Did you know that we have premium courses available? One of those courses is dedicated only to presentation boards, our “Master your presentation boards”, click here to find more info and to enroll!
This short tutorial is an extract from the presentation boards course, where you will learn the basics. Check out the complete tutorial and also watch the video tutorial here.
Final Presentation Board
Creating a new file
We opened InDesign, we clicked where it says to create new, we chose our size and if we wanted our file to be horizontal or vertical, we eliminated also de bleed margins.
If we want to change our file size, we can go to File > document setup, and we can change if we want it for web or print, or even add another page.
Importing main image
Remember we should adjust our base file according to our main image. We added our main image, but not in a jpeg format because we wanted to do some adjustments, so we imported the PSD file.
We just drag it to our file. We adjusted the margins and we clicked on frame fitting fill in proportionally.
Adjusting a floor plan
We do the same step, we drag in our floor plan in PSD format so we can edit it later. It is a very detailed floor plan, but it obviously doesn’t go along with the main image.
We right-click on top of the image to edit, so we choose the edit original and it will take us to Photoshop.
The first thing that we are going to do, is to erase the background, we leave it transparent. Click ctrl+s and back in InDesign, you can see the floor plan without the background, but something is still not right.
So we go back to the editing in photoshop, and we paint the background to a similar blue as the one in the main image, so we can edit the floor plan accordingly.
We selected all of the text and we rasterize it and then we merged the layers so we can easily change the colors all at once. Be careful when rasterizing the text, once you do this you can’t edit it or write another thing.
Pressing Ctrl + I, you can change everything to white, but if it is not white enough you can adjust the hue/Saturation and turn it white.
We erased some of the textures we had added before, to see how it was turning out and we were liking the outcome. We also turned all of the top view trees to white and then saving the floor plan we went back to InDesign to see how it looked with the main image.
Adding more details
Now, we are going to add some more details, we looked at our main photoshop sketch, we see that we have text, a floor plan, and also some guidelines.
We dragged one of the guides to make the same division as in our sketch. We dragged one guide to the middle, another one to where the roof stops, and another one to have three equal spaces.
We start organizing our presentation board. So we want the floor plan to be in the right-hand top corner, we resized it, and also we used the frame fitting.
We created also a text file, we named it a little bit different, why? To avoid being common and explaining the obvious. So if you were in a competition about the market plaza, everyone is going to use the “market plaza” title, so naming your presentation board to catch the eye, or whatever your main image is doing.
We saw that the title position worked really well, then we added the concept text, if you have a lot of text, avoid using a condensed font. Check out some font suggestions that every architect should be using and the correct size here.
We then imported the section, we did the same process as the floor plan and edit it out so it could be all white lines.
It looked very interesting, but we also tried to re-size it and made it a wide section. It does look interesting and it emphasizes the diagonals of the main image roof.
Final Image
What did you think of the final image of the presentation board? Remember that in order to create a simple but effective presentation board, you need to take this into consideration:
- Select wisely your main image
- Choose a simple but nice sky
- Adjust other plans to the main image
- Text is very important
Mastering your presentation boards
In this course you will understand and learn how to create a presentation board that can communicate effectively the message of the architecture that is being portrayed.
