Class 11

Lessons Learned

Master/Parent Pages

Styles

NEVER DO THIS:

Always do this:

Remember that legibility is more important than good looks!

No paragraph separation

No separation can lead to incorrect reading

Use:

Spaced paragraphs

Space between

Indented paragraph

Indented or outdented first lines

Over indented paragraph

(avoid over-indenting paragrahs)

First Initial Capped paragraph

First initial caps (but this can often break up the text too much, and you read "MOBDI" when you shouldn't)

Frist Init Cap drop-line

Here's a trick: Use first initial cap on two lines with a shift-return to create a large cap on the first line

Top vs bottom heavy

Rule of thumb: Margins at the bottom are usually larger than at the top

Text box

Make text boxes with inset options and strokes rather than putting a text box in front of a rectangle

Setting vertical align to center is helpful also, but sometimes doesn't quite do the centering it should. If it looks off-center, use Align: Top and Inset Top

Avoid This:

Good Ideas

Pro Tips

Fundamental Concepts

Bullets

Adjusting Bullets

The importance of using Zoom

Demo document

Bad Alignment Good alignment

Chapter/Lesson 08: Working With Color

Background frame
filled with color
Line with color
applied to stroke
Text frame with
linear gradient
Graphics frame
with stroke
Text with PANTONE
color fill
Text with stroke
and fill

Lesson08.zip

Managing Color

The Need For Color Management

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:

* 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.

Displaying Images At Full Resolution

Make sure Menu View Display Performance High Quality Display is turned on.

Specifying Color Settings in InDesign

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.

Proofing Colors Onscreen

Defining Printing Requirements

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.

Loading A Preflight Profile

Converting a Color Mode for a Swatch

There was a preflight error for a line with an RGB color. Let's change the swatch it's colored with to CMYK.

Creating Colors

There are about 100 ways to pick colors in InDesign...

Creating a PANTONE Color Swatch

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. Below is a 5 color offset printer, notice the 5 towers, one for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black, and one more - usually a PMS color or varnish. That 5th color is often called a Spot color or Spot Varnish.

Result

Creating CMYK Color Swatches

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.

Applying Colors

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.

Applying Fill Colors To Objects

Basic poke and grunt technique.

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...

Applying Colors to Strokes

More poke and grunt.

Applying Color to text

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

Working with Tint Swatches

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:

100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10%

Creating a Tint Swatch

Resulting color swatch added. Note the 65% mark at the right of the C=25 M=75 Y=0 K=0

Applying a Tint Swatch

Working With Gradients

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.

Creating A Gradient Swatch

Applying A Gradient Swatch

Adjusting the Direction of a Gradient Blend

Result. Let's play with this for a while...

Working With Color Groups

Sometime you need to organize. I like being organized.

Adding Colors to a Color Group

Result

Select all the colors after [Black]

Drag them down into the Orchid Clinic Ad Group. You'll know when by the line that appears below the folder icon

Release. The deed is done...

Previewing the Final Document

So far. Still a bit more to play with with Color Themes...

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

Creating a Color Theme

CHAPTER 8
Review Questions

  1. What is the advantage of creating colors in the Swatches panel instead of the Color panel?
  2. What are the three general steps involved in applying a swatch of color?
  3. What are the pros and cons of using spot colors versus process colors?
  4. After you create a gradient and apply it to an object, how do you adjust the direction of the gradient blend?

Chapter/Lesson 09: Working With Styles

Lesson 9 Download

Styles are probably the most important and powerful feature set in InDesign. They are why it is a professional tool. They are not simple, but it's their inate complexity that makes them powerful.

Remember, digital publishing is all about saving time, meeting deadlines, and producing consistant, high-quality designs.

Understanding Styles

Styles store information about the formatting of a category of object that pretty much align with the settings you'll find in a given object's Panel, like:

Characters: Fonts, weights, sizes, kerning, leading, tracking, glyphs, etc.

Paragraphs: Alignment, spacing between, indents, character styles, etc.

(Graphic) Objects: Fill, stroke, text-wrap, corners, etc.

Tables & Cells: Horrid drugery and to be avoided at all costs.

Basic Styles

AKA Default Styles. The ones in the Styles panels that are in square brackets, like [Basic Paragraph]. What a given object has applied to it when you don't do any styling of your own. When you apply attributes to an object, like set a word to italic and red, you modify the default style and rename it to create a new style. Whenever you find yourself repeating a formatting task, stop and think about whether it makes sense to modify the relevant basic style or creat a new style.

Creating and Applying Paragraph Styles

The Paragraph Styles dialog has more than 230 different buttons, checkboxes, and menus in it to set the various parameters of a paragraph style. From as simple as Indent Spacing, to as complex and precise as the HTML tag format for the style when it gets output for the Web.

Creating A Paragraph Style

Applying A Paragraph Style

Creating And Applying Character Styles

The big concept with Character Styles as opposed to Paragraph styles, is that a Paragraph Style will apply to the entire paragraph that the text cursor is positioned within, you don't have to select the whole paragraph to apply it. Character Styles will only apply to the set of characters you have selected (and shows as inverted in the UI).

Creating a Character Style

Applying a Character Style

It's really just a matter of selecting a block of characters and clicking on the Character style you want in the Character Style panel. However, since we're styling the name of the company wherever it is in the we could use the Find/Change feature in InDesign (even though there are only three other instances of the name - it could be a big document with dozens of repitition of the name).

Apply Styles with Quick Apply

In a production environment, speed and efficiency are everything. Use Command-Return/Ctrl+Enter to invoke a popup menu of styles (of all applicable types) and start typing the name of the style. As soon as the one you want is at the top of the list, hit Return/Enter to apply it.

Nesting Character Styles inside Paragraph Styles

Nesting is wierd and takes a lot of careful setup. I think it's mostly a feature that played well at conference demos, but isn't used much in the real world. Let's take a quick look just for grins. I think it speaks to the tendancy for feature bloat that so many mature applications suffer from...

Creating Character Styles for Nesting

Creating a Nested Style

Once you commit the changes to the style, all instances of the Catalog Body style will show the nested styles.

Creating and Applying Object Styles

Object styles are styles applied to graphics rather than characters or paragraphs. Things like Effects, Strokes and Fills. The example in our textbook I think is confusing, since it's done on outlined text rather than editable text, which you can get by selecting editable text then choosing Menu Type Create Outline . What makes it confusing is that you can also apply an effect like drop shadow to both editable text and outlined text. And you should never create outlined text when you don't have to!

Formatting an Object for a Style

Creating an Object Style

Applying an Object Style

Creating and Applying Table and Cell Style

Ugh. Rarely used and damned confusing. Something that if we learn it now, it will be so long until we have to use it again, that we'll never remember how it works, at least I cant. I just review the help docs or our textbook when it comes up. Let's pass it by...

Globally Updating Styles

This is actually really important. Every time you format something, it will effect the style of that thing. A little plus mark [+] will appear next to the style in the Style panel. Paragraphs have a default [Basic Paragraph] style applied to them, so if you do any paragraph formatting, it will show [Basic Paragraph] +. It's a good sign that you should probably make a new style to handle the modified styling.

Loading Styles From Another Document

You can load styles from another document, and even select which styles you load, without actually openingthe other document.

Review Questions

  1. How can using object styles speed up your workflow?
  2. What must you have created previously in order to create a nested style?
  3. What are the two ways to globally update a style you’ve applied in an InDesign document?
  4. How would you import styles from another InDesign document?