#SpacingOUT

Today, my mother, who majored in graphic design in college, helped me with my project a LOT!!! She gave me pointers on group text boxes together and critiqued what I have so far. She went especially in depth into my cover picture, which I was kind of upset because I thought my picture was PERFECTION, but she believes I need to take it again. Low-key angry and don't want to, but I should listen to the professional. It pains me to admit that I actually don't know as much as she does.

Anyway, the thing she wanted to help me out with was my Table of Contents. The first time she saw it, she complemented my layout, but said we could work on the spacing of some of the line. Well, today we did just that! Even though it took approximately an hour an a half we finally figured out the issues I was getting with the text boxes I had!

Before I dive deeper into that, here's a little before-and-after of my Table of Contents:

Before

After

As you can see, I lined up things like my article titles, article descriptions, the space between the first three articles and the last three, AND I even got rid of the white space above where it says "Table of Contents"!!! All this came from the help of my mother! Now onto the issues I had and how we fixed them.

Before, I had each little text in its own text box. So, when I tried to bring one box closer to the other, the stationary box would disappear! I had to settle for as close as it could go. But then, my mom found out my method and COMPLETELY changed it. She said it was because they were all in individual text boxes, so she showed me how to group the boxes together and move one text to another box and delete the old text box. She told me, "the less text boxes you have, the better" which should be the golden rule because man was she right! I went from having 14 text boxes to 6 text boxes!!! It became so much easier to move everything around after that!

Next, she showed me how to align things better! I can't believe I didn't know this but if you use the arrow keys on the computer instead of dragging the mouse on the keypad, it becomes so much more precise! And if you want to take it further, you can zoom in on the thing you are trying to move around and use the arrow keys for EVEN MORE precision!!!

But, there was one thing that was troubling her that we could not figure out. It was how to space a paragraph on Pages. She knew how to do it on Microsoft's Word, but Pages has updated itself over the past 20 years, so she was at a lost, and so was I. So we YouTubed how to do it...no help. We tried the Apple Help site...again, no help. Then it hit her: it was the line spacing, not paragraph spacing! I had the line spacing on 1.0 (the standard spacing), but to make it seem more professional, we changed it to 1.2 spacing. Trust me, even though it's a small change, it made a HUGE difference!!!

I'm so grateful that my mom helped me out with this! Like I said, everything is working out right now! Fingers-crossed that nothing starts to go downhill from here! But, I have a positive mindset and truly believe nothing will happen! That's all for now! Talk to you guys soon! Thanks again, Mom!!!😘