Lucidpress Day 3

Objectives

  • Students will be able to understand and utilize the four design principles: contrast, alignment, proximity, and repetition
  • Students will be able to create shapes and lines
  • Students will be able to understand and use stroke and fill
  • Students will be able to understand and use color.adobe.com to find color swatches to use in Lucidpress
  • Students will be able to find free, usable icons online
  • Students will be able to make their own infographic

Lesson Plan

Introduction

  • Download Day 4 files from files.learnsoftware.org/indesign
  • Has anyone used Lucidpress since our last class? How did it go?
  • Any questions from last time?
  • Show hook and explain what infographics are

Basics of Design

  • Tell students to grab a piece of paper and pencil. Give them the info document and pictures (in the folder). Have them sketch out some ways to represent that information, maybe a draft of their infographic. Have them show their sketches and give feedback. Have a couple people share some ideas they had for presenting parts of the information.
  • Go over some helpful principles of design, using the cheat sheet PDF to demonstrate (on the folder)
    • Balance and alignment
    • Contrast and emphasis
    • Proximity: keep related things close to each other
    • Repetition and consistency
  • Have student make adjustments to their layout and discuss again, and then share with the class some changes they made that they felt made their design stronger
  • Emphasize that LESS IS MORE (don’t try to cram too much stuff in! Keep it simple and readable and limit the text as much as possible)

When they set up their document, make a custom page size. Usually infographics have a longer height. If they want, they can change the background color of the page in the same area.

Shapes, Lines, and Color

  • Creating shapes and lines
    • Use the different shape tools on the left side
    • When you select a shape, it will automatically place into the document and then from there you can adjust the size
    • Hold down shift to constrain to equal proportions. Release when finished.
    • If you double-click on a shape it becomes a text box
  • Scaling, rotating, moving, easy duplicate (alt shortcut to copy)
  • Fill and border (stroke)
    • Changing style of stroke
  • Color.adobe.com
    • Talk about the importance of having colors that go well together, and colors for emphasis – color theme and “accent color’
  • Adding color swatches
  • Can adjust size of page while working

Activity

  • Give them time to work on and perfect their infographics. Once their done have them show it to the class.

Conclusion

  • Tell them when the next class is and what you will be learning
  • Tell them where to find us in the library and on library chat