Recreating A Layout

What I knew?
I knew that print publications like magazines had a bleed because industrial printers that print out large amounts of magazines at a fast pace aren't able to be exactly accurate. The bleed means that the ink printed is slightly larger than the paper itself so that the colour or picture goes right to the edge of the publications. 
I was aware that an affective convention of magazine layout is to put interesting or intriguing information as a large pull quote as the readers eye will naturally be drawn to this part of the document, making them want to keep on reading.

What was the task?
As a task, the challenge was to choose a double page spread from a magazine and copy it as identically as possible using InDesign. I chose a double page spread on The Dark Knight Rises that has a combination of large titles, shapes, columns of text and a large image that is printed between both of the pages.

What do I know now?
To be able to recreate the magazine spread I had to use tools I hadn't previously used in InDesign. Usually when using InDesign I work on a single page document but this time the canvas was different with a line down the middle showing the two sides of the double page spread. 
When setting up the canvas I used the bleed option for the first time so that if the document was to be printed the images would go right to the edge of the page and look just how the original magazine looked. I learnt how to create separate columns for text as I had to create 4 columns, 2 smaller and 2 larger, for the text. I used place holder text to fill the columns and used the red cross button to drag the place holder text so that it was feed through to the next column.
So that everything was placed correctly I made different layers for each part of the document eg. background, title, body text, images. This meant that when I used the polygon tool to create my arrow shapes I was able to put them in a layer behind the text so it would be neat and the same as the original publication.
To make the arrows I had to use the polygon tool as my way of drawing. As the polygon tool only allows you to draw simple, basic shapes I had to draw a triangle and put them together. So InDesign would treat the two seperate shapes as one I learnt the shortcut Cmd+G to group the shapes so any adjustments I made would be made to both of the shapes.