Typography, or the art of type, is a fundamental element of graphic design. All fonts carry meaning. Choosing the right typeface for the job is as important as choosing the right image. Beyond the integral choice of which font, there are also the basics of what to do with the font once you've chosen it. Things like which member of the font family to use where (italic, oblique, bold, condensed, extended, thin, heavy etc). Then things like alignment, size, kearning, tracking, leading, glyphs, hyphenation, hanging indents, hanging punctuation. InDesign is a very robust tool for manipulating all these elements and settings.
Vertical spacing as referenced in our text isn't just about leading, but it's also about spacing between blocks of type - usually in the form of paragraphs - and things like keeping blocks of text together when they flow across pages and columns.
You can set spacing before, after, or before and after paragraphs. Before and after spacing is accumulative, that is, they get added together if they're both there, so it's best to use only one.
1/2 lb strawberries with stems
1/2 lb strawberriesto
Protein 0g
For some reason, a single click in this example defaults to .0625 inches, or 4.5 points. I can't find any way to change this, even though there are settings for default increments in the Preferences, this one isn't part of the set. The usual default is 1pt.
Spacing Between Paragraphs
Space Before A caveat about Space Before paragraphs: It won't add space before a paragraph at the top of text frame. To add space before a paragraph at the top of a text frame (or any text for that matter) use Text Frame Options, Inset Top.
Space After Probably a better and more reliable choice for spacing between paragraphs, unless you use the next one.
Space Between Puts a consistent amount of space between paragraphs of the same style. Overrides any Space Before or Space After settings. Combining this, you could have consistent spacing between paragraphs of the same style, but add more space (or less) between blocks of paragraphs with different styles. This is a new feature, and I think it's meant to reproduce the behavior of spacing between paragraphs in HTML.
There's a good Adobe Support article on formatting paragraphs here.
Fonts are kept by the operating system except Adobe Cloud fonts. A font is usually more than just a font, it's usually part of a Font Family, which includes different flavors of a given font name. We can think of the different properties of a Font as what we can manipulate in InDesign with the various panels. These include:
Since, as students, you're not entitled to Adobe Fonts, I'll demo this without your needing to follow along
Adboe Caslon Pro (6)
Font Formats
TRUETYPE (.TTF)
TrueType is a font format that was developed by Apple and was eventually licensed to Microsoft. They only require one file, but a separate file needs to be added for each member of the font family (regular, italic, bold, condensed, etc). TrueType fonts can be unreliable for publishing.
OPENTYPE (.OTF & .TTF)
OpenType is a newer font type built on the TrueType format that supports an expanded charater set (smallcaps, ligatures, glyphs, and alternative gylphs). OpenType fonts were created by Adobe and Microsoft, and offer cross-compatibility. They are ideal for graphic designers and desktop publishing software like InDesign, offering outline and bitmap data for the font in one file. It's recommended to use OpenType whenever possible.
Strawberries
Adobe Caslon Pro: Regular
S
Adobe Caslon Pro: Bold Italic
Note the letterform. It's a special swash form of the capital S character
You stand out...text and select it
This displays the swash cap Y, a swash off of the lower case w, and discretionary ligatures for st. Caslon has a bunch of ligatures - special designs for pairs and trios of certain letter combinations that are included in the OpenType font character set. 
Robust OpenType files can also contain special non-character based forms, or glyphs
...bowl of peas.
Finding Fonts in the Type Menu
Name Search: Just start typing in the search field in the Font Family field
Filter By Class: Nice visual interface for Sans Serif, Serif, Slab Serif, Script, Blackletter, Monospaced, Hand Written, Decorative, Weight, Width, Contrast (between thin horizontals and thick verticals), Upper & Lower Case or All Upper Case, Lining Figures (numbers all between baseline and cap height) and Oldstyle Figures (numbers with descenders and variable x-heights)
Favorites: You can pick'm with the UI so they're easy to find
Font Similarity: Sets the list below to similar fonts. New feature since 2017, kind of nice. Might be part of Adobe's new AI engine, Sensei.
Unlike Illustrator, this actually does it the right way and applies the stroke to the outside of the glyph, and not centered on the path. Those of you who've had my Illustration class will know how much this bugs me.
The recipe in our sample file uses a number, a diagonal slash, and another number to make a fraction. Not usually good form. Minion Pro has fraction glyphs for common fractions which look much better. It also has all the glyphs needed to make any fraction, like 1234/5678.
You can also create just about any fraction possible with Numerators and Denominators in the Minion (and Caslon) Pro fonts
It's all in the magic of Text Frame Options...
Nutritional Facts
Let's align a bunch of stuff with the Paragraph Panel's buttons, shortcut keys, and the Control Panel's buttons
A BITE OF DELIGHT
Heart-shaped fruit...
Chocolate-Covered Strawberries
You stand out...
Icons Defined
Align Left Align Center Align Right Justify With Last Line Aligned Left Justify With Last Line Aligned Center Justify With Last Line Aligned Right Justify All Lines Align Toward Spine Align Away From Spine
For as long as I have been a designer, there's been battles waged over Hanging Punctuation, To Use or Not To Use? Basically it means when you set a block of type to justified, should the hyphens, commas, periods, and other puncutation marks hang past the edge of the bounding box or stick inside.
Basically this, normal punctuation:
Versus this, hanging punctuation:
The function is burried in the Story panel! I suppose because you want it to affect the entire Story, and not just a text frame. Me, I would have put it in Text Frame Options...
Heart-shaped fruit...paragraph
Slick trick! Very old-timey feeling, harkens to the middle ages and illuminated manuscripts, where the first letter on a page was oversized and lavishly illustrated. Some books and magazines still use the idea, greatly simplified, where the first letter of a paragraph is larger then the paragraph text and spans 2 or more lines. I use it on my website just to show off my HTML chops (it's hard to code)
Note that the next button, Drop Cap One Or More Characters, jumps to 1. You can extend the number of characters to cover the whole word if you want.
Well-designed fonts have a lot of data in them about how far apart any two pairs of letters are from each other. These are called Kerning Pairs,
and they're a part of the font file that contains the font outlines. It's a tricky business, with no set rules about how to adjust these distances. It's done by the trained eye of the typeface designer(s). There's even a cool game online about guessing the best spacing.
InDesign, Illustrator, and most other applications that allow changing the distance between letters use two modes to do so. One is kerning
, which give spacing control over any pair of two letters, and tracking
, which gives spacing control over two or more letters.
Kerning UI
Tracking UI
This separation between kerning and tracking allows you to set custom kerning between several letter pairs in a single word, then apply tracking to the entire word and maintain the distince kerning relationships between letter pairs even though their pair spacing has changed from the non-tracked word.
A BITE OF DELIGHT
Strawberries
Sand
t
Hyphenation and line breaks at the end of each line of text in a paragraph affects readability and impact. InDesign has three ways to affect line breaks:
So, in theory, these three samples below should look different:
But, they don't. Or they often don't. Seems to work at 13pt. The Balanced Ragged lines seems to have an effect, but Single-line and Paragraph Composer look the same to me. And it makes no visible difference in our Strawberries example either. Too subtle for me. Download this file (composers.indd.zip) to check it out.
You can control the way words hyphenate (or not) thru the Paragraph panel, and control the number of letters that need to be together before a word will hyphenate. 'Nuff said, I think. Let's skip the settings bit.
Easy Peazy Lemon Squeezy, just hold the shift key when you press the Return or Enter key.
Tabs are weird, but useful. They don't exist in HTML, and it's a real drag that they don't.
.
Working With Tabs
Demo:
- Entering
- How they affect the current paragraph
- Specifying type
- Dragging or entering value for X
- Changing the type
- Repeating from flyout menu
- Reset to default
- Align on for decimal tabs
Easy until you want to control the hanging indent distance...
Probably have to scroll thru the panel to find it. It's big.
This is always annoying. You have to set the First Line Indent to a smaller negative value than than Left Indents positive value before you can set the Left Indent value to a smaller value. They should be the same number, but opposite signs (Left Indent postive, First Line Indent negative)
Hanging Indents and Bulleted Lists
The UI is confusing and sometimes hard to manipulate, but there's two other ways to affect the hanging bullets and numbers.
With the little triangles in the Tab UI
With the values in the Control Panel (and Paragraph Panel) for Indent and Tab Inset. These have to be set in the correct sequence as well, or you'll get an error message.
Check Shading
Strawberry swatch
It's partly about how the eye sees color, whether it's through transmitted light or reflected light, and about the limits of a given system to reproduce a range of colors, also know as a gamut. Matching the color you see on screen to the one that is printed falls under the pervue of color management
.
Color management is a way of translating the colors from one gamut (RGB) to another (CMYK). Every print device, like an offset printing press, an inkjet printer or a color laser printer, has its own gamut. If you use a professional printer for your project, work with them to match what you see on your screen to what gets printed. What you don't want is to show a client a project on your screen and then give them a final printed product that doesn't look like it did on your screen. The problem is usually that RGB images never look as good in CMYK as they did in RGB.
Creating A Viewing Environment for Color Management
The work environment you develop a project in can influence how you perceive colors. The kind of light bulbs you use and the color you paint your walls matters. If you plan on doing print production work, you should create an appropriate workspace for it. Some things to think about:
- View docs in an environment that provides a consistent light level and color tempurature (the right 5k lighbulbs)
- NO FLORESCENT LIGHTS! They're too cold and have irregular spectrums (that is, some color wavelengths of light are weaker they in daylight)
- View doc in a room with neutral-colored walls. Neutral gray is considered best.
- Remove colorful backgrounds from your desktop
- Vew document proofs* under real-world conditions which your audience is likely to face
- Pay attention to color proofs*
* Document, Pre-Press and Color proofs are provided by the printer you choose to do the printing work.
Here's a good YouTube video on Comprehensive Guide to Color Settings, Color Profiles and Proofing in Photoshop (17 minutes). Very detailed.
Make sure Menu View Display Performance High Quality Display is turned on.
InDesign works with what's called a Color Setting File (CSF). It contains data about color management polices and profiles. The default CSF is North America General Purpose 2
, which the book says is the best for beginners.
This is huge, complex, and more detailed than we can possibly go into. To me, the net net is work with your printer to get these setting right.
Device to Simulate: Dot Gain 20%
Dot Gain 20% lets you preview how the document would print in black and white
Work with your printer before you start designing, or have an existing relationship with one so you know the constraints and profile settings needed for the upcoming project. any printers will give youa Preflight file for InDesign.
Ad Profile.idpp
These setting will trigger warnings in InDesign when you do a preflight, and also place icons in the UI. One of the more common setting is Color Spaces and Modes Not Allowed
where yoy can explicitly call out any images that might be set to RGB, which can lead to trouble.
Color space not allowedline and highlight the
lineerror
The problem is with RGB color. There's a swatch of color for the line that isn't in CMYK colorspace, but RGB. Next, we'll convert it to a legal CMYK color.
There was a preflight error for a line with an RGB color. Let's change the swatch it's colored with to CMYK.
Green-Darkswatch
About 100 ways to pick colors in InDesign...
PANTONE is the leading manufacturer of specialty colored inks for the printing industry. When you print on an offest printing press, the standard is four colors, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black (CMYK). This has a limited color gamut, but you can extend it with PANTONE inks. Literally a can of ink you put in the printing press in addition to the four colors you've already got.
That ink goes on it's own station in the printer.
CMYK is the normal color space for print. It's even more unintuitive that RGB, which is a no no is print.
| Cyan (C) | 10 | % |
| Magenta (M) | 0 | % |
| Yellow (Y) | 40 | % |
| Black (K) | 0 | % |
This duplicates the selected color.
| Cyan (C) | 25 | % |
| Magenta (M) | 75 | % |
| Yellow (Y) | 0 | % |
| Black (K) | 0 | % |
| Cyan (C) | 90 | % |
| Magenta (M) | 70 | % |
| Yellow (Y) | 30 | % |
| Black (K) | 10 | % |
| Cyan (C) | 65 | % |
| Magenta (M) | 25 | % |
| Yellow (Y) | 100 | % |
| Black (K) | 10 | % |
We now have a Swatches panel with 5 new colors in it for use in our document.
About Spot and Process Colors
List of color spaces and spot color brands in the popup menu in the Color dialog
A spot color is a special premixed ink that is used instead of, or in addition to, CMYK process inks (or process color), and that requires its own printing plate on a printing press. Use spot color when few colors are specified and/or where color accuracy is critical. Spot color inks can accurately reproduce colors that are outside the gamut of process colors. The exact appearance of the printed spot color is determined by the combination of the ink as mixed by the commercial printer and the paper it’s printed on.
- For best results specify process colors using CMYK values printed in process color reference charts, such as those available from a commercial printer or online.
- The final color values of a process color are its values in CMYK, so if you specify a process color using RGB (or LAB, in InDesign), those color values are converted to CMYK when you print color separations. These conversions differ based on your color-management settings and document profile.
- Don’t specify a process color based on how it looks on your monitor, unless you are sure you have set up a color-management system properly and you understand its limitations for previewing color.
- Avoid using process colors in documents intended for digital devices, because CMYK has a smaller color gamut than that of a typical monitor.
Sometimes it’s practical to use process and spot inks in the same job. For example, you might use one spot ink to print the exact color of a company logo on the same pages of an annual report where photographs are reproduced using process color. You can also use a spot-color printing plate to apply a varnish over areas of a process color job. In both cases, your print job would use a total of five inks—four process inks and one spot ink or varnish.
It's all about the fill/stroke or foreground/background tabs, with a bit of variation when it comes to type.
Object Color
Text Color
The solid square tab is the fill color, the square donut is the stroke color for objects, signified by the dark grey square with the light gray border. The capital T if the fill color for text, and the red diagonal slash behind it is the stroke color, signified by the little light gray capital T.
Basic poke and grunt technique.
Urban Oasis Gardensand fill color it C=0 M=0 Y=40 K=0
$75and fill color it C=25 M=75 Y=0 K=0
Orchid Clinicand fill color it C=90 M=70 Y=30 K=0
This bit may have you wondering, why didn't this color the background like it did for the $75
and Urban Oasis Gardens
frames? It's because, despite appearances to the contrary, the words Orchid Clinic
are not acutally text, it has been converted to a vector object with Menu Type Create Outlines applied to some editable text. Because it's in outlines, it can't be edited anymore. I actually think this is needlessly confusing...
More poke and grunt.
If you are in the text tool, the color choice tabs reflect it with the capital T in the squares, or you can force the application of color to the text by clicking on the little T icon near the color squares
Tuesday • January 8 • 7—10 p.m.The Text form of the fill in the Swatchs panel should be showing. Set the fill color to C=90 M=70 Y=30 K=10
Grow. Maintain. Bloom.and set its fill color to C=90 M=70 Y=30 K=10
Urban Oasis Gardensand set its fill color to PANTONE 266 C
$75and give it a 1 Point stroke with a stroke color (the other tab) of of C=90 M=70 Y=30 K=10 and a fill color of C=65 M=25 Y=100 K=10 AND also
Any given color, like solid Cyan-
or C=90 M=50 Y=50 K=0-
or Black-
can be expressed as a tint of itself.
Tint's are expressed as a percentage of the original color, so you might end up with a set of colors something like this:
Resulting color swatch added. Note the 65% mark at the right of the C=25 M=75 Y=0 K=0
$75in it
A gradient is a transition from one or more colors to another over a distance. In the case of InDesign, it's a linear change from one color to the next, or a radial (circular) change from one color to the next. Thusly:
Linear
Gradient
Radial
Gradient
And, a gradient can be between more that just two colors:
A Note of Caution: Gradients are notoriously hard to print. Ask your printer about how well a gradient you used will print with their printing system, or test it yourself if your printing on a laser or inkjet printer. They tend to have a problem with what's called banding,
where gradients show distinct steps between colors instead of smooth transitions.
Grow. Maintain. Rebloom.
Pink/Yellowgradient we just made tp the text frame
Grow. Maintain. Rebloom.text frame still selected, choose the Gradient Swatch tool or type G
Result. Let's play with this for a while...
Sometime you need to organize. I like being organized.
Result
Orchid Clinic AdGroup. You'll know when by the line that appears below the folder icon
So far. Still a bit more to play with with Color Themes...
A new-ish feature that takes advantage of what used to be called Adobe Kuler, and now is called color.adobe.com, but built into the UI of InDesign
