Perspective is my school’s magazine of which I’ve been the designer last year. Though the old team has moved on and I’m no longer associated much with it, such releases have remained as an archive online. Mainly because I like the open-source ideology I’ve produced the magazine primarily using FOSS tools – such practice is quite rare in the publishing industry due to Adobe’s dominance. However -especially noticeable in the latest release- the quality of results have truly been quite astounding. So of course I was pleased to recently receive an email about it:

Hi Dion,

I was blown away by the layout you did for Perspective using scribus, and I was wondering if you could offer a COMPLETE newbie to scribus some tips on how to layout a simple greeting card. I would really appreciate your help.

Everybody loves seeing their work being appreciated, and so I crafted a reply, and whether or not it helps anybody else, I thought it’d be good to share.

Hello,

Why thank you! I assume you’re talking about the July 09 edition, where I took the time and effort to actually design each page instead of simply lump text and boxes around.

The first step was to use Scribus to split the page into a grid using the rulers. As a magazine, I split the page into three, then created more rulers to allow for padding. I also put rulers at each of the borders to give ample space for page margins. Once this was done I now have a clear idea of what space I have allocated for my content.

I have to admit that the main crux of the design process was done in the GIMP. I would export a blank canvas and then mirror the rulers with GIMP’s rulers to make it so that my designs also were within those borders. The entire page layout was created in GIMP – I would guess how much space an article might take, and then create it in GIMP. Putting the entire article’s text in The GIMP along the side of one column allowed me to get a pretty good guess at how much space it would take – a screenshot showing this can be seen here:

If you look at that screenshot you’d also notice that all of the pictures – eg: the page template as well as the pictures for the article and fancy font used for the title – were done on The GIMP and NOT on Scribus. The problem I found was that because printer’s were unreliable, when given to them in a format that separated text and many images being overlayed above one another, the colours would run and many artifacts would be seen. So what I did was to create all non-text items in one single image, then export that and use it as a background for the page in Scribus. This keeps all the images together and greatly reduces the number of artifacts – it worked so well, in fact that I would be confident to say that there were almost no artifacts at all!

At the same time, when dealing with such a potentially complex document this technique would keep Scribus running extremely fast yet still benefit from a well designed and with pages full-of-effects (eg: shadow, interesting overlays and rotations). Of course this also meant I could use cool fonts for titles and not be worried on whether or not the printer also had those fonts! Another benefit is that it keeps the final file small and extremely fast to export. Less chances of crashes and easy portability!

The final step once all the non-text were finished in The GIMP was to fire up Scribus and put text on top- so on each page, there was only one image, no more, no less. This also made it a lot easier to manage and edit text. I could still make text flow around images by inserting invisible shapes then selecting Shape -> Text flows around image in the properties window (F2). With line and bezier shapes this really gave me the precise control I needed.

The title page was made almost last – I find this helps as firstly you don’t sit around wasting time thinking of a design because you’re doing the easier and repetitive inner pages. Over time you gather a feel of the document’s style and creating the title just flows out.

On this issue I chose a “small” text font size. This does actually make it seem more professional as you really notice the flow around images. Previous issues I refrained from doing this as my editor told me it would strain people’s eyes. Turns out that they were wrong (well, nobody complained).

Release early, release often – share your work’s in progress with your friends. They’ll help point out things that don’t look nice. If at anytime you’re unsure of how to layout a page, stop what you’re doing on the computer, print it out, and start throwing down ideas with a pen(cil).

So in short – basic layout started in Scribus, design and playing around with ideas done in GIMP, inserting and arranging text done in Scribus, and that’s it. I hope that helped – if you’re unsure on the actual design, searching google images and especially design blogs such as SmashingMagazine can really give you some inspiration.

In other news, things are starting to calm down a bit so within a week or so I should be able to continue development on WIPUP and perhaps even do a few small creative projects.