One of the most common files that I work with at Moen Incorporated are Instruction Sheets (INS Sheets). Not only do I need to update the art within each step, but I also need to manage the layout of the text as well.
It is also not uncommon to re-design an INS sheet once we have translations. The reason being that I have a proof ready with English place holder text, but French & Spanish often take up more space than the English counter-part. In this case I will need to accommodate for unexpectedly larger text boxes.
In this case a custom INS sheet was required. We generally have templates that we can fall back upon, but in this case it needed to fit a 11" x 8.5" sheet of paper. The reason being that the part that is being shipped out is very small and thus the packaging was equally as small.
Below are some of the tactics that I incorporate into all of my INS sheets.
1. All of our INS sheets feature certain information on the cover. In this case there was extra content that needed to be added and from that there was less room than usual. I utilize the inset padding of each textbox to ensure that the spacing for them is uniform.
2. Some of the products feature a flexible supply line that has a pattern on them. In this case, to replicate the pattern and keep the hoses flexible in the design I utilize paths with multiple strokes. For these hoses I use a path with three different strokes: one white stroke for the background, one stroke for the black outline, and another stroke containing the pattern.
3. As with all of my files I incorporate paragraph styles. I have numerous paragraph styles to fit each instance of text. In this case the list style is "based on" the standard text style. With this I can easily change the text characteristics for one style and it mirrored across all of the other styles.
4. The parts list also features a paragraph style, but in this case the paragraph style also utilizes GREP styles. With these I no longer need to manually bold the letter identifies. Instead, the paragraph style automatically un-bolds the text after a tab.
5. Along with paragraph styles I also use character styles. I generally use them to bold the parts' letter identifier, but in this case it is used to bold important text.
6. When I first ran across the warranty page it seemed fine. Until I shrunk the text or modified the text box sizes. It was then that I found numerous hard line breaks. This was generally done to prevent hypenation in the text. Instead, I removed all of the hard breaks and simply set the text to not-hyphenate. Now the text is easily modifiable.
