Super smooth styling in InDesign 2024: Object Styles, scripts and grep! | Els Ruiters | Skillshare
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Super smooth styling in InDesign 2024: Object Styles, scripts and grep!

teacher avatar Els Ruiters, Graphic Designer from The Netherlands

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Welcome to Super Smooth Styling in Indesign

      3:03

    • 2.

      Project and sharing

      2:23

    • 3.

      A demo first

      5:54

    • 4.

      So HOW did I do this?

      8:17

    • 5.

      About size and position

      2:59

    • 6.

      Adding and using scripts

      1:12

    • 7.

      Scary grep monster

      3:42

    • 8.

      More settings and keyboard shortcuts

      6:53

    • 9.

      Conclusion and thank you!

      2:10

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About This Class

Calling all InDesign enthusiasts! Elevate your InDesign skills with my new class — Super Smooth Styling in InDesign. Whether you're a seasoned pro or you've only recently joined the group of InDesign users, this class is made to accelerate your workflow and efficiency.

For fast and efficient work

  • Unleash the potential of object styles to streamline your design process and achieve quick precision
  • Discover the magic of grepping to turbocharge your InDesign projects
  • Use scripts to take away tedious chores!

This class is designed for those with love InDesign and want to take their skills to a higher level.

Ask away!
Don't forget to ask your questions in the discussions section. :-) I'm there to answer!

Do I need to be experienced in InDesign to do this class?
Yes. A bit. You'll be lost if you have not work with InDesign before. If you know your way around Paragraph Styles and Character Styles, you're good to go!

Resources section: the class arsenal
In the resources section, you'll find everything to get you started with this class:

  • An InDesign folder with a the fonts, the links and both an INDD as well an IDML file.
  • A similar InDesign folder with styles but without the content, so an 'empty' version
  • Two text documents
  • An Images folder
  • A zip file with the scripts used in this class and a short explanation "how to"
  • Fonts used in this class

Download them to your computer, unzip the files and you're ready! 

Don't miss out on this opportunity to revolutionize your InDesign skills. Wow your colleagues and clients!

Have fun with Super Smooth Styling in InDesign!

Meet Your Teacher

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Els Ruiters

Graphic Designer from The Netherlands

Teacher
Level: Intermediate

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Transcripts

1. Welcome to Super Smooth Styling in Indesign: Hello. Welcome to my class, The Power of Styles in, in design. My name is El Raus. I'm a graphic designer, a deesta publisher. And I have been working with Adobe software and especially in design ever since it's Saw the light of Day, which is more than 20 years ago. And I've seen over the years that only few people actually use styles the way they're meant to be and the way they can use their actual power. Because it's such a powerful feature to use object styles, paragraph styles, and character styles. And there's more and use some scripting and some grapping in, in design. In this class, I'm going to well reveal a bit of the power of the super fantastic style feature that comes in in design for who you might ask. Well, you need to have at least a basic knowledge of indesign. You need to know how you can format text. You need to understand the basics of paragraph styling. For example, if you are a bit overwhelmed by everything you see when you open in design for the first time, It's better to start with a basic course, which is probably somewhere in the class right here on skill share. But if you are somewhat experienced, and I'm begging those who are experienced to take a look at this class too, because this might be just something that you have missed along the way. So it's for those who are interested in design, basically. What else can you expect? Well, there are downloads in the resources section, there are two word documents. There's an indesign document to help you start it using the same styles as I have here. There is a package of design with the correct information, the correct images, and the correct styling. So you can use a document that I'm working on as your aid to get you started. This is in design 2024. We are in November 2023. Right now and I'm working on a Mac. It's always easy to explain that because people might get a slightly different view when they are working. If you have an older version of indesign, and I'm talking about years back then some of the features might not work. In your case, there is an IMDL file as well, which is an older version of indesign or which is suitable to open in older versions of design. So you can follow along and see how far you get. Let's get started on to the next lesson. 2. Project and sharing: If you'd like to join me in this class, I would like to see your end result. But it's a bit of a hassle to upload an entire design file including images and fonts, and that's not necessary. The easiest way to share your work is making a PDF. Let's take a look on how you can make a package and then make a PDF as well to file, then go to package. You have a summary here of the things that in design is going to grab together so that another person can work on your file and have the images and have the font and have the indesign file itself. Just go to package. Choose a location I have set my desktop as a location for now, if you know that someone is going to work with an older version of Indesign, you might want to tick IDML. You can also include PDF. I have a print file here. I chose high quality print. Let's go package. And you can see that it's already working to collect everything and then put it on my desktop, right there in my Skillshare Smoothie flyer folder. Now if I open that, I have the design file, the documents folds, and the links, there they are, the images used inside the document. Here's the PDF. When I press the Space Bar, I have a preview and I can just scroll through whatever I've made. I would like you to upload this PDF to the project gallery. I can see where you have made and you have any questions, make a screenshot of your particular problem that you run into and post it in the discussions so I can help you there if that's necessary. I'm very curious to see what you make. Now let's see if we can start styling smoothly with smoothies. Let's go into class. 3. A demo first: Let's go from the end to the first part. First, I will show you what you can do in this class and how easy it is to work with object styles, paragraph styles, and character styles. Here's my document and I've got a few pages set up already. This is what it looks like. There are these little words that are, well, just scattered around. There's a logo. This is the title of the stuff. Here's a short explanation about the fruit, something about the special discount and the regular fixed items such as the order number and the contact information. Now let's go to the last page here. I've already imported the text that should be on the last page, on page four. I'll just copy it and go back to page four and paste it right there. Now what I want to do is separate some of these parts. Because I have made object styles that will put this part and this part and the loose words, scatter words directly onto the page in the correct way. Just let me copy or cut this, put it in the frame. Same here, cut and paste. Same here, x on V. Now I'll just leave these words for now. Now let's take a look in a different screen mode. If we have strange symbols like hard returns or returns or tab sign somewhere, just go to view screen mode normal and then go to type show hidden characters. There's an extra line there that needs to go right there. This is all right. I can see there's more here. Just leave that open. Okay, let's take that one extra out. I can take out these ones as well. My information is ready to go. I'll just select this frame. I'll go to my Object Styles and I'll apply the head of frame and watch what's happening. Plo right there. I'll go to the watermelon smoothie which is yellow body copy frame and bluf right there. It has the height that it needs. It has the formatting in the text that it needs, just like it was in the top. It's ready. It's done, It's finished. Now let's take a look at the discount, which is the C discount frame. And Tada, you can see the heart return here. I'll just change that. Let's take this one. Here's something that I want to assow you because this is all about scripts. Let's take a look at the script file. Now, I have added two scripts in the resources section in the downloads. One is called text merge and the other one is called text split. I'll just select this frame and I'll do text split. And now I have four separate frames instead of one with four lines. I can just go to my object styles and say, make my orange eye catcher, make this my dark green eye catcher, make this my yellow eye catcher. Sometimes it does is I'm not sure why that happens. The last one, let's take the dark green. Now, the last thing that I need to do is add the image. That too is of course pretty easy. Go to file, important to the watermelon. Which one do we want to take? This one. I'll just put that image somewhere there. Well, that's far too small because if you look at the top ones, they have the size and they have rounded edges. I want that one to be like that too. I can enlarge the frame and I can add the contents and the corners. But it's much easier to use an object style. All I need to do is bring that back. I'm done. That's basically it. This is what it looks like. This is so easy because once you've got this, you can make things very quickly. The height of this yellow box will adjust as the number of words increase. If it is too much, just bring down the number of words a little or the font a bit smaller. This box will always have a large font, a smaller font there, and the day will be in a different font, in a different color. The same is right here. So it's so easy to format your flyers in advance like this and then just go, go, go. And don't forget to postpone your e mails because they might think that it doesn't take you any time to make this while if you make this in advance, you win a lot. So let's take a look on how we can make this now that you've seen how this class is all about. 4. So HOW did I do this?: We've seen in the previous lesson how easy it is to work with preset paragraph styles, and character styles and object styles. But how does it work? How do you get the object style to use exactly the correct paragraph styles? And how do you put things in the right place? Well, let's take a look at the paragraph styles. Here's my page one. I've called this first headline, of course, that I did that along the way. I've called that one header. Let's open up the paragraph styles menu. I'll rip that off. I'll tear that off. There it is, Header. One header, and the next one, it has a size, it is 42 points. It is Montserrat, bold version, it's all caps and it's left aligned. Very simple. Right Now I go to number two and that is header outline. Well, that's very easy. Just make the same kind of text and make sure that you don't have a fill, but you do have a line. Well it's the same size, same font. Just call that header outline. Then we have deles, which is the subheader. These three things make the heading of the page, right? If I go to my object styles called the head frame. Now I can move this around and you can see that this is what you need. But how do I tell my design that I need specifically that followed by that, followed by that paragraph style? Well, that's very easy if you go to the paragraph style head, if I double tap that, I can see by general that it is not based on anything but The next style is header outline, right cancel. Now when I go to header outline, I can see that it is based on header one. The next style is called subheader. All right, when I go to subheader, there is no extra next style. It's just the same. Make an empty page here, Use the word head. Now when I, I will have outline. It's hard to see because there is no color. I'll give the frame a color. The frame, you can see it. Then I want the subheader. This is really very easy because this automatically happens when I type Heather, I type enter, it will know I need header outline next. Then when I type enter after the outline, I can have subheader. If I make my header a little longer, I use a soft return, it will not happen. It only happens when I add information after a hard return. That's already quite cool. But let's take this out. I'll just make a frame. I'll give it a color black for now. We've seen that header is followed by header outline by the subheader. If I type my text, I'll say Heather outline subheader. I can hear you think. Yeah. Right. But now I still have to apply all those paragraphs, all those styles to that specific paragraph because I have told the object style that it needs to format this specific part in the right way. Let's take a look at header frame and I'll tap that and it jumps right to the correct place using the correct formatting. Let's take a look at why header frame knows how to apply these paragraph styles to this piece of text. I'll just double click the object style, a header frame. Then there's paragraph styles. This is usually unticked by default. Now I have told this object style that it needs to use paragraph style one header, apply the next style. That's the secret of this all because it knows that when there is a heart return, it will have to use the next paragraph style determined in the paragraph style settings. As you can imagine, when I have a bit of text here, and I'll say blah, blah, blah, blah, I'll just add a bit placeholder text here. If I go here, even though I haven't formatted anything, I can go to the yellow body copy frame and I have my text formatted the same way. There's a heading there which is a bit bigger. It is bold. The body copy which is light in s9a2 points. As you can see, there's a body copy header and the body copy. Now if I take a look at the body copy header, I will see that the next style is body copy. Things are coming together. Now let's try another one. Let's go for the cash back part. I'll say, what is it, five euro discount every other day like that. I'm not certain what I'm going to get, but I will go to the discount frame and look, there it is. Even though the word is much bigger than in the other other parts, I used the dollar sign here, that's of course much smaller. It automatically uses the width it needs to get everything in. Everything is format. The large font here, the smaller font in caps there and every other day, which is light. And in a totally different font as well. All of that is done in object styles. I'll call this one orange, blue, purple, and red. Did as you've seen in the way that I showed the scripts, just split the text, Go to the object style and make sure that I get the orange. I don't have blue, so I'll do green. I don't have red, so I'll do yellow. The dark green colors, these settings are all set inside the eye catcher. Let's take a look at, this is just a setting. I've set up the corners like this. There's a rounded corner left up 5 millimeters, and the same goes for the right corner here, which is also 5 millimeters. I've added the color if I want to. I can also change this to multiply, for example, which is quite nice, I can make this smaller, or larger, or bigger. Again, in this catcher, I have set the paragraph style to use catches. That's basically how you set up a document very easy and very quickly. And how you can use scripts, and this is it. 5. About size and position: I showed you how to use paragraph styles to ensure the texts are properly formatted with characteristics by checking next style. When creating styles in design understands which styles follow each other When a hard return is encountered in the text, by choosing the first paragraph style from a series that belong together in an object style, this is done automatically. Now I'll show you how to automatically position a frame at a specific location and how to adjust the size of the frame if needed. Let's take a look at the A header frame object style. First. By clicking on the object style, you get the option to fill in size and position in size. You can specify only the height on the width or both height and width in position. You indicate where the frame should start. Now let's take a look at object style, yellow body copy. Here you'll see that the auto size option is checked in this style. The height of the frame is automatically adjusted from the middle top to the bottom. If the text is longer than the original frame was. By choosing a different reference point, the frame can be adjusted in both directions, up and down or left and right. This ensures that you always have all the text in view, so there is no overset text in object style discount frame. You can see that the frame is automatically resized from the top left corner. I've checked no line breaks so that all text stays on one line until the return is encountered. Let's take a look at the eye catches as well Here, no line break is also checked. When I'm looking at the auto size options, since these are short keywords scattered all over the page, I don't want any brakes with no line break checked. The keywords in the eye catches remain fully intact and immediately getting the right formatting. I would recommend experiment with these settings. They are very handy feature and allow you to quickly and consistently add text to frames and place them in the right position, right way. The frame has the right fill stroke if needed, and it is where you want it to be, including text that is already formatted. 6. Adding and using scripts: Adding scripts to your own script panels is much easier than might look in design. Go to window and utilities scripts. If you don't see it, I have them standard right there. You will have application community and user scripts. Yours might look a little different, but I already have quite a few. Tap the right mouse button and say Reveal. Now you will have a text merge and a text split. I already have them here. Place them in the script panel. You can add extra folders if you like here. I have scripts by me, I have scripts by third parties. Everything I do I can add here, save a copy of the original script somewhere on your computer so you won't lose it when you have a reset and something is missing, then when you go back, it will appear right here in the user. Well, I have an extra folder here and you can see there's text merge and there's text split. That's basically the start. 7. Scary grep monster: We've seen how object styles and paragraph styles can really speed up your workflow. But there's one thing more that is good to show you. That is, using a grip graph sounds terrible, but it's not really. Just suppose that I want in these documents to have the word set or sweetness in the body text in the yellow frame to be bold And bold, italic, something like that. I'll go to the character styles first, I'll make a character, son sweet, let's format that. Let's say it's the Mona as it was, and then I want the bold italic. And let's for the sake of clarity, underline it. All right, let's keep it like that. Now nothing happens because I haven't determined anything just yet. Apart from the fact that there is a special character style, remember that character styles are set to a specific set of characters in the selection. If you don't select anything, there's nothing happening. I want the word sweet or sweetness to change inside the body copy text only. I'll go to body copy, double click. I'll go to Grab Style. I'll say new Grab style. Now the stands for Pattern in Grab. It means it looks for patterns and a word that is the same every time is a pattern that's easy to format. I'm going to say use the word sweet to the text. Sweet, I'll just have wow, they're sweet. And just realize that I didn't touch anything. I just added some information to the body copy. See that there's tang sweet. Here's something sweetness. This looks all right. We need to change that. Go back to the body copy, I'll double tap it back to the grab style. I have to add sweetness. And it needs to look for sweetness and it needs to look for sweet. Important to remember when you're doing this is that it always looks for the longest word. First, I'll tap sweetness right there, and then I'll tap the pipe symbol, which is the straight line. It is above, at least on a Mac it is above the backslash. When I tap next to it, you can see instantly that it changes everything. Now it changes everything in my yellow box with the body copy text. Just imagine that you have a file that is over 50 pages long. If you have to look for sweet or sweetness with a search and replace, that's fine. You get a new text and you have to change it again. Now once it is determined inside the paragraph style, it's always there. So that's what a grab style does in this class. You've done two sorts of automation. You've done the scripts, and you've done a very simple example of grab styles. But it's very useful, very efficient, and it works like a charm. 8. More settings and keyboard shortcuts: Now you might wonder how I get my objects to move to a certain position or to get a certain height, or even a certain fill. We've already seen that the object styles can hold paragraph styles, which works fantastic. But there's so much more that you can apply when you are using object styles. Let's take a look at this image frame moving to the object styles. Let's tear that off. Just put it over here. When I open the image frame, well, there's of course no need for a paragraph style because it's an image that's not ticked as you can see. But I have changed the size and the position options. It's always 85, 139 millimeters, and there's an X and Y position. X is from the side and Y is from the top. It jumps automatically to 65 millimeters from the edge and 49 millimeters from the top, always. Now let's take a look, because this is an image what you can do with the frame fitting options. Frame fitting is what is inside a frame and how the image should behave. Well, I turned, in this case, auto fit on and I want it to be proportionally in that frame. I don't want any white to be visible. I said fill the frame proportionately and align from the center. If you know in advance that your images will always start in the left top, you can also choose another reference point. I don't want it to crop automatically, in this case. I just wanted to fill the frame proportionally. All that information can be stored in the object style. All right, now let's take a look at the yellow body copy frame. You have seen that I already get the right formatting for the text and it also jumps to a specific location. But when my text is longer, let's just add a few returns. You can see that it gets higher as well, it doesn't get any wider. How that is done is like this double take the yellow body copy frame. Let's take a look at the paragraph style that has been set as we've seen the body coopiena and apply next style. I'm going to the size and the position. I've said that this width is only important and only needs to be set to 58 millimeters. I can make this bigger or smaller, but this is how wide the frame is. I also set the position to 0.83 millimeters from the top. That's fixed. That's set, but I want the frame to go higher or less high when I add or remove text. Let's go and see how that works. Go to the auto size options. Look, I've set the auto size to move from the top down. If I had put it up here or here I should say, then the frame would get higher on the way up. This is the way that I have set up this entire document. This is set to an object style and has a horizontal ana, vertical position and a fixed size. And the same goes for this part. Doesn't have a fixed height, but it has a variable height to adjust height. This has a fixed size, this has rounded edges and also a small line around it. And that is all set in an object style. That's one style to rule them. All right, now to speed up your workflow even faster, because of course this is already very fast. It's also possible to add a keyboard shortcut to your object styles. I have done that in my paragraph styles, as you can see, command numerical one, command miracle two, et cetera, et cetera. But once I started working on my object styles, I realized that that was probably not very necessary. Let's move over, close this one to my object styles. Let's make a short, such a difficult word, shortcut key for these eye catchers. This is yellow, double tap yellow. Let's use old one. I choose the option key and the numerical one. As you can see, the paragraph style is there, by the way. There is no need for where is it? Position isn't changing. Size isn't changing. But there's something different in the auto size. This resizes from the center. And very important, I have ticked, no line breaks, because if you use line breaks, and it's a word that can be split, it will move on. And that's not what you want it to stay in one frame. If you want to have it over more lines, you should use a soft return. And then it doesn't matter, the line break is really like a carriage return. Unless it finds a carriage return, it won't break. It's like this. That works. And I'm going to do the same for orange. I'll say old two. Okay, Catch a green. It a three, and then here. Okay, Now I can try a little bit more. I can see, is this nice, Just by tapping my keyboard, using my option old key and the numerical keyboard. And this is the fastest way to get your work running. Just look at this. This might be better here and this might be better there. Maybe I want that to be dark and maybe I want it to be lightened. Now, that's not really good. I want it like that. And maybe that's better when I k that dark. Because there are dark lines here as well. And shall I leave it like that? Maybe that's better. When I do it light green, it is so fast, it works like a charm. I would recommend if you use object styles and you have object styles that can be changed quite a lot, use these keyboard shot keys. 9. Conclusion and thank you!: We've reached the end of this class, this is it. I hope that you've seen that working with styles inside object styles, it's very efficient and very time saving and it is less prone to mistakes. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below. And don't hesitate to ask if something is not clear. Your assignment would you like to try? Some of this is make your own set of flyers. Take three or four different pieces of text and try to work like I've shown you. If you haven't got a real subject and just use your local grocery store, the Neil Studio, make four flyers for programs of your local baseball team or for something that happens in the class or at work. There is so much possible once you've got this set up, it so easy and so quickly to change this, just imagine that. The client says, in this case, I love it, but I don't want that yellow anymore. I don't like yellow, I hate yellow. Then give it a different color, you have to change it once, and it changes everywhere. That is the great power, the absolute strength of working with styles. Most people know that working with paragraph styles is something that will help them to get a nice, crisp layout. And that it always looks the same and that it's consistent in the way it's formatted. But working with paragraph styles, character styles, inside paragraph styles, and object styles. Well then you've got your winner. Thank you for watching. Thank you for joining me and I'll hope to see you next time. If you have any specific design things that you want to know, just let me know and I'll see if I can devote a glass to that specific subject. Bye. See you next time.