Good Baseline layout for Interview page

[SebastiaoV]

Hi guys,

I am designing an Interview (questions and answers page) in a magazine. I would like know how to have nice even height spaces separation between the questions and the answers.

SAMPLE 1

All text fitted on baseline grid

SAMPLE 2

Question text not fitted on baseline grid. Answer text on baseline grid.

just in case the image don't read well this is the text there

Answer text is 

10 points serif / 13,5 pt leading

Question text

9 point bold sans / 11,5 leading

If i fit everything to a baseline the question text leading is too open. If i take the question text out of the baseline grid if will generate uneven spaces between questions and answer.

Is the any way to solve of improve this design with baseline grids?

Thanks for your help 😉

[Randy Hagan]

Forget designing to baseline. As you see, it cheats your leading grid to get your text to "line up."

You want to design a given Space After: paragraph style value (you set that under the Indents and Spacing section as you define your paragraph styles) to get even spacing and maintain your leading. If you have multi-paragraph question/answers, create new style(s) with your designated Space After: paragraph style value named [question and/or answer paragraph style] Last.

Hope this helps. If it doesn't, just let me know here and I'll get an email asking me to respond to your questions. But by my experience, this should work well for you as you do quick InDesign layouts on the fly for your Q&A sections.

[SebastiaoV]

Thanks! Thats is a good tip!

By the way, how you solve the tip to finish the text alignment at top and bottom in the same line if you don't have baseline grid activated?

[Randy Hagan · Accepted solution]

You may or may not like this, but by manually doing the math to ensure your leading grid is maintained. This won't work with your paragraph styles in the original post, because each is a body type with a different leading set per line (But if you adjust the type values -- say, Question Text of 10.5/11.5, and Answer Text of 10/11.5 -- it'd line up like you'd like ...).

But if we could determine a consistent minimum leading value, the key is designing slugs of larger, display type in multiples of that minimum leading value. Let's use the example below, starting with three columns of type using a Body Copy style of Minion Pro, set at 12 points on a 13.5 point line (12/13.5).

Now we'll create a contrasting Question Text, set at Helvetica Bold Condensed, set 12.5/13.5. The type looks different, but the leading remains the same. So all the lines, well, line up.

Let's make it harder. We want to enter a subhed in the text of, say, 18/19.5. A leading value of 19.5 is like 7.5 points short of two lines (13.5 X 2 = 27; 27 – 19.5 = 7.5). So we create a new 1-Line Subhed style with 7.5 points of extra space. If we use 4 points of space before and 3.5 points of space after the subhed style, everything still lines up like the example below.

But dang it! One subhed is too long. It breaks across two lines, so it's best if we create one more style. Two lines of subhed set like we did before would fill a slug of 39 points. We need it to equal 40.5 points to take up as much space as three lines of type, or 54 points to take up four lines of leading grid. Adding 8 points above and 7 points space after in our 2-Line Subhed style lines everything up just like we had with only body type, because we maintained the leading grid.

If the variation between subhed spaces is too much, you could mitigate the difference to have each of the subheds take up an extra  line/13.5 points of space to maintain the leading grid. Also note that in the last illustration, the paragraph circled above the two-line subhed takes up one less line. I did that by cheating the character width of that one paragraph to 99% character width to get rid of that one-word orphaned last line. There are lots of tricks we can apply to get copy to fit the way we want it to ...

Hope this helps.

By the way, if my first response and/or this response answered your question, could you please mark it as answered? That way, the moderators can archive it so it'll be helpful for other members who are having similar issues.

[Scott Falkner]

Your questions and answers are using inconsistent leading. Without the grid you will never get the baselines to align. With the grid the space between paragraphs will change as needed to honour the grid, which will override your desired spacing.

The solution is to use the same leading for questions and answers. Set your paragraph spacing to be one line of lead or one half line of lead. If one half line, then either forget the baseline grid (since you won’t need it) or set the grid to be half a line of lead.

[Barb Binder]

Baseline grid alignment always comes down to simple math. You set the grid to your body text leading, select all and snap everything to the grid.

For your Q&A, if you want to use a baseline grid, the Qs and the As should have the same leading.

As for the spacing around the paragraphs, you have the option of adding one whole grid line, or two, or three, etc. You might try two above the question and one above the answer to visually group them together.