Well what do you know? Full pages of text! Am I good or was it just obvious? I really don't know what's coming next though but I'll admit I'm a little bit excited to find out.

Okay, full pages of text. The image below is just the text pasted into a fullsize text box (not including margins or anything like that) and then edited via pointsize and leading to make it all fit in the one box. There are far many words to read on each line and just looking at it makes me think, ugh, that's a lot to read. Graham showed us a way of making it look much nicer.
And that way was this. You can't edit it enough to have fewer words on the line and not have it so crammed up with minus leading that you can barely read it? Make the text box slimmer and work with it from there. I'm not going to lie, the piece of text on a whole looks far nicer, and really does make me want to read it more than the above one.
Then we moved onto two columm, which was fairly easy and is another solution to solving the 'too many words on a line' problem with the single column. Splitting it into two makes it far more readable due to the fewer words on the line.
Then images were thrown into the mix! Madness!

Two columm
Three column
Four columm
And five column
And then we were shown more interesting ways to use up columns! These were done with five column grids as examples.
I really like these two, they just look so snazzy and far more intriguing than generic layouts.
I'm learning about both layout and typography now!

This week in the Typography workshop we were dealing with entire paragraphs of text! Shocking I know, whatever will be next? A whole page of text?

He's playing with fire!

We're not ready for Nibbly Pig! I mean, uh, full pages. Black Books moment over.

Aaaaanyway. This top page of text was done using a four column page in InDesign. Clearly I've only used three of the four columns but whatever, it's what we were told to do. We were looking into readability, as in which piece of text you would most likely read. I'm learning a lot more about kerning and leading and point size and the like. I'm actually really enjoying this workshop and that definitely is making me lean further and further towards doing the Typography elective.
And then, we moved onto using a twelve column grid, making 3, 2, 1 and 6 column pieces of text, and how to make use of the space given to us.

By doing this, I learned that you should never really have less than 5/6 words to a line, and no more than 12 - 14. Obviously you can have more, but going on a purely compfrt of reading factor, you don't want to have someone look at the text abd your page and think 'Jesus that looks like a lot of work, I'm just not going to bother.'

You want people to read with ease.

This is a screenshot of what the grid system looks like.



And this is what it all looks like without the grid lines on show. Pretty slick, huh?
I'm actually learning a lot in this workshop, and am making good use of Indesign. When we tried to learn about it last year, I'm not going to lie, I didn't really get what the hell I was supposed to do with it.

Fun fact: If you need to fit a lot of words into a small space, don't condense a font by kerning, find a condensed font because that was made to be condensed and still look good. If you kern a font to make it fit, it won't flow as nice as it did before.