Today I would like to share my work on the editorial redesign of the Disney book, The Arts of Toy Story 4, into Korean.
First of all, I would let you know, some of the images of the book used in this article that all rights are reserved by Disney Enterprises, Inc. and Pixar Animation Studios.
I was really happy when I got this project, Toy Story 4 because it’s one of my favourite Disney movies. It was two months before the movie release, so I was lucky to see the glimpse of the movie from the book and could guess what would happen in Toy Story 4. Also, I learnt a lot about how efficiently Disney works for print. Throughout this article, I am going to share three tips that I’ve learnt which would help editorial design work quicker and more efficiently.
The editor, Ji Eun, instructed me that I should not change any master layout design except the fonts formats in Korean during the kick-off meeting. When I saw the original InDesign file received from Disney, it was well organized with all contents, especially, Character Styles and Paragraph Styles.
A character style is a collection of character formatting attributes that can be applied to text in a single step. A paragraph style includes both character and paragraph formatting attributes and can be applied to a paragraph or range of paragraphs. — Adobe InDesign User Guide
Using those two style sheets provides many benefits, especially with two benefits I love the most.
Two benefits
The first benefit is once specifying the formatting attributes as Character Styles or Paragraph Styles, it is easy to apply all formats to the other text layers (character or paragraph) automatically. This means that I do not have to touch individual format such as font size, leading, kerning, tracking, colour, hyphenation, bullet, etc. By doing so I could keep the design consistent in the entire documents.
Of course, I could change each character or each paragraph without the style sheet. However, for example, suppose that if there are 100 captions as the image above which should have the same 8 formats such as colour, font family, font style, font size, leading, tracking, alignment and indent, we have to click more than 800 times. It will be a very time-consuming and tedious work. On the other hand, if we have the caption style in the Paragraph Styles panel like the image above, we can just select all captions and click the caption style, then 100 caption layers will be updated with the caption style at once. Save your time and save your index finger.
2. Easily changing the formats of a style to all text (or paragraph) which was already specified
The second benefit is once you specify the same style, you can easily update the formats of a style to all text (or paragraph).
Let’s continue the example above again. There are 100 captions which have the same caption style and we have to change the font style (font-weight) of those captions from bold to light. To do this, double click a caption style¹ in the paragraph panel, and go to Basic Character Formats², and change the font style (font-weight)³˜⁴ from bold to light and click the OK⁵ button. We only need to click 5 times to change the 100 captions.
Why do I need a style sheet
After finishing the design work, the design might be changed and it happens frequently. For example, a client wants to change the primary colour or you find it better increasing the leading value for readability. In this project, I should change the Basic Character Formats in the style sheet for translating English into Korean. Let me explain more on how I worked with a style sheet in the real project.
Process
As you already saw, I displayed panels, Character, Paragraph, Character Styles and Paragraph Styles in InDesign like the images below. In this way, I could immediately get the text or paragraph styles and formats.
For example, when I click the middle of the paragraph like the image above, I could find that this paragraph was applied with the TS4 — Extended Caption Indent style and it was highlighted with the yellow star in the Paragraph style panel.
Also, you must pay attention to each paragraph because each paragraph might have different styles even if they are in the same layer.
The first paragraph had a TS4-Extended Caption style.
However, the second paragraph had a TS4-Extended Caption Indent style. Thus, I had to paste each paragraph in Korean separately so that it would not lose their own style.
2. Change the font format which supports Korean in paragraph styles
I have already explained this step briefly above. However, in the real project, it was not quite simple. I had to examine more on the Paragraph Styles.
For example, in the TS4 — Extended Caption Indent style was based on the TS4 — Extended Caption like the red rectangle above. That means it has an attribute TS4 — Extended Caption, so I had to change the formattings in the TS4 — Extended Caption style.
As you can see from the image above, the TS4 — Extended Caption style isn’t based on any other Paragraph Style (in the red rectangle). So I changed the individual formats of the TS4 — Extended Caption style to update Korean font like the image below.
I changed formats of the TS4 — Extended Caption style to NanumBarunpen(나눔바른펜) font, font style to regular, size to 7.3 pt and leading to 16pt.
Here is the result.
People typically say technology has made us lazy. But I don’t totally agree with that. Our laziness was the best motivation to bring the development of technology to our life and I believe one of the best inventions is the copy and paste, command(control) + c/v. Anyway, going back to the InDesign App, there is a time-saving function, Find/change which I use frequently.
As you can see from the images above, the name, Mara MacMahon, was the same and mentioned frequently in the entire documents. In this case, I used a Find/Change function to change it from English to Korean. Here are the steps.
① Copy the words that I wanted to change.
②~③ Open the Find/Change panel
④ Paste the words that I copied from step ①
⑤ Type or paste the words that I wanted to put in
⑥ Select All Documents
⑦ Click the Change All button
⑧ Click the Done button, and then the pop-up window will appear
⑨ Click the OK button
This Find/change can apply to not only text but also many search options such as GREP, Glyph, Object. You can find more information about this function from the link below.
One of the biggest challenges was to redesign the handwriting contents translating in Korean. It was a JPG image file with other drawings, so I couldn’t edit the image directly in InDesign.
I discussed with the editor and we came up with three options.
Option 1: Add a small text caption at the end of the image and do not make any changes on the other images. we tried this option (see the image below), but it was hard to read with low readability.
Option 2: Remove the handwriting text area in English with Photoshop and add Korean instead. This result would bring us the best readability, however, both the editor and myself were not happy with this option. It was because we thought the handwriting in English was a part of the artwork so we wanted to keep it. Also, this option would take much longer time, that means the agent had to spend more budget.
✅ Option 3: Juxtapose English with Korean: we decided to use this option even if it may look a bit dense in some pages. With this option, it was important to put both English and Korean handwriting in harmony. To do this, I used the Nanum Pen Script(나눔손글씨) font which is the handwriting font and picked the same colour with the Eyedropper tool from the English handwriting.
How to set the Eyedropper tool
① Make sure there is no other layer above the image which has the fill and stroke attributes you want to sample
?Problem
At first, I couldn’t pick the colour that I wanted from the image. It was because there was a transparent layer on the image. From the image as an example, I wanted to pick a yellow colour in the yellow rectangle layer, but there was an invisible layer which has a green colour with opacity 0%.
Let’s see what happens.
The text colour was changed to green.
When I copied the fill colour using Eyedropper in the overlayed yellow rectangle, the position of the transparent rectangle which has a green colour was actually picked so the text layer was changed to green and not yellow. However, when I copied the left side of the yellow rectangle, the text layer colour was changed to yellow because the position wasn’t as part of the transparent green rectangle.
? Solution
Hide the toggles visibility above the layer you want to get a sample from.
② Set Eyedropper options
?Problem
In this case, I wanted to get a fill colour only without copying any other attributes from the artwork image. If you apply all attributes from the Eyedropper options, the text layer you are applying to will disappear like the image below.
? Solution
So I set the Eyedropper options like the image below to get a fill colour only.
③ Apply colours to Korean layer using the Eyedropper
Click the Eyedropper tool or press command + I (for mac), and then the mouse pointer will be changed to the “select mode”, the first icon from the image below.
And click on the colour that you wanted to get and then the mouse pointer will be changed to the “loaded to object” and let you know the colour was loaded.
Lastly, when you hover on the text that you wanted to make a change, the mouse pointer will change like the third icon below. Keep in mind that there is the Eyedropper tool in Photoshop and Illustrator too but those icons and functions are a bit different.
? Resources
Free fonts in Korean which I used in this project
Sandoll Childfundkorea(산돌초록우산어린이체)
? A shout-out to Naver, Sandoll and Child fund Korea for making this great open source font. ?
? Note
Actually, when I worked on this project, I set the language of the InDesign App to Korean. However, when I was writing this article, I set the language of the InDesign App to English to explain it better.
© Copyright of the book: The Art of Toy Story 4
Copyright ⓒ 2019 by Disney Enterprises, Inc. and Pixar Animation Studios. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher. First Published in English by Chronicle Books LLC, San Francisco, Califonia. Manufactured in Korea
? Any questions or feedback
I would love to hear your feedback on how I can make this article better for you. Please leave your comments below or through my Twitter.
? That’s all for now
