Report Redesign

Purpose

This assignment will give you experience both designing—or in this case redesigning—technical report documents and using InDesign's features for working with longer documents.

Task

• Redesign a technical report 6 or more pages in length, using the publication's original text and making it ready to go to press. The design should include a Table of Contents and an Index, which are not included in the page length above.
• Use your existing knowledge of typography to improve the reader's ability to read and scan the document.
• If the document has existing graphics or photographs, improve them in order to accentuate and support the document's technical information. If no graphics are present, create new ones to achieve the same goal.

To reuse the publication's text, you will have to either obtain the original digital files or scan the text into ASCI text format using an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program. You should consider retyping only as a last resort. For OCR help, see a Ross Hall computer lab monitor. Graphics or photographs can be scanned from the original and improved or altered using Photoshop. Charts or diagrams can also be recreated using an Excel spreadsheet; just take a screenshot of the recreated chart, then import the image into InDesign. Though the images are taken at screen resolution, they usually print fine.

Impositions

InDesign now has a built-in imposition feature for converting reader spreads to printer spreads. When printing your technical report for submission, make sure you use printer spreads so the output can be assembled in a way that ultimately makes sense for the reader.

Submitting Work

Print

• Your redesigned technical report, complete with a paper cover and bound the way you want.
• A copy of the original technical report.
• A print order form specifying as much detail as possible about the way you would want this report printed (from pages 179-180 of Getting It Printed).

Digital

The following items should be placed in a zipped folder called "lastname-report" and submitted in the Novell dropbox, emailed to me, or handed to me in class on a USB Flash drive:

• A packaged InDesign file of your redesign (reader spread) to include all fonts and images used
• A preflighted PDF version of the document ready for transmission to a print shop.

Evaluation Criteria

In grading this assignment, I will be looking at how well you have used the following elements to improve the report's overall communicative effectiveness.

• Page layout - how well you have used white space, alignment, contrast, and other design principles to place elements on the page.
• Typography - how you have formatted headers and body text to achieve a pleasing reading environment and focused your readers' attention on key elements of the text.
• Imagery - how you have used graphics and/or photographs to enhance key elements of the text.
• Pre-Press Elements - what technical choices you have made within the InDesign file to ensure it works with the specifications listed on your print order form.