Hi everyone, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today we're going to talk about
paragraph styles and character styles in InDesign CC 2018, and how to set them up and how to
use them.
And we'll also go over when to use them and why you would want to use them.
So basically, I really only use these when I'm designing more than one page.
So, either a two-page or in this case, a four-page brochure.
So this is just a folding brochure.
And this company, I made their own little logo.
It's not great, but it'll do for now.
Their colors are yellow and blue.
And I'm going to throw in this pink color too.
The reason you would want to use character styles. ...if you find yourself making a list,
and then tabbing or putting bullets in like this and tabbing over...character styles will
help you if you ever have to change any of that.
If you don't ever have to change it, it probably won't matter too much.
But if you actually have to go in and add some bullets and things, it just gets to be
really a pain.
Character styles also keep everything really consistent.
So all the spacing is the same, and all of the headline styles, and everything are the
same size.
So let's go ahead and get started.
Now as a graphic designer, most of your content will come from the content department.
And it will be in a Google Doc or a Word Doc.
This is a Google Doc that I just made, so I can show you how to use character and paragraph
styles.
I'm going to select all and copy and then we'll go to InDesign.
Most of the time, all I do is come in here and make a few text boxes and paste it like
this.
And as you can see, it's not formatted or anything.
I'm going to grab this headline and cut it (CMD X) and come up here to my brochure cover,
and I'll just paste it in.
Now I think I'm going to use Montserrat for the title.
I usually don't make character styles or paragraph styles for my titles...make this big, and
I don't want to really waste your time, so I'm going to do most of this offline because
it doesn't really have to do with character or paragraph style.
All right, so I've got the cover pretty much done for right now.
OK, so I've pasted everything in here on the inside.
And now the first thing we want to do is format the body text, or the text you're going to
be using the most of.
So I'm going to go to Paragraph Styles and create a new paragraph style down here with
a new page.
Double click that and call it 'Body'.
We want it to be based on 'No Paragraph Style'.
Now come down here to Basic Formats.
I'm going to change this to Montserrat, which is one of my favorite fonts.
And we'll make this 'Regular', and I'll make it 10.5 Size.
And maybe we can make the leading just a little more spread out.
The color, which is down here...we'll make it 90% black and say 'OK.'
So now my body style is set.
Now I want to go through here and just delete the things we don't need, like the logo...
it's just saying we want the logo on the front, and I'm going to take everything that's a
headline and you can go back and check your Word Document.
So this would be a headline, this would be a subhead, and this would be body.
I'm going to set up my Paragraph Styles for headline, subhead, etc.
So we'll do that now.
OK, so now click on Paragraph Styles and new one, and double click that, and it can be
based on Body-that's fine.
I'm going to call this one 'Headline.'
We will make this ... I think I'm going to make this the blue color.
So that's at the bottom.
We'll make it maybe 19.
OK.
And then spacing, I think is one of the best things about paragraph styles.
You can just set the space after you hit return to be whatever you want.
So I think we'll do .125 here and say 'OK'.
Now this next line here is going to be the, the subhead, so I'm going to click 'new' again
and double click this and call it 'Subhead'.
And we'll make this still Montserrat.
I think I'll make it 13.
And now we'll change the space after that to also .125, and I'm going to put the Leading
at 'Auto'.
OK, and then I'm going to change the color to be a kind of pink color.
Alright, so we've got our headline setup, we've got our subhead.
And now here's some body, and that's already listed as 'Body' over here.
Now I've got another headline here.
So all I have to click is 'Headline.'
Oh, and I see I need to set a setting in Body, so make sure you're not selecting anything
and double click Body, and we'll go to Indents and Spacing and do Space After to be .1875
or so.
Just so it looks kind of similar to what's above it, maybe there.
OK, so now we can come in and highlight the next section which is a subhead.
Here's another headline.
And we can go back and look at the Word Document.
Usually I print that out so I can just see at a glance what my headlines are, and what
my subheads are.
Your copywriter should actually set that up for you in the Word Document to help you because
sometimes it's not very clear.
The way I usually do this, I usually have all of the text flow all the way through the
document.
So I'll just create another text box over here.
And now we can see pretty...almost the rest of the document.
It should all be body because it set it up originally as a body paragraph style.
This one looks like it has a bulleted list in it.
Let's take a look.
Come down here.
Yeah, so we've got some bullets.
In some of it, parts of it are bold, and that's when you want to use Character Style.
So, I'm going to highlight the bullet parts, and I'm going to make a new Paragraph Style.
And double click it and call it 'Bullets'.
All right now, this is also going to be based on body, but I want to give it a bullet.
So we'll go down here to 'Bullets and Numbering.'
And for the list type, I'm going to choose 'Bullet.'
And as you can see, it put a bullet in here.
For the spacing, I want it to be a little less space here so I'm going to put the Indent
like about .25.
And then the First Line Indent, I'm going to do -.25.
If these two numbers are the same, it'll align it to the text that's already there.
So I use that all the time and just say, 'OK.'
All right, and now we're going to set up a Character Style.
Now character styles are good when Paragraph Styles won't work, because...oh, wait, I forgot
to change this to 'Bullets.'
When we open the Character Styles, this is where you can change parts of a paragraph.
If you set this up in Paragraph Style, it would change the entire paragraph and you
don't want that.
You just want this little piece to be changed.
So I'm going to make a new one and call it 'Bullet start text,' and we'll go to Basic.
So I want the font to be Montserrat.
I want it to be Bold.
Now you can go to Character Color and change the color here.
OK, so now every time I highlight something and click on 'Bullet start text,'
it will change that part only.
As you can see, the bullet color did not change, and I want it to match the pink color.
So I'm going to go back to Paragraph Styles and double click on Bullets.
And then we'll go to Bullets and Numbering, go to Character Style, and then choose Bullet
star text and say 'OK,' and now it matches that same Character Style.
OK, now I want to let you know that no one ever really taught me how to use Character
Styles or Paragraph Styles, and a lot of what I learned came from a graphic designer that
I replaced that I actually I never met.
But her layouts with brochures and ebooks and white papers made a lot of sense, the
way she did things.
So that's how I learned how to do this.
I don't even know if it's right.
So if you want to call me out, please feel free to do that in the comments because I
never really claimed to be a layout person.
Anyway, I just wanted to say that.
OK, now we have a callout here.
And I'm just going to leave this in here for now, but we'll worry about that later.
I think we have most of our paragraph styles and character styles set up enough to get
us started.
So let's start dropping images in here.
I'm going to hit W to see my frame edges, and I might just change my margins a little
bit.
And now I'm going to add an image here.
So I'll just hit M and create a box.
And then I'm going to hit question mark to get rid of the yellow color and then hit CMD
D to place an image I've already found, which is this one.
This is another cool thing about character styles.
They will flow around things, of course,
just like every other part of InDesign.
So, to have your text flow around this picture, click this button.
There's a few different ways to do this, but I'm just going to
click this, and then I'll hit OPT CMD W to bring up my Text Wrap.
And I'm just going to hit the up arrow key and have this wrap around like that.
Alright, that's looking pretty good.
And I'm going to add a little yellow box here so that it kind of matches the front.
I'll group these two together (CMD G), and we will have that wrap around that.
I'm sure you guys can tell that everything is hyphenating.
To fix that, you just go to Paragraph, select all the text, and uncheck 'Hyphenate,' and
that should fix that problem.
As you can see, we have some leading issues here.
So, instead of trying to do this manually, I am going to go to my Paragraph Style, my
Headline and double click it, and then go to Basic Character Formats and increase the
Leading by 23.
All right.
And sometimes you have to kind of play with how your text is going to lay out.
Like I said, this is not the best brochure I've ever seen.
But that's OK.
As I'm moving things around, you can see the spacing doesn't change and things kind
of stay together like they should.
And that's because I'm using Paragraph Styles.
OK, I'm going to hit W again so we can see what we've got.
That looks pretty good for the left side.
Let's come over here to the right side.
And now I think we'll just drop a picture in or maybe we'll make - no, we'll make this
callout.
So I think I want the call out right here.
I'm going to hit M and draw a box.
And I think we'll make this blue.
Yeah, that looks good.
I don't really need my text box to go all the way under there, but I like the image
here to decide where my text box cuts off.
So to do that, the Text Wrap is really handy.
Just click this button, and then you can make it the same
size as this one.
And I will also do .1875 to make everything pretty consistent.
So I'm going to just click this red and then flow it right into here, and it's suddenly
not showing up and that is because we have the text wrap on here.
So to have this override the text wrap, just hit CMD B or CTRL B on a PC and say 'Ignore
Text Wrap,' and you can kind of see it in here.
It's all black, and we don't want that of course, so I'm going to highlight everything
in here and create a new callout body text.
So this one will be Callout body.
We will make it white or paper color.
Say 'OK'.
And we do have a sort of headline here, so I'm going to use the same Headline as the
regular.
Alright, it's a little big.
We'll use a Subhead.
I'm going to do a Callout Subhead.
So I'll make a new Paragraph Style, and we'll change the color there to yellow.
Alright, now we have some extra stuff going on down here.
I'm just going to shorten this up, and then we'll take this text and flow it over here.
We'll mess with that here in a minute.
You can always mess with your margins, however you need to.
I'm sure there's a better way than what I'm doing.
But if it's something this small I...I just kind of do it visually.
And now we'll put another picture in.
I'm going to hit question mark to get rid
of that color and then CMD D, find my other picture that I'm going to put in here.
Yeah, why not?
And now we have a little bit of text on the back, so I'm going to use some of the same
Paragraph Styles for this.
We'll just do Subhead, see what that looks like.
And then Body for this probably.
Maybe we'll do the Headline.
Yeah, I like the Headline.
You can kind of play around with that like that so that you can see what it's going to
look like.
I might hit return right here.
Anytime you have to hit return, just keep in mind, you probably don't have to do that.
It's probably better to actually make the style and change the style.
That way it changes the spacing, and it's consistent everywhere.
And I just did it because, you know, this is a tutorial.
I see I have some hyphenations in here.
So I'm going to select everything again.
Click on Hyphenate, and then click it again.
And now it's gone.
I don't know why it does that, but it's kind of annoying.
And then they wanted us to put the logo in here, which I'll grab from the front page,
and we'll paste it on the back page.
Maybe I'll put it here.
And the really cool thing about these... let's say the client decided they wanted the bullet
colors on this part to be green.
We can just go in here to the Character Styles, double click this and change the character
color to green.
And now all of those are green.
It just updated everything.
Also, if you decide you don't like the spacing between a couple paragraphs, you can just
go into your Paragraph Styles, maybe want to add a little space after the body sections.
So we'll go to Indents and Spacing and increase that, and you can see it and it's going to
move everything.
If this happens to you, you'll want to come in here and make changes, maybe
do some things with your margins.
But it is really, really handy, and if you're handing off your work, they will love you
if you use these....well, if they also know how to use them.
Otherwise, they'll probably just undo everything you did.
But I just wanted to show you guys that.
All right, I'm just kind of tweaking things here and there.
But if you liked this video, please click on the 'Like' button, and please let me know
if you're having any issues with setting up character and paragraph styles or if you're
still curious and don't understand what they're really used for.
Just let me know, and I'll try to help you out.
Thank you so much, and I'll see you next Thursday!!!