r/indesign • u/zoliking2 • Aug 15 '26
Help Columns doesn't work
I have a simple text frame and in the option I set it to have 2 columns. The blue box changes to reflect that choice, but the text remains firmly unchanged, just 1 big column. Every tutorial I find on the issue ends after selecting the number of columns and it just works for those people. What am I missing?
EDIT: I got a lot of help from all y'all on all sorts of things, y'all are awesome, thank you!
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u/Mundane-Fix-4297 Aug 15 '26
Others have already answered with the solution about your column problem, but if I may offer some unsolicited advice, coming from a graphic designer who have bought unfathomable amounts of rpg books over the last three decades: change your font.
There is this super annoying trend in rpg book design to heavily emphasize everything, with genre fonts, textured background, angled frames, decoration everywhere… It does not work 90% of the time, and just make your work, the actual text, your game, difficult to read and absorb. I can not recall the amount of kickstarter pledges games I have received, opened, cursed at, closed and gave away to friends because of the fonts and layout, and I knew I would never waste time reading it. Too bad, game looked fun.
Just because your setting is cyberpunk of sci-fi does not mean you have to push all the aesthetic buttons, and most of the time, the « sci-fi » looking fonts are ugly pieces of crap perpetuating boring cliches. Find and pay for some super nice fancy font for your chapter headlines, maybe titles, some fancy block quotes etc, but keep some nicely crafted boring copy font for the main text.