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Lesson Info
Class Introduction
We are going to talk about styles in InDesign. And first I'm going to tell you what that is and why we care about styles in InDesign and anybody that knows me knows that I love styles. And once you get a grasp on them, I hope you'll love styles too. Styles or style sheets, you might hear that terminology floating around and basically what styles does for you is it allows you to do anything that you've done to text and some objects in your document that you feel like you're doing over and over again and you need to be consistent throughout your document. You can set up a style so that that information is there and you don't have to keep inputting it. If you've seen any other courses that I've done, there's a lot of going into text and telling it what size the text is and what color. And you know the paragraph settings, if it's justified, if there's space afterwards. That's a lot of little minutia to deal with and have to put all that information in. But the great thing is once you do al...
l that, you can save it as a style so that when you want another paragraph, for instance, to look the same, then we can just click a button and it happens. So styles give you consistency, which is great. It also gives you a quick way to update things because if anybody has ever worked with clients, we know that they come back at the last minute usually and make changes. And if they come back and decide that all looks great but I want all your fonts to be two points larger than they are now, you have to change it throughout. And if you've used styles then you can do it in one spot and everything kind of flows. So that's what we're going to learn. We're going to learn how to manage those styles, create those styles, how they work with each other, and how to basically speed up your workflow and also make sure that everything that you create is consistent. So before I start showing you the how, let's actually show the what. So what is it that we're actually doing? So I'm going to actually open up a file here and we're going to look at it unstyled, and I'm just going to show you with a click of a couple of buttons, and I'm not going to tell you what I'm doing or how. I'm just going to show you how quickly it can be styled once your styles are set up, just to give you an idea of what styles can do for you. So I've got this newsletter here and there's not a lot of style to it. In fact, I've got this page here and it's not styled. My other pages are all styled just fine but this one I just have lots of text. I've got a header but everything looks kind of the same as does the caption. And then I've got what I want to be a sidebar, but it just kind of looks like a jumble of text kind of floating there. But what I want is I want to add some color to it. I want to add some styling to it. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to come up to this little text frame that's here. And again, I'm not going to go over what I'm doing just yet. I just want to show you how quickly, when you have styles, you can bring in text and then style it out really quickly. So I'm just going to grab this one and I'm going to...whoops. I am going to fix that. So now I've got a header. And again, I'm just showing you how quickly we can do that. I'm going to click on this button down here. And I got to open up my Object Styles panel here. Let's give this guy floating over here and I am going to just make this a sidebar through the magic of clicking. So there I have that page already set up. And that's because I had styles. I just had to click two things in my different styles and suddenly I have a headline, I have some text. I can come down here and I need to make this... I'm going to make that caption style as well so now I have a separate style for my caption down there. So I was able to style this page that was just text laid on a page. Yeah, I had the photos already, but the text, I was able to just put that in there, style it just by clicking a couple buttons. So we did that through setting up these styles. And I know when you look at these panels that are here, we've got Paragraphs Styles and Object Styles open right now, that's a lot of stuff but, actually, we're going to step through... just walk through step by step and create styles and again, base them on other styles. We're going to nest them together. So things like when I did this, I only clicked one button and somehow I ended up with a header and also text underneath it. So I ended up with two styles by clicking one button so we're going to actually see how to do that as well. So again the styles means that I don't have to come in here and select this headline and then tell it that it needs to be railway, extra bold, 26 point, it's in a purple color. I don't need to do that every time. I do it once and I save it as a style and then I can just go through each little page, I can just jump to another page, and if this is not styled in any way, I can just click Article Headers and, boom, it suddenly changes the text. It went across both columns. All that is baked into that style. So we're going to back out of this now and we're going to actually just start with a completely blank page. And then once I go over the little pieces that we use for the styles, and we're starting with Text Styles, and we'll move into the second segment into Object Styles and Table Styles. But right now with Text Styles, once I do that and once we start getting the basis how that works I'm going to go through kind of my workflow of how I create a style, build a style on it. And so when I'm starting from scratch, what my thought process is when I am creating these styles and how to base them on them so that we don't end up with just a bunch of styles that aren't related in any way and you end up spending more time maintaining your styles and that I see a lot. And if you're just starting out in InDesign and you haven't learned styles, it's great that you're learning them today. And also if you've been using InDesign for a long time but styles have bothered you, annoyed you, befuddled you, whatever, wanted to make you throw your computer across the room, I get it. It's hard to get a handle on it first but once you see how easy it really is and how much frustration it's going to save you, I hope you'll like them as much as I do. I get files from designers that have been working in the industry 30, 40 years and they still don't use styles properly as much as I try, and so... but it's just one of those things where once you see the magic of it, you'll realize that you should be using these.
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Ratings and Reviews
user-8d447e
Lots of good information to make using InDesign efficiently. Thank you for this!
a Creativelive Student
Another amazing class Erica. I'm going to have to purchase the one because it's so much cool content I didn't know.
DOlores RUsso
You are the consummate online teacher! And as you know, teaching teachers is the worst ever...and I can I honestly say (as a photoshop teacher) , I love how you are so organized and you just keep going. We are focused!
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