our apps not horrible to people with difficulties — and the good news is that there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit. It starts with education and tooling. But we also need to make it easy for product developers to do the right thing. What can we do to make accessibility a default rather than an afterthought?

This is a good reminder that front-end development is not a problem to be solved, except I reckon Dan’s post is more helpful and less snarky than my take on it.

Anywho, we all want accessible interfaces so that every browser can access our work making use of beautiful and consistent mobile interactions, instantaneous performance, and a design system teams can utilize to click-clack components together with little-to-no effort. But these things are only possible if others recognize that UI and front-end development are a worthy fields.

Direct Link to ArticlePermalink

The post The Elements of UI Engineering appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

How to Create a Fun Heart Crown Photo Filter Effect in Adobe Photoshop

Post pobrano z: How to Create a Fun Heart Crown Photo Filter Effect in Adobe Photoshop

Final product image
What You’ll Be Creating

Create fun heart crown photo effects just like Snapchat’s famous filters. Today, we’ll
learn how to make one from scratch using simple shape tools and images in Adobe Photoshop.

Watch
the steps unfold in this quick video lesson and get all the details you
need in the written process below. Head on over to Envato Market for more amazing effects like Photoshop actions.

Follow along with this tutorial over on our Envato Tuts+ YouTube channel.

Tutorial Assets

The following assets were used in the production of this tutorial.

1. How to Make a Heart Crown Effect in Photoshop

Step 1

The first part of this tutorial uses the Heart Crown PNG I created from scratch.

Here’s how to apply this crown to any portrait or selfie.

First, I’ll be using this Model Stock from Envato Elements.

African amerian model stock from Envato Elements

Step 2

Download the heart crown and open it in Photoshop.

Now hold Control-A to select the heart crown, and then Copy and Paste it onto a New Layer. Hold Control-T to Free Transform the crown, adjusting the size to the height and width you desire.

Try to get the crown to frame the head as best as you can.

Apply a heart crown in photoshop

Step 3

If you want fewer hearts to show, just use a Layer Mask or the Eraser Tool (E) to take away the ones you don’t want.

Layer masking the crown

Here’s my first result.

Super easy!

Heart Crown Photo Filter Effect Photoshop Tutorial by Melody Nieves

2. How to Make a Heart Crown From Scratch

Step 1

Now let’s create this same heart crown effect from scratch.

Bring your next photo, Model #2, into Photoshop.

model stock photo from envato elements

Create a New Group. Rename the group „Heart Crown.”

Then select the Custom Shape Tool (U) and choose the heart option from the drop-down menu.

Create one large heart with a white Color Fill.

create a heart shape

Step 2

If you want to change its shape, just use the Direct Selection Tool (A) and modify the lower two anchor points to your liking.

Since the initial shape is really pointy, I decided to round out the curves for a cute effect.

Modify the heart shape

Step 3

Now Right-Click the heart layer and go to Blending Options.

Add a Gradient Overlay with a pink to light pink Linear Gradient.

Here are the colors:

  • Pink: #c7065c
  • Middle Pink: #f56ca6
  • Light Pink: #f5ccdd

Set the Opacity to 83% and the Angle to 140 Degrees, and keep the Scale at 100%.

add a pink gradient overlay

Step 4

Now make several copies of this layer, depending on how many hearts you want. Initially, I created about 10 but ended up with around 16 hearts.

Select the heart layer and press Control-J a few times to make 10–16 copies.

Position each heart around the model’s head, making sure to adjust the heart size and rotation to your liking with the Free Transform Tool (Control-T).

Add more heart copies

This part will take a little experimentation, so make sure to vary the size and position until you’re happy with the effect.

For even more control, use the Move Tool (A) along with the Up, Down, Left and Right Arrow Keys to finely tune each heart position.

Step 5

Create more depth by selecting a few of the heart layers and lowering their Layer Opacities to between 50 and 70%.

If you want to save your custom crown for future pictures, Merge all the group layers together, Crop around the result, and Save it as a PNG with a transparent background.

Here’s my final effect!

How to Make a Heart Crown in Adobe Photoshop

Learn More With Our Tutorials!

Try this effect with hearts, stars, or other shapes for more fantastic results. Make your social media pictures stand out by simply following one of our quick Photoshop video tutorials.

Create awesome heart photo effects to share with your friends and followers! Show us your results below!

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