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Editorial

Check the guidelines, workflows, and templates for editorial design projects (guides, reports, kits, etc), including multilingual

On this page:

1. Note for content providers

Given the involvement of a third party (the print), editorial design requires of collaborative creative work to be successful and avoid pitfalls.

If you are a content provider, or content creator, or project coordinator working on an editorial project (guide, kit, report, etc), read the Working with designers guide before contacting your designer.

The same note applies to editorial work to be published online (generally as a PDF).

2. Guidelines for designers

Editorial design combines compositions, editorial layout, and creative typography in order to create a newspaper/magazine layout.

The following are some guidelines for editorial design commonly used at OCASI:

  • Know your audience first
  • Know well your budget, deadline, technical, and/or content constraints
  • Create a front cover to draw attention
  • Add a table of contents
  • Design section breaks
  • Create a back cover (toned down or contrasted compared against front cover)
  • Work with a grid and keep in mind content size
  • Use typographical hierarchy and a modular scale
  • Work with wide white spaces as much as you can
  • Be consistent with all your design elements

The same guidelines apply to editorial work for the web (usually published as a PDF).

Software

As a good practice, it is recommended to work with Adobe InDesign as your editorial software of choice since this is its specific purpose.

Other software, such as Adobe Illustrator could get some of the job done, but it is not designed for editorial work. Do not use Adobe Photoshop.

Hyperlinks are sometimes part of the content. Given that links are not clickable on a printed paper, the following are some best practices:

Shorten links by removing the http://www. part or similar. For example:

  • do not use https://www.ocasi.org
  • use ocasi.org

If available, use short and user friendly URLs with a few words:

  • avoid long URLs, such as ocasi.org/ocasi-organizes-youth-presentation-uncrc-representative
  • for example, use ocasi.org/membership or ocasi.org/ocasi-members

Long URLs

Long URLs are not friendly on paper, especially if they contain multiple numerals and symbols. Instead, use a URL shortener to add short links:

  • do not use https://ocasi.org/ocasi-organizes-youth-presentation-uncrc-representative
  • use bit.ly/youth-reps
  • do not use https://ocasi.org/ocasi-town-hall-%C2%A0new%C2%A0pathway%C2%A0-permanent-residence
  • use bit.ly/path-pr

Additionally, it is a good practice to custom your short links instead of using the default short links provided by the URL shortener service. For example,

  • do not use https://bit.ly/3wQXwaX
  • use bit.ly/215-children

You can work with a free URL shortener such as bit.ly

4. Multilingual projects

About multilingual workflow

If you are a content coordinator and need multilingual design work, you may plan your work in advance. To do so:

For designers, you may:

About time

Keep in mind that some languages may take longer to work with because:

  • some scripts need to be double checked carefully with content translators due their characteristics and potential issues (for example, Arabic or Tamil)
  • some languages take more space and extra adjustments in the layout are required (for example, French)

Supported languages

OCASI works with print and web multilingual projects that have supported the following languages:

  • Left-to-right (LTR): Amharic, Armenian, Bangla (Bengali), Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Creole (Haitian), Croatian, English, French, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Kurmanji, Nepali, Oromo, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Tagalog (Filipino), Thai, Tigrinya, Twi, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese
  • Right-to-left (RTL): Arabic, Dari, Farsi, Pashto, Punjabi, Sinhala, Sorani, Tamil, and Urdu

5. Templates for designers

You can download sample artworks created with InDesign (CC version) from the print assets webpage.

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