How to Design a Project Proposal in Adobe InDesign | Free Course

hi there welcome to this Envato toothless course how to design project proposal in adobe indesign if you're looking to win new projects as a freelancer or for your business beautifully design proposals can really help you to leave a lasting impression on your clients my name is Grace Fussel I'm a graphic designer based in the UK and I'm going to show you how designing creative proposals doesn't need to be intimidating or time-consuming once you know a few design tips and techniques for good practice so you may be thinking what exactly is a proposal so proposals are smartly designed brochures which introduce a client to your business and let them know how you would approach a design brief that they've set for you proposals can either supplement or replace face-to-face pitching and can be sent as printed documents or as PDF attachments in this course you'll learn how to create proposal designs that are super professional and look amazing we'll learn how to edit proposal templates in InDesign adapting them to make them unique and completely tailored to your own purposes you'll also learn how to design beautiful creative proposal documents from scratch using InDesign creating attention-grabbing cover formatting awesome typography and working with contents pages masters color palettes and textiles whether you're a seasoned user of InDesign or you're relatively new to the software you'll build up your familiarity that programs solely by the end of the course you'll know exactly how to create a proposal document at the drop of a hat as well as having picked up lots of transferable print design skills that you can use to create magazines brochures ebooks and other print media so if you're looking for a new creative way of winning exciting new projects as well as honing your publishing design skills this course will be a brilliant fit for you I'm really looking forward to welcoming you on board and I hope you're excited to get started proposals are a tried and tested technique that businesses use to win new client projects proposals are used by small businesses like design agencies and startups as well as large consultancy firms like architects and lawyers to help convince clients that they are the right people to choose over competing businesses so some business my opted to do a face-to-face pitch as well as presenting a proposal document if your proposal is well designed clearly structured and easy to navigate it's not always necessary to have to pitch as well some businesses might opt to do a face-to-face pitch as well as presenting a proposal document but if your proposal is well designed clearly structured and easy to navigate it's not always necessary to have to pitch as well if you want to grow your creative business where there is a sole trader or small business learning how to produce your own elegant beautifully design proposals will help you to stand out against your competitors and win more exciting and interesting work here in Envato elements you can find a wide range of proposal templates that you can download and customize if you're in content but it's also really good resource just for finding some inspiration for creating your own proposal designs so there are some common elements you can find across a wide range of proposals they all have a nicely designed cover with the business name and the name of the recipient which is also very important and contents page is useful for helping readers to navigate through the document easily and it's particularly handy for time strapped clients who need to find certain bits of information really quickly a proposal might also contain and meet the team page a summary of your business and company ethos and then the bulk of the proposal will usually be devoted to breaking down the client brief and how it will be approached timeframes for delivery of the work and also cost estimates if you're in the States a lesser page size is the normal format for proposals if you're in the UK or elsewhere a4 is normally the standard this is helpful if you're sending your proposal over email as it means that the client can easily print it off without any issues in this course we're not going to look at the text content of proposals but instead how you can create an appealing design for your proposal which balances both professionalism and creativity the look of your proposal is really important because it helps the proposal to stand out against others it ensures the reader is engaged with what you have to say for longer and it also gives the client a really good feel for your business subtle design decisions can make a huge difference to the look and feel of your proposal so opting for a geometric sans-serif / a serif font for example can lift your design from more corporate territory to a cleaner more contemporary look that might be a better for a youthful star set for example researching color trends across other media like advertising and editorial design and applying these to your proposal can also send the message to the recipient the other sort of company that's very aware of current trends and it's able to produce cutting-edge design work for their clients researching color trends across the media like advertising and magazine design and applying these to your proposal can send the message to the recipient that you're the sort of company that's very aware of current trends and is able to produce cutting-edge design work for their clients you might have an idea about the sort of style or branding that would be appropriate for your proposal but equally you might be a bit unsure about the sort of look that you'd want to aim for in the lessons to follow will download a proposal template from Envato elements that has a simple modern look that would look great for a range of businesses the elements that define the look of your proposal are actually very simple including the fonts the color palette and the choice of photos and graphics so first up we'll look at how you can adapt an existing template like this one and tweak some of the elements to give a very different feel to the design to make it instantly more unique and creative in the later part of the course we'll develop these skills and we'll work towards creating a complete proposal from the ground up which is a great choice if you want to have complete control over the look and layout of your document in the next video we'll look at the software and resources you'll need to follow along with the course lessons and then we can dive in and start creating some really great proposals because proposals are made up of multiple pages and they combine text and graphics a publishing program like Adobe InDesign is ideally suited for creating them to adapt the template and create your own proposal from scratch you'll need to have access to Adobe InDesign if you don't already have the software installed you can download the desktop app from the Adobe website at the link listed here if you're unsure about whether to commit to buying an InDesign subscription you also have the option to download a 7-day free trial the software which would allow you enough time to complete this course if that's what you prefer to do we won't be dipping into other software during this course but if you'd like to edit photos or create vector graphics like logos and icons for your proposals in the future you'd also find it handy to have access to a photo editing program like Photoshop and also vector software like illustrator or Inkscape but as I say during this course we're just gonna be working in InDesign and I'm actually going to show you some ways you can apply interesting effects to your images directly in InDesign like color overlays and gradients as well as how to create your own stylish shapes and graphics in the program you can find a list of resources attached to this lesson which takes you to the relevant links on Envato elements you'll need to download a proposal template from elements which will adapt to using our own choice of fonts and images so take a look at the resource list when you get the chance and you can do your prep for the next lesson by downloading the items listed on there in the next lesson we'll get started by looking at how you can find a proposal template that's really going to suit your requirements and share some tips for how to spot templates which are really going to be the right fit for you so I'll see you over there in just a moment if you've ever looked longingly at a beautifully designed proposal the chances are it's been adapted from an existing template there's no shame in using an InDesign template to create your proposal document in fact it's a tried and tested method used by professional designers when they want to save a bit of time using a template also doesn't mean you have to be limited creatively you should see a template as a handy foundation for creating your own unique design the fiddly time-consuming aspects of creating a proposal from scratch such as formatting master pages and tables of contents that's already been done for you so you can spend more time on experimenting with the aesthetics of the design such as editing color palettes and fonts in this lesson I'm going to show you where you can track down templates and how you can filter through the wide range of templates and offer to find something that's going to fit the bill so where to start you're going to want a site that offers a wide range of quality templates with plenty of variety and vaster elements is a really great option for proposals as it has a really wide range of professionally designed templates so let's head over to elements and take a look what's on offer so here we are on the main site just type proposal into the search bar and then click on graphic templates so you've got a whopping 517 place to choose from so how do you choose the right one for you so you might have an idea about the sort of aesthetic style that would suit your business maybe it's more corporate so something like this cool Pope is template would be a good visual fit or maybe you want something that would better suit a creative business or a star soup in which case this creative proposal might be a better fit star wise my top tip for you and looking for a template is actually to try to dismiss the visual style of the template because this is the easiest element that can be changed a corporate template style for example can be instantly made a bit funkier with a brighter color choice or a more interesting font style instead you really want to make sure that the template has the structure in place that's going to make your job of editing it much easier so let's take a look at an example of a template that has a really good structure to show you just what I mean this proposal template has a pretty unassuming look sure it's nice and stylish and modern but its main advantage is that it's got such good bones and structure so it comes in two page sizes a4 and US letter which makes it flexible for either American or European companies it's also really lengthy with 24 pages that you can easily cut down if you need to let's take a look at the preview images okay so it's got a simple grid based cover layout which could be easily tweet to make it look a bit more exciting it has a table of contents which has an attractive simple layout it has running headers and page numbers across each page elegantly designed headers and subtitles of lots of whitespace things like icons and photos can be easily swapped so there's no need to dwell on that though the icons could be a nice touch all in all you've got a wide range of varied page layouts some more text heavy others of more dominant images which is going to give you plenty of flexibility in the way that you can work a project timeline page that is compelling with a slight infographic look to it it's really handy you've also got tables set up on the budget page which again saves you a job all in all it's got a nice mix of stylish pages that will sell your proposal as well as more formal pages that contain tables and text which can be particularly time-consuming to create from scratch this is the template we're going to download and adapt over the course of the next few less when you come to pick your own templates in future you want to look for a good structure to the design plenty of page layouts to work with and some of the more fiddly elements like tables and running headers already set up for you in terms of style a clean simple look is always easier to adapt and make more interesting than working backwards from something overly fancy so you can find the link to this template in the resources list attached to the course what I'd like you to do is download this particular template from Envato elements and in the next lesson we'll open it open InDesign and take a look at what we've got you've selected and downloaded a template great job before you dive straight into editing your proposal and making it look even more fabulous it's a good idea to acquaint yourself with the way that the document has been created in InDesign and get to know how the master pages layers Styles the color swatches and also the grids have been set up inside the folder you've downloaded you'll probably have a few files normally there'll be a PDF or text document listing the fonts that you need to download and in this case you're looking also to have some more guidance about how the layers styles and images have been arranged here you also have the option to go for an a4 or letter page size of your proposal so let's open up the u.s. letter folder if you're using an early version of InDesign such as cs4 or cs5 you might need to open the idml version of the file for later cs6 and CC uses the INDD Pfau should open just fine I'm using CC so I'm going to open the iron DD version you might be prompted with a warning message saying that you're missing links that's no problem that's just the missing images which we'd be looking to replace anyway if you've installed the fonts described in the help document you shouldn't miss fonts but sometimes these can install in funky ways so you might need to click on a find font button and manually reassign these okay so let's take a look at what we're working with here let's go to view display performance and switch on high quality display the first thing to check out is the layers it can be really frustrating when you're trying to edit something and you can't select it and this is probably because if we're sitting on a locked layer okay so most of these are pretty self-explanatory we've got text graphics photos background guy doesn't seem to contain very much master background is probably for the master page content which we can take a look at in a moment in terms of layers you'll want to be coming back and forth to these and locking them and unlocking them as you work so you can keep content from shifting around by mistake and also these layers are just going to help you keep organized which honestly when you're working with these long indesign documents it's just going to help you keep your sanity right next thing to look at is the master pages I really love masters in InDesign they're so handy these allow you to repeat consistent elements like running headers and guides across lots of pages so you're not just copying and pasting content for hours you can find the masters at the top of the pages panel so in this template we're dealing with three masters the bottom master called one master you can see is applied to the front cover and the back cover only and it just contains a very simple grid the D master is made up of two facing pages or a single spread as we call it this master contains running headers and page numbers which are sitting on the master background layer and note that because this layer is at the top of the layer sequence this is going to ensure that the page numbers and headers are always above other content which means they are always visible this master has a nicely uniform grid with columns and rows allowing you to place text frames and images in various different positions and at different sizes and you can see that this D master has been applied to almost all the pages in the proposal which puts those page numbers and headers and the grid across all of the relevant pages finally we have the F master which is very similar to the D master also having headers and page numbers but with one difference in that the grid has been extended across the inside margins at the spread if we look at the spread this is applied to we can see why on this page which features a project timeline the timeline graphics cross the spine of the spread making this into a pair of pages that feel more like a unified whole than some of the other spreads another thing you'll want to check out is the Styles used in the document these determine how text formatting can be easily transferred across different text frames so go to window styles and paragraph style and yep that's a lot of styles but it's nothing to be frightened of these actually are going to really help you save time when it comes to formatting the text in your document so if we click on this project timeline header you can see the main big title style is highlighted the row headers have been saved as an h5 style this gray title over on the right-hand page when we highlight it we can see this has been set as an s2 style with an underline the smaller text beneath it is a body 1 style so we've already worked out that we have h4 headers s4 subtitles and body for body text so what is n-r well if we scroll it to page 7 and highlight one of the numbers we can see this has aligned and our or lined number style applied to it so the nr folder contains all the styles apply to numbers in the document so it's really well organized all you need to know about using styles in a template is two things one is that you can keep the existing style as it is and then apply extra formatting to text on top of that so for example on the front cover page an extra bit of color has been applied to the word brochure which brings up this little plus symbol next to the style so you can add your own little extras to text like color or an underline while still preserving the main features of the original style the other thing to know is that you can redefine styles in your document so what does this mean this means you can change the font and formatting of a single example of text which has a style applied to it and then redefine the style which applies it to all other instances of that style in the document this might sound a bit complicated but in practice it's not at all we'll look at how to do it in a couple of lessons time for now let's move on and check out the last thing you need to be aware of when using a proposal template and that is color your template will have a pre saved palette of color swatches which you can view in the swatches panel which is that window color swatches because this proposal is formatted for print the swatches are in CMYK mode you don't want to be using any RGB swatches if you're creating a document for printing so we've got a very simple range of colors which are mainly monochrome varying levels of gray and one accent color which is yellow we're going to look at how to give your pros all an update through color in a few lessons time so once you know your way around master's styles and swatches in your template you've got a really good foundation for moving forward of adapting the template to exactly how you want it to look in the next lesson we'll look at a couple of techniques for adapting your template really easily once you know your way around your template you can start to think about how you might want to adapt it to make it more relevant to your purposes in this lesson I'm going to walk you through the process of adapting your templates content the first thing you're going to want to change is probably the text content if your proposal this is super easy and quick to change let's scroll down to page four which is the about Us page so to change any text on your document you're going to need to get familiar with the type tool which you can find in the tools panel over here on the left side of the workspace or simply hit T on your keyboard so if this tool you can set your cursor into existing text frames you can highlight text and also you can create new text frames so you might be happy to manually type your text content into your InDesign document but it's likely that for at least longer pieces of text you might have some copy saved in a separate word document or in an email and it's really simple to work with copy and outside documents simply open up the copy document select and copy the text back in InDesign use the type tool to highlight the text that you want to replace and go to edit and paste and the text formatting in the proposal will be preserved if you want to practice pasting in text from another document you can find this about as copy as a word and PDF document attached to this lesson so let's work our way over this page replacing the title the subtitle the name at the bottom and also the quote text as well awesome okay so the other basic thing that you want to be able to edit is the image content in your document most templates won't be provided with the images used in the previews but often as is the case here you can see a fuzzy preview of the original image with a small red question mark at the top of the image frame showing you that the link is the image is broken attached to this lesson you'll also find a folder of sample images called sample images for about his page which you can download if you want to follow along with the steps here as I do them so pause the video and get that folder downloaded if you like okay so with our images ready to use we can start to replace the images on our document there are two ways you can replace images one is to use the default selection tool to select the image frame and then head up to file and place navigate to the folder of images choose the image that you want here I'm going for group shots and then click open and from here you can select the image inside the frame by clicking on the circle symbol in the center and holding down shift while you scale it up and down the other option is to click on the red question mark symbol by the image frame and this instantly opens up a Finder window from here you can find a new image that you want and replace it by clicking open it really is that easy to change the text and image content in your template super super simple and it doesn't need to take a lot of time swapping in your images can actually have a really big impact on the look of your template but generally the style of your template is still going to look pretty similar so in the next lesson we'll look at how you can refine text styles in your template which can really transform the overall look of your proposal so keep your template open in InDesign and I'll see you over in the next lesson in just a moment as well as changing content such as text and images in your proposal you can also flex your creative muscles when it comes to customizing your template over the next three lessons I'm going to show you three ways you can give your template a completely unique look by the end it won't be obvious at all that you used a template in the first place in fact you could probably tell your colleagues that you created it from scratch it will be our little secret okay so one of the most transformative methods for customizing a template is to switch up the fonts and typographic formatting in your document and this is so fun I love playing around with typography the best bit about working with a template is that you can play around with the font and formatting and then simply redefine the paragraph style which applies the new formatting to all other instances of the style so let's look at just how to do that so first we need to think about the sort of font style we might want to use in our template at the moment we have a serif font which is Playfair display for the headers and a son serif Railway for the subtitles and body text a simple way of making the design look more unique would be to reverse this changing the headers to a sans serif and the body text to a serif from inviter elements I'm going to pick two fonts to swap into my proposal let's look for the Sun serif first so on Envato elements go to browse and fonts and sans-serif if you prefer you can browse through the selection and pick a font of your own choice I'm going to opt for Burgin text I just really like this font it's got a really bouncy friendly style and I think it's going to add a bit more character to my proposal so once you've picked a font download it and install it onto your computer let's head back to the template document and try it out so scroll up to page 3 in the template which is the contents page select the main headers text frame of your selection tool and then switch to the type tool you'll notice that this switches the options now showing on the top controls panel which now give you the character formatting options so let's change the font first so open up the front menu and type in ber and there we go so let's choose Burgin text in the bold weight okay so this shifts the baseline of the text up a bit so to keep everything a bit more nicely spaced let's increase the font size to 68 points and let's also space out the two lines of text by increasing the leading to 62 points cool I really like the look of that so what I'm going to do is redefine that as a header style for the whole document so in the paragraph Styles panel right click on the main big title style and choose redefine style and now when you scroll through the document you'll notice that all the headers I've switched to the new style so how handy is that you might need to expand some text frames if any text is overflowing and do a bit of shuffling about but otherwise by redefining the style you've given your whole proposal and instant makeover in just a few steps let's keep it technique going by swapping in a different font for some of the body text too so backing vasser elements let's see what serif fonts we have on off I actually really love serif fonts of body text they can look really elegant and they still look very modern when they're paired with more modern son serif headers so you can go ahead again and make your own choice or go along with what I'm going to pick which is going to be Addington CF so get that downloaded and installed onto your computer and when you're ready head back to InDesign again so for editing the body text Styles it makes sense to start on a page that is a bit more text heavy so scroll on down to page six which has the title the working process and here we've got lots of different styles to adjust so let's start with the subheading below working process select the text frame as before and switch to the type tool let's change the font to Addington CF and choose a medium-weight let's switch off all caps to make the text lowercase which i think suits this font style a bit better looks to me like the sizing and leading is pretty good so back to the paragraph Styles panel and on the h4 style right click and choose redefine style awesome let's keep going select the small subheading reading analyse the brief and set the font of this to Addington CF bold and let's up the font size a little to 15 points and then right click and choose redefine style okay interesting you can see that the sizing has been applied but not the font and the reason for this is that the original text frame that we edited had an enhanced version of the style applied to it there's no need to panic it's really easy to sort out so just select the text frames and once you've done that click on the style name and that will reset the style okay cool so now we can apply the Addington CF font to the body text below the analyse the brief heading so let's go for a regular weight and increase the font size just slightly to ten points and then right click and redefine style as before and we'll have to do the same process selecting all the text frames and clicking on the style to reset it for any text that's paired with other paragraph styles in the same text frame like over here on the right-hand page simply put your type tool cursor in the paragraph and click on the style name to reset it for that paragraph so that we have it so you can start to see that by tweaking the fonts and formatting of your text you're really starting to give your proposal a fresh new look and redefining the styles in your indesign document is a super quick way of applying your new formatting to all the text in your document it's much much quicker than manually changing all the text in your proposal our template reinvention isn't over quite yet in the next lesson we're going to take a look at color in our proposal and give our template a really quick makeover that's going to make it look a bit more fun and edgy along with typography color is one of the most striking things that you can change about your proposal template it's not reinventing the wheel but a clever switch of color can cast your proposal in a completely new light so for example a punchy red might make a great fit for a tech brand while more soothing tones of green my seat proposal put together by a not for profit or an environmental business so much more so than typography color has the power to transform the psychological impact of your proposal so you can see it as a strategy for putting the reader into the right mindset for reading your proposal in a favorable light but enough about psychology let's get practical and creative as well in this lesson I'll show you how you can change a single accent color in your proposal to lift and transform the whole design working still on our InDesign template let's expand the swatches panel which you can find at window color and swatches so we've already got a really nice class excessive monochrome theme swatches in here with a range of Gray's blacks and off-white if you've got this already my feeling is there's no need to change it these are doing the hard work for you they're adding subtle gradients of color to different elements in your document the very inoffensive workhorses so let them do their bit the swatch your swatches that you want to look at changing all the accent colors so you might just have one as is the case here or you might have a couple and is so so easy to change this accent color and to experiment with different color combinations so say for example we're not sure about this yellow we might want something a bit cooler a bit more modern perhaps so to switch up the accent color across your whole document double click on the accent color swatch in the swatches panel to open up the swatch options window from here you can tweet the levels of I am magenta yellow and black to create new colors and as long as you have the preview box checks you can instantly see the results live on the document so try experimenting with different colors what looks good with the fonts and the photos what's going to give you enough contrast against the text something like a very punchy orange red like cyan zero magenta 80 yellow 79 and black zero could give a nice edge to the document and makes the design look a bit more attention-grabbing or something more soothing like a pastel blue like cyan 48 magenta zero yellow 14 and black zero could also look really nice yeah I think that looks really good so when you've decided on your new accent color just click OK and you're done it's that easy if you want to add additional colors to your proposal all you need to do is choose new color swatch from your swatches panel so if you want to be more experimental of color such as using a different accent color in each spread you can do just that it will just involve manually applying the swatches to elements if you want to get even more creative with color you can also create gradient swatches which blend two or more colors together to create a very on-trend effect in the second half the course will take a more in-depth look about how to do this but for now we're continuing to adapt our proposal template and tweet little elements to big effects in the next lesson we're going to look at how you can edit master pages in your template which are going to give your page numbers and running headers a completely different look page numbers and running headers might be small but as they are likely to feature on every page of your proposal they make a subtle but consistent impact on the design of your document editing master page content is quick to do and as of redefining textiles it has an instant effect across a wide range of pages still working on a template document let's look at how you can edit the content of your master pages so expand the pages panel go to window pages if it's not already open and double click on the first master which is here called D master zoom in to the top of the left-hand page so you can see the page number and header really well we can see from the Styles panel that this also has a style applied to it but first let's get rid of that plus icon next to the style and reset it so we can start from a clean slate so right click on the name of the style h3 and choose apply h3 clear overrides this is going to increase the font size which is fine let's bring it down to nine points let's also switch the font to Burgin text semi bold and switch off the all caps okay awesome now right-click on the h3 style and choose redefine style let's highlight the page and umber symbolize by Adi because this is the D master and switch the font color to our new accents watch from the swatches panel now we can apply that style to the running header on the facing page so select that text frame and click on h3 to apply it switch to the type tool and from the top controls panel choose align right from the text alignment options okay cool so what else can we tweak well these lines running beneath each header are fine but we can add a bit more flair to them as well we can adjust the look at these using the stroke panel which you can find in window stroke select both lines of your selection tool cursor and from the stroke panel you can see that you can choose from a range of different styles under the type menu so you can go four dots or dashes or a wavy line I actually really like the hash lines because these add a bit of subtle texture to a line and make them look a bit less digital and clean so I'm going to go for straight hash okay so if both the running headers and the lines beneath them reformatted you can transfer these on to other relevant master spreads so select all the elements sitting on the D master by dragging your cursor across the page and head up to edit and copy in the pages panel double-click on the F master to bring up this spread on screen delete the headers that are on there and then go to edit and paste in place awesome so by doing that you've tweaked the look of the page numbers and running headers across all the inside pages of your document great job in this section of the course we've looked at different ways you can edit and customize a proposal template making it more unique and creating a look for your proposal that ultimately looks like your own work even if the foundations have been built by somebody else of course this isn't the only way you can design creative Xul's it's simply a quick and easy way to help you save time in the next section of the course we'll look at how you can create your own completely unique and creative project proposals from scratch in Adobe InDesign you'll learn how to create an effective cover how to find stylistic inspiration for your layouts how to create an engaging consistent style across your document and how to perform sophisticated print design tasks such as creating gradients swatches and type styles so if you want to take your proposal design skills to the next level make sure to stick around for the next lesson I'll see you there hi there welcome to this section of the course how to create and design your own proposal layouts so templates have their uses but if you want to give your proposals a completely unique and creative look you'll want to be able to create your own proposal documents from scratch so in this section we'll work towards creating a cover and four inside layouts for the proposal that's pictured here and this is going to teach you how to set up the structure for your proposal as well as how to source creative inspiration and apply your ideas in a professional beautiful way to your layouts in this lesson we're going to start with creating a proposal document in InDesign and cover some of the basics for getting your document setup in the right way so let's get started with InDesign open go to file new and documents let's make sure print is selected at the top of the window so we're going to setup our proposal here with a u.s. saucer page size if you're in Europe or elsewhere the usual standard is a4 which is pretty similar but for our purposes here let's stick reviewer Sutter so that's 8.5 inches for the width and 11 inches for the height make sure facing pages is checked to create spreads in your document now for the columns so to create a grid in our pages which will give us a bit of flexibility about where we can place text and image frames let's give our document four columns with a naught point one two five inch gutter okay now for the margins so one thing to remember is that if you're creating a print document with a large number of pages you want to make sure that the inside margin which is the margin near as the spine is slightly more generous than the outside and this is going to allow for a bit of paper to disappear and the binding or fold in the center of the spreads so let's set the inside to one inch the outside a bit less to not 0.875 inches let's make the top the same not 0.875 and the bottom a bit more generous at one point one to five inches if you're planning on having your proposal printed professionally it's really important that you also include a bleed on your document so this allows content to go past the trim edge of the page so if your document is trimmed not completely pin accurate it's not going to be noticeable so let's set that to not 0.25 inches another thing to note is that you don't need a bleed on the inside edge of the page so click on the little chain icon and remove any bleed from the inside edge the final thing to think about is the number of pages you might want to have in your document but don't worry about this too much at this early stage you can easily add or delete pages as you work so for now let's just have 10 pages okay cool now you're ready to click create so now we've got the basic proposal document set up with columns good margins a bleed facing pages so hop up to file and save as and save this file as proposal in progress we'll be using this file throughout the next 10 lesson so make sure to save it to a folder you can easily find again if you want to head straight over to the next lesson you can keep this InDesign file open next up we'll look at how to set up masters for your proposal hi there welcome back so here we have our proposal in progress document open in InDesign and our next task is to get some of the basics of the proposal sorted out so these include the master pages the sections and numbering in your proposal and also the layers in your InDesign document these are the things that are going to make your life way easier down the line when you start designing so it's well worth taking just a bit of time to get these set up before you get into the more creative work so let's start with the master pages in our document so as we now know these are the best places to put content that you want repeated across a number of pages so that includes page numbers and possibly running headers as well so for this proposal we're going to set up just one master spread so head over to the pages panel and double-click on the a master at the top which has already been created for you as a pair of facing pages zoom into the top left corner of the left-hand page and switch to the type tool by hitting T on your keyboard create a text frame centrally between the top margin line and the top edge of the page with the left edge just extending past the left margin slightly so type in a space and then a forward slash another space and then a header which would usually be the title of the document so for now let's have project proposal set your type cursor at the start of the phrase and here is the perfect place to drop in a page number so go up to type insert special character markers and current page number awesome so now we want to make a copy of this text frame for the right-hand page so edit copy and edit paste the frame and then move the second frame over to the right page and InDesign will guide you with the same alignment if you want to get it perfectly lined up to match the left-hand page you can pull out guides from the left hand ruler to mark out the margin and a second for the left edge of the text frame then select both of these guides and copy and paste them and move them over to the right page just like that and you can shuffle that text frame into a mirrored position great we'll come back to these headers in a few lessons time and format them of a nice font and a different color swatch but for now you just want to have the basics in place so that's looking really good if we go back to the pages panel we can see that by default the a master that we've just been working on is applied to all the pages in our document but we don't want the page numbers to appear on the front and back cover of our proposal which are going to be these two single pages page 1 and page 10 and also we're not going to need page numbers for the intro pages of our document like the contents page for example so that's no problem we can drag down the none master which is up here at the very top of the pages panel and drop that on to pages 1 2 three and four and then down also on to page 10 so now we just have the page numbers and headers on the relevant pages of our documents awesome to continue organizing our document the next thing to do is to decide how we want the document to be sectioned up so for most proposals this doesn't need to be that complicated most people just need numbered sections throughout the main body of the document which starts after the contents page so let's look at how to do that let's say we want page 1 to actually start here on page 5 so to do that right-click on page 5 and choose numbering and section options check start page and then bring out and put in 1 and click OK and you might get a warning about repeating the same patient but twice in your document that's okay we're going to sort that out so now right click on the first page of your document at the top and again choose numbering and section options choose start page and bring out and as we did before put in 1 but this time under the page numbering options choose something different from the style menu so it might be ABCD or Roman numerals I'm going to go for lowercase Roman numerals and then click OK and now you've got two sections set up in your document with page 1 beginning after the contents page which we're going to place on the spread before that our housekeeping tasks are nearly over there's just one more thing to do and that is to set up the layers in our document and this is going to mean that we keep all the content on our pages organized as we design so to do that go to the layers panel and remember that we've already placed some text on the master pages on this layer so let's double click on layer 1 and rename it text ok now click on the create new layer button at the bottom of the panel and double click on that and let's rename this one background let's repeat to create another new layer above that and let's call this one photos and a final new layer at the top which we're going to call shapes and because we want some of the texts like page numbers for example was feature above other content let's grab that text layer and drag that up to the top of the sequence awesome okay great job so the basic bones of your proposal are now in place and you're ready to start moving on to more fun and creative tasks so make sure to save your document in the next lesson we're going to look at how you can get your creative juices flowing and find some creative inspiration for your design it's going to be fun so stick around and I'll see you over there in the next lesson style is everything okay not absolutely everything but it sure can make a big difference to how well received your proposal is finding the right look for your proposal can be tricky perhaps you're working within an existing brand which already has colors and fonts you can use or perhaps you're having to start completely afresh and have no idea about how to begin in this lesson I'm going to give you an insight into how I found the inspiration for the style for this proposal and share with you some ideas for how you can source inspiration for your own proposal designs from choosing typefaces that look elegant and stylish to developing a color palette that feels appropriate for your design the variety of styles you could go for or potentially endless so you need to have some foundation to help you narrow your ideas and develop a style that is a perfect fit for the type of proposal that you're producing I can give you two things you need to think about before you start developing any creative ideas so first of all you need to consider the brand if you have one of your business and take this into account when creating a stylistic look for your proposal so if you have brand elements to work with like colors fonts or even just a logo design that should be the starting point of your proposal style if you don't have an existing brand look you can consider instead the ethos and USP of your business are you for example a young startup full of energy and enthusiasm or a more corporate formal business and so the type of business that you are and the type of services that you provide can help to point you in the right direction in terms of developing a style for your proposal so the second and most important thing you need to think about is the audience your proposal these are the people looking at your proposal and deciding whether to go with you or go for what some other business is offering if that audience feels like you're offering something that's presented in a way that's familiar to them they'll be more likely to get on board of it so for example you might be a trendy design agency pitching a proposal to a more traditional corporate business so you want to show that you can offer the corporate business something fresh and new as otherwise they'd be looking to do the job in-house but you also want to show that you understand their business and style is a really important tool for striking this balance so you might go for an energetic color like acid yellow but you might balance this with more serious black-and-white photography or you might opt for a serif font instead of a modern sans-serif to give your proposal design and more formal traditional feel okay so those are the two things to know and to keep in mind as you design the identity of your own business and more importantly the identity of the recipients business right so where to look for inspiration so I'm just going to show you a couple of online resources that I use quite a bit for sourcing inspiration for print design so my first go-to is always Pinterest and what I really like about Pinterest is that it blends visual content with the trending aspect of social media so it's a good gauge of what's really popular so it's handy if you want to create a design that's going to be on trend and it's probably going to be well received by your reader as well you might want to search for something broad like print design and look at the sorts of colors fonts and layout styles that are popular I'm seeing a lot of pastels and also neons gradients are really popular at the moment too you can look to more trend leading areas of design to pick up some fresh ideas as well so try for example advertising design 2018 and see what you've got so here there's a lot of strong block colors big bold San serif type creative ways of placing and editing photos it's nice just to get really absorbed in all the creative work going on in different fields like advertising and it might just trigger some ideas about color type or layout design for you so pin will save any images that speak to you perhaps you like a certain kind of or the way that particular photo has been framed or presented the other site I go back to when I need a bit of inspiration is be hounds this is better for very new cutting edge work and obviously you never want to be plagiarizing another designers work but it might be that a certain color scheme catches your eye or you would never afford of using a particular type style of an image in a certain way and often I find that by looking at lots of different creative images you gradually keep being drawn to certain common traits across these images and once you've collected them together you can pull together different aspects from each and develop a good idea for the direction that you want to take your proposal in once you've gathered a mood board of images from sites like Pinterest and Behance the next stage is to start formalizing your ideas by choosing fonts and developing a color palette as well as drafting ideas about how to edit and frame images and the sorts of graphics such as shapes and patterns that you might want to include in your design so I'm just going to show you the result of the inspiration that I gathered to give you an idea of how you could develop your own style ideas for proposals in the future so this is the InDesign document I've used to put together my ideas about the style that I want to use for the proposal including the fonts the color palette the photos shapes and also the way that the layouts are arranged let's take a look so this is only my personal approach to developing my ideas about style you may feel confident enough to dive right into applying your style ideas the proposal document directly but if you're lacking a bit of confidence I think taking a bit of time to put together this sort of document is an exercise that's well worth doing it can really help you to pull together your ideas and give you a sort of brand guidelines for your proposal which you can refer to as you work a PDF of this document is attached to this lesson so you can download that and take a look later if you'd like to so what I've done here is first decide on the font style that I want to use in the proposal I wanted to use a sans serif which feels clean and modern I also wanted a font that had a corporate smart look but also felt friendly and really easy to read and I found this font which was b/w modèle occur on enforcer elements and I just loved it straight away and I thought it would be a really great fit the inspiration I was looking at online was probably most useful for getting ideas about the sorts of colors that I wanted to use in the proposal I really love that combination of soft pastel colors of more bright primary colors which will be the accent colors in the design and a couple of off black and gray tones help to make the palate feel a bit more formal colored gradients are also really trendy at the moment and I wanted to include them but instead of creating a by color gradient of opted to create a gradient with one bright color and one gray swatch which keeps it looking a bit more business appropriate for the photos I was inspired by color overlays and I thought this would be a nice way of bringing together the color palette and the images into a whole thing shapes can be a really great way of adding a bit more Flair to lay out there otherwise quite text-heavy and circles can be adapted to function as text frames and infographic elements and a little rule that I've set for myself is to color the circles of a gradient swatch to give them a slightly 3d look creating a uniform grid for your layouts is really important and once you have a basic grid established is going to be easy for you to replicate that across lots of pages and give your intro pages and normal pages a more consistent look so here I want to emphasize the contrast between the curves of the circle shapes and a more rigid quartered layout below so it's actually really simple just splitting each page into four sections across the center point and then inserting images into one of those sections and on top of that we've got the circle shapes and white or gray type depending on the background color below now I'm not saying you have to produce anything like this document but it can be helpful depending on how you work it just gives you an insight into how I work and how you might think that aspects of that process might work well for you too or not so in the next lesson we're going to return to our proposal document in InDesign and put the style pictured here into practice and our first task is going to be creating an eye-catching cover for our proposal welcome back in this lesson we're going to hit the ground running with designing our proposal a great place to start is with the cover of your proposal so in this lesson we'll create an eye-catching and effective front cover which is going to set the tone stylistically for the rest of the document so before we begin make sure to revisit the envato elements resources list which is reattached this lesson and make sure you've downloaded the fonts that we're going to use which is b/w modèle occur and BW glen sans and the photos that we'll be using in the design too so pause the video if you need to take a look at that you'll also find attach this lesson and adobe swatch exchange file this contains the CMYK swatches that we'll be using in the design so make sure to download that as well and I'll show you here how to load the fonts into your InDesign document so with your proposal and progress document open go to the swatches panel and choose load swatches from the main menu navigate to where you've saved the downloaded ASE file which is called proposal swatches and click open okay so now you have five new CMYK swatches in the panel ready to use we're also going to create a couple of gradient swatches and also a tint swatch so first the gradient swatches choose new gradient swatch from the panel's menu we can name this red gradient we want the type set to linear and choose swatches from the stop color menu click on the left-hand stop on the ramp and choose the red swatch which is cyan 7 magenta 100 yellow 99 black one for the right-hand stop choose black and then click add and done ok second gradient swatch so new gradient swatch again and this one is going to be blue gradient set the left-hand stop to your blue swatch cyan 75 and then move the stop over to around the center of the ramp and the right-hand stop for this one is going to be black again add and done ok awesome one final swatch to add which is going to be a tint swatch so click on the black swatch in the swatches list and this time choose new tints watch from the swatches menu on the tint slider at the bottom pull this down turn 90% and then click Add and done great okay so we've our swatches all created and ready to use we can start creating our cover so get the very first page of the document up on screen and from the layers panel make sure that the background layer is unlocked and active and you can lock the other layers above that select the rectangle tool from the tools panel or hit M on your keyboard and drag from the top left corner to create a shape that fills about a quarter of the page and you can use the column lines as a rough guide from the swatches panel set the fill color of this to the 90% black tint and make sure that the stroke color is set to none and you can edit copy and edit paste the shape and move it directly below and change the color of this to blue cyan 75 copy and paste again and move this up to the top right corner and extend the edge out to the bleed edge on the right side and copy and paste one more time moving this over the bottom right corner let's set the fill of this to that pale pink swatch okay so let's lock the background layer and unlock the shapes layer switch to the ellipse tool which is L on your keyboard and hold shift while you drag to create a large circle that's about seven inches in diameter right let's set the fill of that to the red gradient swatch we want no stroke color on this one let's position it over on the right side of the page centrally about two-thirds of the circle off the page then go to edit copy and edit paste in place and change the fill of this top circle to the pale blue swatch cyan twenty-eight then switch to the scissors tool which is C on your keyboard and just snip once at the center point of the circle on the left edge and once on the right side to split it in half then select the bottom half and hit delete on your keyboard okay awesome then select both of these circles and edit copy and edit paste them so on this copy right-click and transform and choose rotate 90 degrees clockwise and then right click and transform and flip vertical and move this parish a up to the top center of the page we're about a third showing on the page let's change the fill of the half circle to pale pink okay so let's select this pair and copy and paste and then right click transform and choose rotate 180 degrees move centrally over the bottom of the layout and then let's switch the fill of the half circle on the left side to 90 percent black okay back to the layers panel we can now add text to our cover so lock the shapes layer and unlock the top text layer so when your front cover you might want to include a title your business's name and the name of the recipient you might also want to put the date and some contact details right your website phone number etc so take the type tool or hit T and create a text frame on the left side of the top half of the page and type in the title of the document so to demonstrate here let's type project paragraph break and proposal add a little asterisk to that to licit the font size to about 70 points and the leading to 80 and from the swatches panel set the font color to white which is paper time to change the font choose module occur medium and then let's pull out just project in extra bold okay great so let's add the business name above so a new text frame and type in the name let's set the font size to 35 points and the font Touma delica bold and a pale blue font color you can also add details like a trademark symbol for example from the glyphs panel which you can find in window type and tables and glyphs a good spot to add contact details is at the top so here I'm going to type in the website and the phone number and apply the same font style with a 13-point size and switch the text to align right let's write up who the proposal is for below the main title and format that in the same style with a 15-point size and set this text in all caps let's set the date below in 13 points awesome your front cover is looking great another thing you might want to add is a statement of confidentiality to the front cover if the proposal is intended to be seen by only a select person or group of people and that's quite a nice professional touch but it's not absolutely essential and that's your cover done great job so make sure to save your document as we'll carry on working on this in the next lesson where we'll look at how to create type styles for your proposal hey there so in this lesson we're going to look at how you can create type styles for your proposal so we look briefly at paragraph styles back when we were adapting the proposal template from and vassar elements but instead of redefining existing styles here we're going to have to create our own styles from scratch the advantage of this is that once you have a few style setup you can easily repeat these across lots of text in your document so they're well worth doing in on proposal in progress document let's make sure that the background layer is unlocked and scroll down to the second full spread of our layout which starts on page 4 in Roman numerals so we're going to format this two-page layout and populate it with text which we can then save as styles to use elsewhere in our document so first up let's add a bit of color so use the rectangle tool to create a shape across the whole of the left-hand page and set the fill of this to blue which is cyan 75 add another shape over the top left corner setting the fill of this to 90% black lock the background layer and then unlock the shapes layer so scroll up to the front cover and select the pair of circle shapes over on the right side and copy them and then scroll back down to the spread that we're working on and edit and paste in place change the lower circles fill to blue gradient and the top half circle to 90 percent black okay let's lock the shapes layer and start working on the top text layer so let's create a large text frame over the bottom right corner of the dark rectangle on the left page and type in the chapter number let's change the font color to paper and change the font to Medela kobold up the font size to 200 points and the tracking 240 okay so this is going to be our first type style so go to window and styles and paragraph styles and click on the create new style group icon at the bottom of the panel let's name this chapter with the text highlighted choose new paragraph style from the panel's menu let's name this chapter number and click OK and that's it so when you go to create a new chapter layout in your document you can simply type in a number and then click on this style and it will replicate all the formatting exactly as it is here I'm going to add a little extra to this just an asterisk for a little quirky touch okay so let's keep going and just create a few more type styles so create another text frame along the bottom of the left page and type in the chapter title which is about us this is going to be my delica bold and 86 points font size 20 for the tracking and a paper font color new paragraph again let's name this one chapter heading and okay awesome let's create a pull quote at the top of the right-hand page so new text frame type in your quote text and this is going to be Metallica bold size 27 points over the leading to 38 points and tracking 220 and the font color is going to be 90% black okay so new paragraph style this is going to be pull quote okay you can also create multiple styles of in a single text frame so let's try that create a text frame below this pull quote for now you can go up to type and fill with placeholder text highlight the first paragraph and set that to Glenn sans Extra Bold size 12 points and the leading to 18 points let's set the tracking to 20 and set the text in all caps highlight all this text and set the font color to 90% black for the next paragraph down set the font to Glen sans bold size 9 points leading to 15 points and tracking to 20 so to create two different styles in the same frame let's just place our cursor into that first paragraph and choose new paragraph style from the paragraph Styles panel and name this opening paragraph set your type cursor in the next paragraph down and again new paragraph style and name this one body text okay and to show you how you can apply styles to text highlight the remaining text in that text frame and click on the body text style and there we go the formatting is copied over so you can see how creating styles might take a bit of time but actually you're going to save yourself loads of time by using them especially if your proposals going to be quite a long document in the next lesson we're going to continue to build up the design of our proposal and move on to creating a stylish contents page for your design so make sure to save your InDesign file and keep it open if you're moving straight on to the next lesson hi there so here we are in our proposal in progress document and one thing that every proposal should have is a contents page this is going to help your reader find relevant info quickly they might want to show a colleague your financial breakdown or just take a quick glance of the people on your team and a contents page is essential if you don't want them to get frustrated and toss your document to one side people are busy so you need to help them out we're going to put the contents page on the first full spread of our document which is Roman numerals page 2 in this lesson I'm going to show you how you can create a simple and stylish contents page and how to use styles to create it really quickly so let's get started so on the background layer use the rectangle tool to create a shape across the left page and set the fill of this to 90% black sort it Oh lock that layer and unlock the text layer let's get started with a heading so using the type tool create a text frame towards the top of the left page spanning the columns and type in table of contents let's set the font to madela cur extra bold size 70 points of the tracking 240 and set the font color to paper in the paragraph Styles panel let's create a new style group and call it contents and choose new paragraph style let's call this contents heading ok new text frame over on the right page type in our proposal and click on the contents heading style to apply it obviously with the white color we can't see it so we can tweak it a 90% black font color let's set the text to align right as well okay great now for the body the content so on the left page use the type tool to create a long narrow frame about a third of the way down the page type in the chapter number and title which is 0-1 about us the font color is going to be paper the font Medela kobold size 18 points and tracking 220 and as before new paragraph style call this one contents subheading okay okay two ways to repeat this formatting cheats way is to copy and paste the text frame and just adapt the text really quick to do or if you want to really learn how to use styles intuitively you can create a new text frame below this one type in the next chapter number and title which is o to meet the team and click on the content subheading style to apply it and then keep going until you have all your numbers and titles then you need to add page numbers and personally I've got no problem with just manually typing in page numbers when you've got quite simple documents like proposals really long documents like books or a different matter and for that you'd be looking at creating a TOC or a table of contents and InDesign but here I don't think it's really necessary so let's copy and paste the first chapter subheading and move that over into a mirrored position on the right-hand page and just tweak the font color to 90% black and switch the alignment to align right and then you can either save this as a new paragraph style or like I'm going to do here just copy and paste the text frame until you've populated the page and edit the page numbers you can put these as X for now if you like before you finish the whole document a nice final touch might be to add lines beneath each subheading to make the contents list easier to read so use the line tool to create one beneath the first subheading on the left-hand page and let's set the stroke color to paper from the stroke panel set the weight of the line to two points and copy and paste that line moving this below the second subheading when you're happy that the align to both of these is the same you can copy-and-paste the two lines as a pair and keep doing this until the page is filled up let's select all the lines on this page and copy and paste them and move them over to the right page into the same position and change the stroke color to 90% black to match the text over here let's not forget the little asterisk on the heading and you're done a really simple and stylish contents page just make sure to come back and update the page numbers here when you finish your document okay great works so far I hope you're enjoying creating your proposal because we've got more to come in the next video we're going to look at how you can map out your proposal we're just going to let you know where content can be placed and give you a sense of how each of your layouts is going to look so as always make sure to save your InDesign document and we'll come back to it in the next lesson proposals can be lengthy if you're working to a tight deadline mapping out your proposal will help you to save time and it will also help your proposals look more consistent and professional as well in the same way that master pages can help you to repeat content across a number of pages working out a sort of model template for how you're going to arrange elements on your pages will mean that you can repeat this here I'm going to show you what I mean so already you've created a cover for your proposal and a contents page so now it's time to start thinking about how you want to structure the design of the inside pages of your proposal so let's say you might want to have a particular layout style for the opening page of a chapter or section and a different sort of layout for a page which contains more text you might also want a page it looks a bit different so that it can accommodate say in infographic or statistics or a table once you have the structure of these few types of pages in place you can repeat them across the whole document it's a really quick way to populate your proposal quickly and it means you won't be approaching each spread of your document we fresh so let's do some mapping on our proposal in progress document so scroll down to page four of your document on the Left page we're going to map out a page for the start of a new chapter and on the right page we're going to map out a page that we see to before having text on it let's start with the background of our opening chapter page so lock the text layer and unlock the background layer select the rectangle tool which is M on your keyboard and create a shape across the whole of the left page taking the edges up to the bleed and to the spine on the right side let's set the fill of this to your blue swatch which is cyan 75 we're going to continue the theme of the sort of quarter look that we've established on the cover so let's mark out the page into quarters pull out a guide from the left ruler to where the second column meets the third dividing the margin area into two and then bring a guide down from the top ruler to 5.5 inches which is the horizontal center point of the design then use the rectangle tool to create a shape that fills the top left quarter of the page bringing it down and across to meet those guides and set the fill of this to 90% black copy and paste that rectangle and move it to the bottom right section of the page and just reduce that with a bit to get rid of the bleed excess okay that's the background mapped out let's add some text so lock the background layer and unlock the top text layer create a large text frame across the bottom of the gray rectangle and type in the chapter number which here is going to be 0 3 and we can come back to the styles that we created earlier for this so go to the paragraph Styles panel and click on the chapter number style awesome right in a text frame across the bottom of the page for the heading typing a title here it's going to be project specifications and apply the chapter heading style to that okay great so this is now a basic template for an opening chapter page and you can repeat this across other chapter pages so to demonstrate let's unlock the background layer and have the text layer unlock to and select everything on that page and edit copy it scroll up to the previous spread riff starts on page 2 of your document and edit and paste in place and you can just tweet this slightly to give the page a little bit of difference by keeping that same consistent layout let's get rid of the shape on the bottom right and change the fill of the large rectangle at the back to red which is cyan 7 and lighten up the color of the top left shape to your pale gray swatch cyan 38 let's edit the text so this is going to be chapter 2 0 2 and the title for this chapter is going to be meet the team this spread is going to be a bit quirky and use circles as part of the design so let's lock both the background and text layers and unlock the shapes layer scroll up to the front cover page and select the red circle shape over here on the right side and edit copy it back down to our chapter 2 page and edit paste that circle onto the page and position over the top-right corner of the left hand page just lining it up with the horizontal Center guide and letting it overlap just slightly onto the right-hand page awesome we're going to come back to the spread in a later lesson and take a look at how best we can present the team photos but for now head on butt down to the chapter 3 spread now there are going to be a lot of pages in your proposal that will need to contain text and these might not be the most exciting pages to design but it's still important that these have a professional attractive look so we can use the grid we established for the left-hand page so unlock the background layer and select the two guides crossing the page and copy and paste them ok shuffle them over so the vertical guide is in the center of the 4 columns on the right-hand page then select the two dark grey rectangles on the left hand page and copy and paste them we need to flip these to make them fit just right so right click and transform and flip horizontal and move this over into position just like that okay so let's change the fill of the top right shape to blue to match the main accent color of the left page ok looking good so let's say for consistency and just to make your life easier you're always going to want these two top sections the right-hand page to be filled with body text and you'll always fill this bottom right section with either a pull quote or statistics or something like that let's create a couple of text frames for this right-hand page so working on the text layer take the type tool and create a text frame over the top left corner using the margins as a guide and then create a second frame over the top right corner let's link these two frames by clicking on the small square at the bottom right of the first frame and clicking once on to the second frame and you can check these frames are linked by going to view extras and show text fritz let's input some sample text and set these as Styles too so type in a subheading which is going to be our solutions and then a paragraph break and for now head up to type and fill with placeholder text let's set the font of everything here to Glen sans bold size nine points and oops are leading to fifteen points the tracking to 20 let's change the font color to ninety percent black let's make the subheading bigger at 17 points and make it a bit bolder too let's go for extra bold okay now for the styles so for the heading let's choose new paragraph style from the Styles panel a name this one title okay we've already got the body text style saved so we can just apply that by clicking on it you can add little adjustments to the text to improve readability so for example we can highlight just the text over in this text frame and give that a white font color to improve contrast and we can leave the space on the bottom right for more custom content such as statistics and things like that so as we did with the left hand page you can use this simple layout that you've established as a sort of template for creating other pages you can copy the background color and the text frames and paste them in place on other right-facing pages and now you have this grid you can switch up little elements to create variety while keeping the general layout consistent so you might want to change the color of the background shapes or the text or swap in an image here what I hope this lesson has shown you is how by mapping out the grid for a couple of pages in your document without spending too much time on bringing in specific content like copy or images you've now got a template you can copy over to other pages so it's a really great time-saving solution and it's also going to give you a proposal a consistent and professional look make sure to keep saving your progress or really starting to build up a great design for our proposal in the next lesson we'll keep working on the spread and have a look at how you can adapt some of the shapes that we've already created presenting facts and statistics in a more interesting way proposals can at times be a bit dry you've got to present financial breakdowns as well as stats about your business sure you could pop these into your body text but it's much better if you can pull out key facts and figures in a more interesting engaging way for your readers now that we've created a sort of brand look for our proposal we can lift elements of this to help build our graphics so in our proposal in progress document we're going to keep working on this chapter three spread unlock the shapes layer and scroll up to the chapter 1 spread for a moment select the blue circle and edit and copy it then move back down to page 5 and edit and paste it hold shift while you scale this down to about a one and a half inches diameter on the text file let's create a text frame over the top of this and set the font to medela kobold 29 points font size and of the tracking 240 let's change the font color to paper so we can type in a number such as 96.7% and create a new text frame to the right of this explaining that statistic so for example of visitors to our apps would recommend them to a friend let's set the font of this to Glen Sam's size 9 points leading to 15 tracking to 20 and the font color to 90% black okay so it's a little ready-made graphic you can use for other stats let's select the circle and the text frames and copy and paste them and move it below we can create a little title above this reading our stats and set the font to my delicate Extra Bold size 24 points and set the tracking to 20 so it's a really simple idea but basically you can use this formula of circles with text to create statistics that look a bit more interesting and it's also a really good visual technique for drawing attention to stats that might be particularly enticing or interesting for the reader in the next lesson we're going to use this technique again but this time to create a stylish way of presenting some of the images in our design so save your document and we'll take a look at how to use images in your proposal in the next video hey there welcome so proposal is really starting to come together and now we've got some of the structure of the pages mapped out we're ready to start dropping in more specific content into our design one of these things is going to be images so you might want to refer back to the envato elements resources lists before watching this lesson if you haven't already downloaded the images on that list if you prefer to just watch the video that's fine but it's helpful if you can also follow along by using the images that I'm also going to be using here so let's make a start on our images I'm going to show you a couple of different ways of formatting the images in your proposal so even though you can't do some advanced photo editing in InDesign you can create color overlay effects and also place your images into unusual frame shapes which are just going to make your photos look that bit more professional and creative so first up let's create a color overlay effect for some of our images I say overlay but actually you can create this effect in InDesign by playing around with the transparency settings of image frames scroll up to the chapter 1 about Us page and then unlock the photos layer switch to the rectangle frame tool you can hit F on your keyboard and create a shape at the bottom right corner of the left-hand page then go to file and place and find the image for envato elements that's called design studio architect creative occupation prj le7 N and open it and you can click inside the frame to directly select the image and music about making sure to hold down shift to scale it okay so that's looking fine but we can give this a slightly cooler look by playing around with the transparency settings select the image frame and head up to object effects and transparency and from the mode menu choose multiply and that's going to bring through some of that color below awesome okay and you can repeat this effect really easily by copying and pasting the image frame so let's edit copy it scroll on down to the chapter three page and paste in place let's extend the wit for cross so that this becomes one large frame across the spine and we'll also want a different image here so go to file and place and choose the image called design studio architect creative occupation PBA G SMN and open delete any dark shapes that are sitting behind this on the background layer and this gives a nice duotone sort of look with the full-color image still intact on the right side that's a really simple and nice way to display images in your proposal design we can also get a bit more creative with the shape of the image frame scroll up to the chapter two page which is the meet the team page and over here on the right we're going to place headshots of the team but instead of setting these in the normal boxy frames we can use the shapes that we've already created to make it look a bit more creative unlock the shapes layer and copy and paste this big red circle and let's scale that down to about 1.9 inches in diameter position it centrally between the second and third columns of the top edge on the margin line and copy and paste that and move the copy over to the left at the same alignment up to the left margin and paste again and pop this over on the right side up against the right margin line bring a guide down to about four point one inches then select all three circles and copy and paste them and move them below with the top of them resting on the guide and then paste again and InDesign will indicate to you where to drop these to get the rows of circles all evenly spaced out so let's say we've got six team members to drop in here so some of these circles can stay as they are and others will have images in them so let's select the first two circles on the top row hold down shift while you select circle on the left side of the middle row and the one on the right side of the middle row and also the left and middle circle of the bottom row with these selected head up to object and effects and transparency set the mode to multiply and bring me a pasty down to 55% okay right now for the images so lock the shapes layer and unlock the photos layer below choose the ellipse frame tool and holding down shift drag to create a circular image frame and let's get that to the same dimensions as the colored circle above and file and place choose one of the head shot images that you've downloaded and open and get that scaled nicely okay cool then we can copy and paste that image frame and position behind the next circle and file and place choose a different portrait and open and just keep pasting more image frames and setting those behind the transparent circles and replacing the images as you go and beneath the images we can put a little caption for the name and job title setting this in Glen sans medium font size twelve points leading 18 points and tracking 20 and set the text to align Center and the font color to 90% black awesome so we've created two different ways of presenting the images in our proposal while still maintaining a consistent look so all the images have a color overlay effect and the frames either match the quarter grid that we've established or they're set inside the circle shapes there's also a consistent feature of our design so everything's looking really good and professional and now you've got all the building blocks in place to create a lengthier version of your proposal I'm not going to create a full end proposal with you in this course but only because a that would take quite a bit of time and B you've now got the main elements in place to copy and paste onto other spreads and just tweak a few things like color and copy to create new pages if you'd like to see the finished version of the proposal which is pictured here you can download the PDF version which is attached to this lesson and have a look at the design in more detail if you'd like to so let's say you finish your proposal you've run it past your colleagues to check that everybody's happy with the copy and the images and you're ready to send it off to be printed in the next lesson we're going to look at best practice for prepping your proposal artwork for printing this stage is really important particularly if you're going to be getting it printed professionally so stick around and we'll talk about how to preflight your proposal in the next video hey there covered a huge amount over the last few lessons by this point your proposal should really be starting to come together for the purposes of this course we're not going to spend too much time building up the content of our proposal because once you have the design in place it's really easy to fill in text and images as you work so let's say that your proposal artwork is finished in this in the next lesson we're going to talk about how to translate your proposal from artwork on your screen to a physical printed document creating a digital version of a proposal is really simple and you can simply export your artwork as a PDF but if you're looking to send your artwork off to be professionally printed you'll need to take a few extra steps in this lesson we're going to look at how to preflight your indesign document performing a pre-flight simply means that you do a kind of health check over your document it highlights any issues of missing fonts or images and whether all the colors you're using are optimized for print so let's look at how to do it okay so you can access the pre-flight panel in InDesign from the bottom of the workspace you'll either have a little green circle here with a no errors sign which is good news or you'll have a little red circle with a number of errors in the document obviously errors are not good but they're really easy to fix so is nothing to worry about I'm going to show you a common example of an error that you might encounter in pre-flight and show you how you can fix it one of the things that's really easy to miss especially when you're working with text heavy documents is text overflowing text frames so if for example this text frame is too short to accommodate the text inside it the preflight color will switch from green to red so then what you do is you double click on the errors text to open up the pre-flight panel so we can see that this is a text error and expanding this we can see that it's specifically a problem with overset text expand again and you can see the page where this error is occurring if you click on that page is going to take you directly to the problem and highlight brain so you can get the text frame expanded and once you've done that preflight will check if there's still an issue and if it's all ok we'll go back to the green no errors at the bottom so really your goal with pre-flight is to make sure that you always have a group no Eris symbol in the panel other errors you might encounter would be a missing font file which just requires you to search for either the font or placement fonts broken image links can also happen if you move images between folders again this is easy to sort out from the pre-flight panel one other thing you need to check which won't be flight up by the pre-flight panel is the color modes that you're using in your document in our previous lesson about color we only created and used CMYK swatches which is suitable for print but you still need to check if any stray RGB swatches have cropped up in the swatches panel as these are meant to be used only for digital design not print it's easy to spot an RGB swatch so let's take a look so in the swatches panel for demo sake I'm going to change one of our CMYK swatches to an RGB swatch like that so you can see here that the little square symbol to the right of the swatch is switched from a four color diamond which is the CMYK symbol to a three color stripe symbol so before you export your proposal for printing you need to make sure that all the swatches in the panel have the diamonds CMYK symbol and that no RGB swatches are present it's really easy to switch an RGB swatch to CMYK just double click on the RGB swatch and choose CMYK from the color mode menu before clicking okay so once you've checked your swatches and made sure no errors are showing up in your pre-flight panel your print prep stage is done and you're ready to export your document as a print-ready PDF in the next lesson we're going to explore our artwork which is the final stage in creating our proposal and the last practical lesson of the course see you're very nearly at the end and you've worked super hard exporting your document is going to be really satisfying as I'll see you over there in just a moment welcome to the final practical lesson of the course after InDesign gives you the green light in pre-flight you're ready to explore your artwork as a print-ready PDF if you're planning on sharing your proposal over email instead this is easy to do so I'll just show you first how to do that you might even want to provide people with a digital copy as well as a print copy so they can have it to hand on their laptops or tablets so first thing to do is to head up to file and of your documents then back into the file menu and choose export you can name the file and then from the format menu at the bottom choose Adobe PDF interactive and click Save because we want readers to see two pages at once as you would in the print copy make sure spreads is checked you can keep the other settings as they are unless you want to add fancy page transitions or anything like that from the compression options you can choose the quality of the JPEGs in your PDF so we might want a high quality but we might also want to bring the resolution down to 72 which is the usual resolution for screen viewing to help save on some space in the file and then when you're ready click export you'll get a warning message about converting see my colors to RGB for interactive PDFs but generally this is not going to be much of a problem so you can click OK and this interactive PDF can be attached to an email or you could upload it on to your website or something like that okay so really we've designed this proposal of printing in mind so let's look at the process for exporting this artwork as a print PDF which is a bit of a different process and needs a few more steps so as we did before go to file and export and this time choose Adobe PDF print from the format menu and click Save okay so we've got a few more options to deal with hair from the top preset menu you're going to want to choose press quality which is going to give you the highest quality for your PDF under pages make sure all is checked and in contrast to the interactive PDF you'll want this print PDF to be exported as individual pages because the document is going to be bound together after printing so make sure pages is selected not spreads the next thing to check is the marks and bleeds options so click on that in the left hand menu different printers prefer different things but generally it's pretty safe to check all printers marks you can check with your printer beforehand whether they want things like the color bars and registration marks and under the bleed and slug section check use document bleed settings and you'll see here that because we set the pages to not have a bleed on the inside InDesign is remembering this and setting this to zero inches and that's it is the ones you've added the bleed to the PDF you can go ahead and hit export awesome so you can really see the quality of this PDF the images are really crisp and the colors look great so you can send this document straight off to the printers and it might be helpful to print off a basic mock-up of your document for them so you can show them exactly how you want the pages to be arranged and then you're going to end up with a box full of wonderful printed proposals which are ready to send off to your client and I'm sure they're going to be really impressed we've very nearly come to the end of the course and one thing I just want to leave you with is that you can download the final PDF of this proposal artwork which is attached to this lesson so you can take a good look at how I've arranged the design and hopefully this will give you some help and inspiration for creating your own proposals in the future make sure to stick around for the next and final video of the course during which we'll take a recap of all the print design techniques that you've picked up during the lessons and we'll look at some suggestions for how you can develop your new skills even further hi there you reach the end of this Envato tux plus course how to design a project proposal in InDesign we started out by looking at how you can use downloadable templates as great foundations for creating elegant proposal designs and how by switching up elements like color and type styles you can give your layouts a completely fresh look that feels a bit more unique well this is a great way to save time and you can still end up with fantastic final results it's really important that you also build confidence at being able to create your own print artwork and in design from the ground up and once you know how to set up masters and things like establishing grids for pages and creating your own type styles you can really build up towards creating a completely unique design that's a true reflection of how you want your proposal to look in this final video I just want to run through a quick recap of some of the awesome print design skills that you've picked up over the course and remind you how much you've learned and also how you can take further steps to developing your design skills so we've covered a huge range of print design and layout design skills over the course of the lessons and these are just a few of them so you can now adapt existing and design templates editing color and type to create a more unique design very quickly you also now know how to create print documents from scratch in InDesign setting up page sections master pages and establishing a general grid layout for your pages you also know how to use color and fonts to create an eye-catching cover for your proposal as well as how to establish a brand look for the inside pages of your document we also looked at how to create our own unique graphics in InDesign using the shape tools and gradient swatches which had a really interesting and stylish angle to layouts you also now know how to format typography to an advanced level and use type styles to repeat this formatting easily across long documents you should also now have more confidence with working with images and InDesign and how to give them a more unique flavor by creating color overlay effects and setting them inside unusual frame shapes and a really essential skill for any print designer you now know how to prepare your InDesign artwork for printing by performing a pre-flight and exporting your work correctly as a press-ready PDF so that's a huge amount of stuff and I think you should be really really proud of what you've achieved even though we focused specifically on creating proposals in this course these skills actually translate to a wide range of tasks such as creating magazines books brochures and Z's so I hope this has given you a taster of what you can achieve in Adobe InDesign and also giving you the confidence to try out creating different sorts of multi-page documents for prints my name is Grace fossil I've been your instructor for this course and it's been really great to have you on board make sure to check out the other course offerings from Envato to its plus and don't forget you can also find a huge range of graphics fonts and print templates over on Envato elements for using in your designs a big thank you for joining me and I hope to see you again soon

Channel: Envato Tuts+

Views: 31,099

Keywords: indesign project proposal, project proposal, how to write a project proposal, proposal, design a project proposal, adobe indesign tutorial, graphic design, indesign, project proposals, project proposal writing, adobe indesign, indesign tutorial, how to use indesign, how to design, adobe indesign cc 2018, grant writing, project manager, how to write proposal, business proposal, proposals

Id: cSHO7omt3iw

Length: 103min 0sec (6180 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 01 2020