If proposals are at the heart of your day-to-day work life, you are likely in InDesign a LOT. But the tough truth is that many proposal coordinators don't enter the profession with formal training in layout and design. Many of us learn on the job and (let's face it) kind of make things up as we go! Have a nagging suspicion that you're spinning your wheels? That there are more efficient ways to get the work done? There are, and we can help! Join Middle of Six's graphic design team, Becky Ellison and Abigail Clark, as they give their top 10 tips to help you find your footing, improve your workflow, and spend more time creating.
CPSM CEU Credits: 0.5 | Domain: 4
Podcast Transcript
Welcome to The Shortlist.
We are exploring all things AEC marketing to help your firm win The Shortlist.
I'm your host, Wendy Simmons, and each episode, I'll be joined by one of my team members from Middle of Six to answer your questions.
Today, we have two team members, both making their shortlist debut.
We've got Abigail Clark and Becky Ellison to talk about InDesign and design tips specific for AEC marketing.
Hi, ladies.
Hey.
Hey, Wendy.
Before we get started on our topic, please introduce yourselves to our audience.
I am Becky Ellison, Senior Creative Strategist at Middle of Six.
I have been working in the AEC marketing industry for 11 years now.
I am a graphic designer by trade, so I did not have any sort of AEC background before I entered the industry, and now I have 11 years worth.
I am very excited to be here making my shortlist debut, Wendy.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, absolutely.
You're actually kind of a podcast pro, so we're happy to welcome you into our group.
Abigail, want to introduce yourself?
Yeah, sure.
I'm Abigail Clark.
I am a graphic designer at Middle of Six, and I've been at the firm for about six months, which has just been jam-packed of AEC knowledge already, and I'm super excited to be here today.
It is my first podcast ever, so I'm very excited.
Right.
We've got the full spectrum of podcast expertise here.
Pretty cool.
Okay.
So our first topic that we'd like to talk about is going to be graphic design and workflow tips specifically for AEC marketing creatives.
So I think you have mapped out 10 tips.
I'm sure there's going to be a few extra bonus tips that we sprinkle in here as we get talking, but Becky, do you want to kick this one off?
Our first tip specifically for graphic designers and creatives working in AEC marketing is, InDesign styles are essential.
So essential.
Paragraph styles, character styles, maybe even table and cell styles.
If you don't know what styles are, it is a way for you to control multiple kinds of text or objects within an InDesign document.
So that if you need to change something, you can just change it in one place, and it will change it all throughout the document so that you don't have to go through and change it everywhere it exists.
It's a wonderful thing.
I think it's absolutely essential.
I don't know how you could function without them.
Love styles.
But, Becky, that seems technical, scary, and difficult to use.
Is it?
It's not, Wendy.
You'd be amazed.
Styles, a lot of times, for people who didn't start out with formal training in InDesign are usually an aha moment that comes later in their InDesign career and can absolutely change your entire workflow.
I like to say that using Styles is like, imagine you have an army, right?
You have thousands of people with different jobs, different ranks, and you decide one day that they all need to get a new haircut because why not, right?
But they can't all have the same haircut because that would be boring.
So what you're going to do is you could go around to everybody and cut their hair yourself, right?
But that would take time and you're general, you're busy, you've got stuff to do.
Instead, you say, hey, okay, all of the lieutenants are getting a spiral perm, all of the captains are getting a buzz cut, and all of the majors are going to get like a cute page boy flip.
I don't know.
So what you do is you're making a style change, right, to a group of people rather than going into each individual one.
And that's very similar to styles.
And I feel like this is a Netflix series that we should be pitching.
But essentially, that is the way to set it up in advance so that you will be able to make changes easier down the line.
What you're doing is putting in like a fraction of a second of extra work so that you will not have to do that work as you go.
And it's super easy.
There's a window in InDesign called the styles panel.
You would just open that up.
Start with paragraph styles.
That is where you can just sort of select a block of text and give it a name, body text, caption, subheadings, whatever.
And then once you've done that, if you need to change the font size, oops, you know, the proposal requires 12-point font.
Ah, you can just go in and quickly set it to 12-point font and it changes it all through the document.
It's beautiful.
You're going to love it.
Yeah.
And if you are a stickler for consistency like I am, then not having to worry that everything, every header looks the same, you know, throughout the whole document, that you haven't missed something on the resumes or in the project pages, make that one change, and you've cut out a huge amount of work for you to do individually.
Yeah.
And I'd say in proposals specifically, it's so helpful to start with that body text style and have everything else based on that body text so that when you apply a 12-point minimum size to that body text, it'll translate to the rest of your style, saving you a ton of time and making sure you do fit all of those specific requirements.
If you're being tortured and having to use 12-point font, which we are constantly being tortured.
Absolutely happens.
Sometimes they will specify 12-point Arial or 12-point Times New Roman or whatever, which is every graphic designer's nightmare, of course.
But yeah, making those quick changes, you have to do it.
You can't be anti-styles.
You can't be like an anti-styler.
You got to get on board the styles train.
It will change your whole life.
It will change your career.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
All right, Becky, what's next on your list?
Tip number two, keyboard shortcuts.
Can't emphasize this enough.
You will be amazed how much time you can save by learning keyboard shortcuts, especially in InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop.
They tend to be similar, but aren't always the same.
There's an absolute million of them.
But some of the essentials that you need to know are like, you know, copy and paste, how to paste text only without attributes, export, send to back, bring to front, scale proportionally.
There's a few.
You can look these up and find out what the standard shortcuts are, but you can also create your own keyboard shortcuts by going into an InDesign, for example, edit keyboard shortcuts.
You can create a new set with your name or whatever, and you can go through and pick and choose the ones that may not be set up for shortcuts or are something you wouldn't remember and give them a new shortcut.
For example, I like to set shortcuts for changing the case of text.
You know, like if you have something in sentence case and you want to quickly change it to all caps, I create my own shortcut for that, Ctrl Shift Alt U for uppercase so that I can easily remember it and so on.
And you can you'd be amazed how many things you can make shortcuts for in all of those apps.
And that saves a ton of time as well.
This is all about saving time.
Hey, my favorite shortcut, I just had to look it up because I do it without knowing what it is.
But it's Ctrl Shift V.
I'm on a PC and that's paste without formatting.
And I am so happy to have that.
I don't want to bring over the formatting most of the time, you know.
And maybe there are other ways to get to that answer, but I use that constantly.
I think one of my game changers was Alt Drag to copy and paste without doing those two separate commands.
That was definitely a game changer and paste in place.
Paste in place.
So nice.
Yeah.
That's a good one.
I love a good paste in place.
So you can take something and put it in a frame that wasn't already in a frame.
Love it.
Looking ahead at number three, I think selecting an appropriate font, especially in a proposal, is incredibly important.
Maybe not technically a time-saving trick, but it's really gonna help you out in the long run.
Becky, what experience have you had in picking an appropriate font for a proposal?
So one of your most important choices for your brand and as someone who works in a lot of documents, like proposals, let's say, you wanna make sure that you have a body text font that is clear, readable, not too fancy and not too huge at let's say 10 point, 12 point, whatever, because a lot of times RFPs will require that you have a certain font size in your document.
And if for example, Times New Roman is teeny tiny at 10 point, which no one should ever use, ever.
And then like Century Gothic, for example, another hated font is massive at the same size.
You got to think ahead to those times when you're going to get that 12 point font request and make sure the one you're using is not going to actually look like, you know, 20 point at that size.
Also, you want to make sure you're not using a font that has too many weird decorations like tall stems on the letters or weird punctuation marks, that sort of thing.
Because above all, you want your body copy to just be very clear, readable, easy on the eyes.
Use the fancier fonts for shorter things like headings and little callouts and one-offs.
Yeah.
And that made me think, in InDesign, you can turn off the feature that has the ligatures.
So that helps a font become a little less fancy and more readable.
So a ligature is when two letters, two characters touch each other.
So an F and an I might touch each other or T, I don't know, there are other combinations of things.
It looks beautiful kind of maybe at a larger scale, but when you're actually reading it in text fonts, like it's a bit much.
That's very true.
And when you check spelling, it will not recognize those characters a lot of the time.
And it will be like, first, that's not a word.
And you'll be like, yes, it is.
But the problem is that the F and the I are connected.
Yeah.
OK, so then moving on, thinking about photos, and obviously they feature heavily in proposals, I feel like as they should.
Becky, what are your tips on making sure you're cropping and presenting the photos the best way possible?
So one of the biggest problems that I have found in using photography of buildings and structures that have come from many different sources is when you get the photo, a lot of times if it's not a super professional photo, you will have this sort of distortion in the perspective of the building, the trees, the lamp posts, whatever is in the photo.
And you wonder, why does this look like it's skewing to the left and like totally out of proportion, that is called parallax, which means you're looking at something from a particular perspective and it makes it look distorted.
And I think if you have worked in AEC marketing for any length of time, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
The building where the walls look diagonal and you're like, ah, how can I straighten this out and make it look like a real building?
Well, fortunately, I believe there are actually a couple of ways to do this, but my favorite and I think the fastest way is in Photoshop.
If you open up the photo and then just go to the perspective crop tool, which looks like a little grid in like a weirdly shaped kind of square looking thing, and then drag a selection over the entire photo.
Then while holding down shift, that's very important or you will tear your hair out in frustration, just trust me.
Grab one of the corners and drag it so that the edges of this grid you've drawn over the photo sort of line up with the diagonal lines of the building.
Once you have done that both from the sort of horizontal and landscape perspectives, you can hit enter and you will see that you now have a straightened parallel normal looking building.
Sometimes you'll get a little bit of distortion if the original photo was very heavily parallaxed, but most of the time, this will definitely work.
And Instagram users will recognize that Instagram gives you the ability to do this with your photos, where you can sort of distort the perspective up and down.
And you'll be amazed how easy it is to do that in Photoshop with your very distorted building photos.
Another essential, I think.
Yeah, that's an awesome tip because sometimes we are working with photography that was, you know, grab quickly from someone's phone, or you're doing a job walk, a site walk, and it's not professional photography, but it doesn't have to look like it's from your phone.
The phone does a good job taking the pictures.
It just needs a little bit of editing help to really make it pop and present as well as everything else in your proposal or other places.
For sure.
Yeah.
Another quick thing you can do to zhuzh up a photo is go to shadows and highlights and just bring up the shadows a little bit and then tweak the settings.
You can bring down the highlights sometimes if the sky is really like blown out too bright, that sort of thing.
That's a quick thing that has a big impact.
Also, if you go to filter, sharpen, smart sharpen, that is another super powerful thing that can make an OK photo look almost great or even fantastic in a short amount of time.
Yeah.
And if you're working in Lightroom with your photos at all, it's always really nice to have a Lightroom preset set up for all of the photos you're going to use in a certain document just so that they're all fitting within the same mood.
So maybe you want to pick a lighter, airy...
Maybe you want something moodier, kind of gritty, more contrast, and then you can get that consistently across, especially if you were doing something like a brochure or a presentation where there was a theme running through it.
Switching gears to something that we actually all love doing, logo design.
What do you want to share about kind of tips for getting to the right answer or what people should be thinking about when they are going through the process of designing a logo?
One thing to consider specifically for AEC firms, especially construction firms, is you want to have a logo that is very simple, very bold and very recognizable.
I would describe that as an icon logo.
It might be a letter, a great big H with some kind of styling that's very recognizable, a bright color that stands out, that sort of thing, because it will be seen on hard hats and shirts and trucks driving around town and cranes that could be looming over the city with great big bright shiny logos on them.
And then people driving around will see your logo and instantly think you're a company.
When designing a logo in general, you want to go for something that is simple and scalable and not full of tiny little details, of course, but especially I think in AEC marketing, you want that that quick hitter icon that's going to be seen walking around smiling at people.
You know, everywhere that your people are wearing it is representing your brands.
You definitely want to stand out, be strong and clean and simple.
I like the idea of thinking about what your logo is going to look like really, really small.
What does it look like on the side of a pen or pencil?
What does it look like then on the other side of the spectrum?
Really huge on a tower crane.
I worked for a general contractor at one point in my career, and we did a test.
We had the original crane sign, and we were going to the style where it was the cutout letters, as opposed to just a big rectangle up there.
We had one built out, we went out to the yard, we had two put up way up high so we could look from multiple distances and just confirm before thousands and thousands of dollars were spent producing that.
It was a big deal and really nice to get to see it in that context.
Yeah.
I think it's definitely a good use of time to have your graphic designer or whatever branding people you're working with put together some mockups before you get really serious about one logo or the other.
It really helps to find that balance between detail and simplicity in a logo and just to get your initial feelings of how would I feel when I see someone walking down the street with this on their shirt.
You also want to make sure that it works in black and white or in one color, for example, because you might have those bright green and orange safety shirts that people are wearing.
And a lot of times they just want to print like a one color logo on that shirt or two.
But you want to make sure it doesn't clash with bright green or orange, because that would be a fashion faux pas.
And you want to make sure that even in all black or whatever, it doesn't lose its identity.
So those are good tests to do in the beginning initial design phase.
And I'll just add one more thing that for a lot of us out there in marketing, your firms have their brand.
Maybe they're not going to do a brand refresh or they've already done it.
It's just not on the docket.
But there are lots of other opportunities to be doing logo design for special initiatives.
If you have something internal for the company that you want to rally around, like a safety week or an ESOP program or anything like that, right?
So you may be called to either create the logo or be on the team who's part of thinking about or working with an agency to create that logo.
So even internally, there can be uses for that.
Yeah.
It's a great thing to integrate, especially when you have a social media campaign going on, just to be able to add that logo in the corner of the photo to tie everything together.
So bookmarking, especially in proposals, is really important, helpful.
It feels like a nice finishing touch when you're putting together a large document.
Becky, what tips do you want to share for setting up the PDF with bookmarks?
So it is possible to set up bookmarks and initial page views and stuff like that in InDesign, but who has time to plan ahead?
It's also very fast and easy to just go into your final PDF and open up, if you hit Ctrl or Command D, it opens up the document settings for the PDF, and you can set the initial view, which is a simple and obvious seeming thing that can actually have quite an impact, because you can sort of set the document to pop up either in one page only or in a booklet style layout where you have a cover and then facing pages throughout when the recipient opens the file.
So if they open it on their phone, it may not show exactly the way you want it to, but nine times out of ten when someone opens it on a desktop, it will pop up in the display that you set.
You can set the magnification 100%, fit the page, whatever.
That is a really cool thing to experiment and try.
Another thing that is great for the convenience of the reader with a PDF is to create bookmarks to your different sections.
This is very easy and fast to do in Acrobat.
You would just open up the bookmarks panel, which is on the left side of the window, and it looks like a little ribbon or like a medieval jousting banner or something.
You open that up and then you just scroll through to each section that you want to bookmark.
And a cool trick is you can highlight the name of the section, the actual text in the PDF, and then hit the new bookmark button, and it will auto populate the name of the bookmark with the section name because you highlighted the text.
And you can just flip through your document and do that really quick.
And if there's not a name of the section, like you want to bookmark the cover, let's say, you would just navigate to that page and then hit new bookmark on the left.
And then that will be super convenient for your reader because you can set the initial view again to have that bookmarks panel open up.
And they can just click on a section name and go right to it.
You're totally right that it is a little jousting banner.
And now I will not be able to unsee that when I look at it.
That's a good tip.
We're working with Adobe products.
And so when you set that up or when you even put them into InDesign and then have it exported with those bookmarks showing, that works great.
And that also shows up in Bluebeam, which I think a lot of people in AEC on the client side or even that your technical staff are probably using Bluebeam to look.
That's really great.
Does the, I don't know, Becky, do you know, does the viewing preferences, that's probably just a component that's integrated with Adobe, right?
To do full screen and the spreads.
It might be, I don't have a lot of familiarity with Bluebeam.
I have resisted Bluebeam my entire career, even though everyone around me has used it.
I have definitely been in it for, you know, Bluebeam review, but I couldn't say 100%.
I know not to put you on the spot.
I'm in the same boat as you two.
I'm like, yeah, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna get that.
I don't want to.
That's fine.
I just was curious if we knew as a group, you know how that presents, but I'm guessing it's gonna be in Adobe setting.
I know when I receive a PDF that's set up to view full screen, I just, I kind of love it.
I just get immersed in it.
It feels like I'm already in a presentation.
It kind of blocks out a lot of the other noise.
So I would recommend doing that as a good best practice.
Yeah, I absolutely love Adobe Acrobat.
I just can't believe there was a time when I just opened it up in whatever that default Apple PDF viewer is.
The amount of tools that Acrobat has is amazing.
Let's talk about GREP shortcuts.
I one time went to the Adobe conference and sat through an inspiring session on GREP.
And I thought, oh, I want to use all of these back at my office, and I barely use any of them because I just chickened out or got lazy.
So, Becky, tell us what you would recommend using GREP for and the times when it adds a lot of value.
So there are GREP shortcuts that are already built in to InDesign, for example, which is what we work in mostly, let's be honest with ourselves.
To bring up the GREP functionality, you would hit Ctrl or Command F, which brings up the fine change box.
And then you would go to the GREP tab.
I don't know what GREP stands for.
I'm suddenly realizing in this moment.
Does anybody know?
Great, really exciting program.
That's not it.
Grapes, raspberries, everything, and potatoes, for sure.
Yeah, GREP.
Abby, do you have a guess as to what GREP might stand for?
Grapes, raspberries, that sounds correct to me.
Yeah, that's credible, sure.
GREP, Global Regular Expression Print, a Unix command used to search files for the occurrence of a string of characters that matches a specified pattern.
So open up your Grapes and Raspberries panel.
You're looking for GREP, G-R-E-P, and then once you get there, you will see a drop-down menu called Query.
This is where you can see what is already included in InDesign, and I won't go through all of them, but one of them that is really, really cool and very needed is multiple space to single space, because even in 2022, people are still doing a double space bar after every sentence, which we don't do anymore, and it's okay, I'm not judging you.
There's no hate in my heart for anybody.
I want to lovingly bring you into the fold of not doing that anymore.
If you do do that, so no judgment and all kindness, but to quickly eliminate the multiple space, what you can do is select the text that you want to apply this to.
You can do the whole document, but it might be chaos.
You never know if there's like an intentional space thing going on, and then go to this grep window, and then you can just hit in the drop down menu, multiple space to single space, hit change all, and bam, it automatically takes out all of those multiple spaces and turns them into single spaces.
It is wonderful.
In addition to the built in shortcuts, if you really want to get advanced, you can create your own grep shortcuts.
I feel like in my entire career, I've only made one of these, but I use it so often.
So when you were working on a lot of proposals, you are getting text content from a million different sources.
And there is nothing worse than trying to pull text out of, let's say a PDF, where you've got long paragraphs of text, where every line is a separate line with a paragraph break and everything.
And you think, oh God, do I have to go through this and hit delete, enter space a million times?
No, you don't.
You can set up a grep shortcut, highlight the text and go into your grep box, and then put backslash lowercase r in the find what box.
And then in the change to box, put backslash lowercase s.
And then make sure, you know, the search dropdown is selecting just the selection, or it will do your whole document.
And that would absolutely be chaos.
And then hit change all, bam.
Then you will have all of those line breaks taken out and converted to spaces.
And you can save that shortcut there in the box with the little save icon.
I use that, I feel like every day.
Yeah, I think those two are just such good recommendations, right?
Let's not spend time, you know, in the frustration of like going through individually and correcting all that.
That's brilliant.
Be brave.
Use GREP.
Yeah, and it sounds a little scary, a little complicated.
But the truth is, it's all out there on the Internet.
Yeah, like one of our team members was thinking there must be a GREP shortcut for changing text to title case.
And guess what there was?
We just had to copy and paste this long string of letters and numbers into the GREP window.
Don't know exactly what box, but the Internet will tell you it is out there, I promise.
What about auto footers?
Yeah, I'm curious, Becky, to see exactly how you set those up, because I know there are multiple ways.
And sometimes I just can't decide if I should have my auto footers based on a character style or a paragraph style.
I don't know what is better.
That is a personal choice.
Oh, OK.
But what I'm referring to as auto footers sounds very secretive and mysterious.
And I think, listeners, this is either going to blow your mind or make no sense.
But I encourage you to look this up either way, because it is hard to explain just via audio on a podcast.
But if you can see this in action, you will understand the value of this for sure.
This was absolutely one of the biggest aha moments of my entire proposal design career.
So what I'm talking about is when you set up parent pages in an InDesign document, a lot of times you will want to put the footer on there, which will have your firm name, you want maybe the section name to be running across the bottom and then the page number, whatever.
Everybody knows how to insert the firm name and the page number, we got it.
But how can you get that section name to just show up automatically in the footer without typing it in on every single page every time you have a new section?
What you're gonna do is go to your parent page and create a text box.
You're going to go to Insert Text Variables and then go to Define, give it a name like Section Header, whatever, and then choose the type Running Header Paragraph Style.
And then you're gonna choose the paragraph style or character style, depending on your choice, that you have already created for your section headers, and then hit OK.
Then find your new variable that you just defined in the list, click it, and then hit Insert.
Now the footer text where you inserted this should look like left alligator bracket, section name, right alligator bracket.
I don't know what those are really called, but you know, less than sign, greater than sign.
You know what I'm talking about.
So that's what it should look like when you've done this correctly.
And then when you go out of the parent page and back into the main document, you should see that the footers now automatically will display the name of the section because it's pulling from that style.
So very important thing to note is that whether you use a paragraph style or a character style, Abby, you can use either.
You want to make sure that style is only applied to your section headers because otherwise, you may get footers that are pulling text from who knows what else because it's style dependent.
But this, definitely look it up, see if you can find a more visual tutorial on the internet.
But this is a powerful, powerful thing that will save you a ton of time.
We'll let everybody hit the rewind button twice so that they can go and then write down those instructions so that they can follow along.
It's really good and every proposal that we have that set up using that is like beautiful.
It just feels like magic is happening on the page.
Does anybody know what the real name of the alligator brackets is?
Less than and greater than.
That's the only other thing I could think of, but it really truly is an alligator.
That is what I was taught.
Like open tag, closed tag if you're into HTML.
But yeah, I was taught alligator.
I don't know.
Project to look up.
Listeners, if you know, please call in.
Don't call.
We don't have a phone number, but send, shoot us an email.
I just Googled it.
And the image that came up was the alligator.
So just so you know, like that's what Google's saying.
I feel validated and seen.
That is wonderful.
Greater than and less than symbols can be used to compare numbers and expressions.
So I think you all are experts at math.
Good job.
Totally.
Yeah.
Well, the next tip that we have, really I have, is customizing your workspace.
And I think it's something that takes you so little time, but is so helpful in the long run.
And I would recommend just whatever broad bracket of projects that you work on to have a personalized workspace for each of those.
And it's so awesome.
It's so easy to do.
You open up your InDesign, and you can just start to add what windows you use a lot, list them from maybe like most used to least used.
You can pick where you want them to show up, and then you can set a new workspace for InDesign to save.
And you can give it a name.
You can say like my proposal workspace or like my social media template workspace.
And I've just found it super helpful.
I don't know, Becky, do you ever find yourself doing that?
I do.
Every time I install Creative Cloud on a new computer, the first thing I do is go through and set up the workspace, primarily in InDesign.
For me, I work with two monitors.
So I keep my work surface in the left monitor, and then I put all of my panels in the right monitor.
And there are many.
And I just, I wanna keep them all open all the time.
That's just how I work.
Everybody's got a different thing.
Some people like them to just pop out of the wall.
I like having them all in front of me.
And then you save it.
I will save mine with just my name, Becky.
And then if you wanna make a change, this is something that is not obvious.
And I wish it was a little bit easier and more intuitive.
But if you change something, what you've gotta do is go into new workspace and then save it with the same name as your current one.
So for me, that would be Becky.
And then it would say, oh, do you wanna overwrite this workspace?
You'd say, yes.
There's not an easy way to just say, you know, save changes or whatever.
Does seem like you have to make an entirely new one.
Good tip, hot tip.
Hot tips coming at ya.
Abby, I think we have another tip here that I'm just so curious to hear about, which would be for long documents, text box threading and text frame options for when you have tons of text.
I'm so curious to hear what you have to say on this because I know text frames are such a hot topic.
Some people like to do multiple columns.
Some people like to do threaded.
Please tell me, what do you think about text frames in a long document?
Yeah, I think it's partially a personal choice, but also I would definitely recommend threading your text frames to some degree when you have a long, text heavy document.
And I think there is a line you have to draw where you don't want to thread the entire document, but you do want to have at least a section where like, you know, a paragraph is going to continue to the next page.
Anytime that is the case, you're going to need to use threading text boxes.
I can't imagine a world where you don't use them, but there was a time when I didn't know what they were.
And I just remember that being a game changer for me.
And one thing that's really helpful is you can actually view how the text boxes thread, view text threads, and then you know which ones are connected and how in which order, even through different pages.
It'll draw that little blue line for you.
So are you someone who likes to have multiple columns in a text frame, or do you like to have a single column that is threaded across the columns on the page?
Yeah, I like to have a grid set up, so to have my guidelines and then fit my text box to those guidelines.
So I'm not doing a multi-column text box.
But I do think that's useful when you're doing like a callout box, perhaps.
I just don't like my entire page to be one text box.
Maybe that's a personal preference, but...
I agree.
I'm the same way.
We're the same camp.
This is such a niche like graphic design thing, but you have to choose sides.
We've chosen the same side.
I'm so pleased to hear it.
You do.
And here is a reason why I think this is the way to do it, because then you don't have to deal with text wrap when you're putting an image.
I like to just end my text box and not have to deal with all that extra padding around your image and just extra stuff to think about.
Let's not.
Yeah, you can fine tune.
You have that control over every column, every component instead of all being linked together.
Yeah, it seems more complicated, but really it feels simpler when you're working with that.
Keeping your text boxes threaded within a section and a proposal, to me, feels like that perfect balance.
Maybe not the whole document.
You don't want safety flowing into diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Yes.
There's a hard break there, but it's really nice on project approach that you can put in graphics or add another photo or case study and just have the text flow to the next page and the next page as your content develops.
Ooh, those are all awesome tips, and I think we managed to fit them into one podcast recording.
So bravo, ladies.
Very proud of you.
All right, well, we'll wrap things up here, but we'll definitely bring you back on to talk about more design and inspiration type topics that I'm sure our listeners will love.
So thanks so much.
Sounds good.
Thanks for having us.
Thank you.
Are you down with GREP?
Yeah, you know me.
The Shortlist is presented by Middle of Six and hosted by me, Wendy Simmons, Principal Marketing Strategist.
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The Shortlist is a podcast that explores all things AEC marketing. Hosted by Middle of Six Principal, Wendy Simmons, each episode features members of the MOS team, where we take a deep dive on a wide range of topics related to AEC marketing including: proposal development, strategy, team building, business development, branding, digital marketing, and more. You can listen to our full archive of episodes here.