This article provides a step-by-step guide to stylizing text in InDesign, offering insights into creating and modifying paragraph styles, aligning text to a baseline grid, and adding images to a profile page. It serves as a useful resource for anyone keen on enhancing their skills in InDesign, particularly in formatting text and images to create professional and visually appealing documents.
Key Insights
- The article details a process of stylizing text in InDesign, starting with changing the text font and size, aligning the text to a baseline grid, and saving these settings as a default paragraph style for future use.
- The guide also demonstrates how to create and modify paragraph styles, allowing users to quickly apply consistent formatting across a document. It covers adding a title above the text, increasing its size, and changing its character to bold.
- Aside from text, the article explains how to integrate images into a profile page, ensuring they are proportionally filled and well-aligned with the text. It also highlights the importance of saving changes and checking the impact of a style modification on other elements of the document.
Note: These materials are provided to give prospective students a sense of how we structure our class exercises and supplementary materials. During the course, you will get access to the accompanying class files, live instructor demonstrations, and hands-on instruction.
In this video, we're going to be stylizing our text and the remainder of our firm profile page. Let's work with this text first.
To do so, we'll double click and let's hit CTRL A. With this text selected now, let's stylize it. We'll first start by changing the text font and font size. We'll select Chivo and let's simply select Chivo Regular.
Next, we'll increase the size up from 12 points to 13 points. And finally, we'll go into our properties and align it to our baseline grid. We'll also uncheck hyphenate.
And this right here, this feels like a good base text for us. This is something that we can use on most of our pages. It's an appropriate size.
It's stylized to Chivo and Regular. And so rather than repeating this step each time where we select our font and we adjust the size, it would be a lot easier to simply save this as our default. Well, in InDesign, we can do this within our properties panel.
And right under characters, we'll see that we have paragraph styles and character styles. Let's work with paragraph styles. Essentially, our basic paragraph is what the default font is within InDesign for our project.
In this case, it says basic paragraph plus because it's a modification of the basic paragraph. However, we've determined that this text here matches the basic paragraph settings that we want. Therefore, we should simply replace our basic paragraph with this text.
To do this, we can go down right below basic paragraph and click redefine style. From here, we now have this text added as our basic paragraph and we can make modifications in the future. Next, let's create a title right above this text.
To do this, we'll click right at the top and let's hit ENTER and simply add a line right above it. In this case, we're going to type out about Parks and Dwell. And next, let's stylize this as though it's a title.
We'll stick with Chivo. However, let's bump the size up just a little bit. We'll change it to 15 points and let's add a little bit of space after.
Finally, let's also change our character Chivo and we're going to make it bold. If we click outside, we can see what this looks like and this looks like a good title. It's a little more defined than the text below.
So, let's now create an additional paragraph style by selecting this text right here and with this text selected, we're going to create a new style. As we can see here, it's basic paragraph plus because it's a little bit different from our basic paragraph. Instead, we want a new style so we're going to click the plus button and we're going on the right side below and now we have paragraph style one.
So, let's rename this in text title and hit ENTER. Here, we now have our title defined and we can reuse this in the future. If we click the drop down, we can change this from basic paragraph or we can change it to in text title.
As we can see, when we continue to fill up these pages, this will be very helpful to saving time and keeping things consistent. Additionally, if we also want to see the modifications for this and see if there's a space in here or if it's part of the character settings, we can see the characters revealed by going to type and we're going to go to show hidden characters. As we can see here, we'll be able to then identify with hidden characters where there's paragraphs and in this case, between the two paragraphs here, we actually have a paragraph.
It's not part of the paragraph styling, it was just an extra enter. So, let's make a modification to this paragraph styling holding shift and modifying all of it and from here, we're going to change our basic paragraph and we're going to change the styling of the paragraph with a space after. From here, we can see again that we've deviated from basic paragraph but we want this to stay as basic paragraph.
So, we're going to again redefine the style by clicking the icon below. Now, basic paragraph has changed. However, once we've made this change, it'll be helpful to have this too because anything redefined as basic paragraph may also be changed.
For instance, if we look up here to submitted to all of this text and check the text, we'll see that this was defined as basic paragraph as well since it met the same modifications. So, let's go back and we'll get rid of these extra spaces and to add this to the second line, I'll hold shift and hit ENTER and from here, we need to now readjust this a bit. We'll utilize our selection tool and let's simply stretch it up there.
Keep in mind that anytime you're redefining a style such as this, it's going to be important to see if it affects other elements of the style. So, now that we can see that the paragraphs have some space, let's hide the hidden characters. Going to type, hide hidden characters and remember that that hidden characters is available to you to sometimes see a little bit more about what's going on with your text.
Alright, to finish this page now, let's add an image here into our firm profile page. We'll go to our CC libraries and feel free to add whatever image you'd prefer. In this case, I'm going to add this image.
I'll click and drag it in, right clicking and selecting fill frame proportionally and if we hit W on the keyboard, we can see what this looks like. I might stretch this a little bit to the right to fill up a bit more of the space so they're consistent and I think I like the look of that better. Feel free to modify yours however you'd prefer and we've now finished the left page of our firm profile.
Well done. Let's now save our work hitting CTRL S on the keyboard to save and in the next video, we're going to begin working on our second page of firm profile. See you there.