From the course: InDesign Secrets
142 Building richer, bolder color gradients - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
142 Building richer, bolder color gradients
See this word design? I'd like to spice that up a little bit. Maybe put a gradient inside of it. Let's zoom in on it by pressing Cmd+ 4 or Ctrl+4 on Windows. And then I'm going to make a gradient swatch that I'll apply to that text. Before I make my swatch, I'm going to deselect everything on my page so I don't accidentally create the swatch and then apply it to the selected object. To deselect everything I press Cmd+Shift+A or Ctrl+Shift+A on Windows. Then I'll open my Swatches panel, go to my Swatches panel menu, and choose New Gradient Swatch. Now this swatch is going to go from magenta to black, so I'll just type that in, magenta to black. But of course doesn't help me, I need to specify exactly what colors I want. So, I'll come down here and click on this color stop right underneath the gradient ramp. Now I can specify what color I want on that side, and I'm going to make it 100% magenta. Over on the right side, I'll click on the color stop, and I'll set this to black. When I click OK, InDesign adds it to my color swatches panel, and now I can apply it to this object. I'll select the object, I'll click this little T button so that InDesign knows that I want this color swatch applied to the text, not the object itself, not the text frame. And then I'll scroll down and click on that swatch. That's kind of interesting but I'd like to rotate the gradient. So, I'll go to the Gradient panel and I'll set the angle to, say, minus 90 degrees. Then I'll hit Enter. All right, now this is looking good. Except for one thing. And that is, it's all kind of gray and blacky looking. It's kind of a muddled gray area in the middle. It goes from magenta to black. But this middle area is just gross, so what do you do? How do you get a great looking gradient? Well, instead of going from magenta to black, you want to go from magenta to a rich black. Let's head back to the Swatches panel, and I'll show you how. I'll right click on this Color Swatch, and choose Swatch Options, that's what they call the edit swatch feature. Now, in order to make this the rich black, I'm going to click on that little color stop. And I'm not going to use the swatch called black. Instead, I'm going to change the Stop Color pop-up menu to CMYK. And now I'm going to boost the amount of magenta in here to, let's say, 80%, or 85%, something like that. So, now this gradient is going to go from 100% magenta to 100% black plus 85% magenta. It's a rich black. It has color inside of it. It's dynamic. Let's click OK and see how it looks. That's looking much better. We've lost our angle so I better go in here and change that again. Minus 90. There we go. So, this is looking much better. It's a nice rich magenta all the way to a nice rich black. The balance is a little bit off. I need it to be a little bit darker at the bottom, and I can do that here in the Gradient panel. I'll just change this midpoint slider, pull it to the left a little bit, and now that gives me more black on the bottom and less magenta at the top, and that looks much, much better. Just remember, black is not usually solid black. It's more of a charcoal gray, so if you really want rich colors, you need to make a rich black. That is, black with some other color mixed in. And boosting the gradient with more color is a super easy fix for boring blends. And it so easy to do.
Download courses and learn on the go
Watch courses on your mobile device without an internet connection. Download courses using your iOS or Android LinkedIn Learning app.
Contents
-
-
229 Batch converting ID files to current version with the Book panel6m 9s
-
230 Getting around InDesign limitations6m 46s
-
(Locked)
231 Creating better callout lines with effects and object styles5m 47s
-
232 Swapping column and row information in tables6m 9s
-
(Locked)
233 Making bigger text link targets4m 52s
-
-
-
161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items3m 55s
-
162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text3m 50s
-
(Locked)
163 Make a pop-up footnote for your ebook3m 48s
-
(Locked)
164 Deleting tabs at the beginning of paragraphs and applying a paragraph style3m 10s
-
(Locked)
165 Five InDesign Presentation tips6m 28s
-
-
-
(Locked)
111 Packaging images on the pasteboard3m 32s
-
(Locked)
112 Automatically updating figure references for books6m 9s
-
(Locked)
113 Adding Tool Tips to your form fields in InDesign3m 21s
-
(Locked)
114 Setting poetry, flush left, center on longest line3m 54s
-
(Locked)
115 Use bookmarks to navigate long documents in production4m 57s
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
107 Using the same keyboard shortcut for two different commands with the Context feature5m 22s
-
(Locked)
108 Making a text highlighter3m 33s
-
(Locked)
109 Updating an interactive PDF without losing work done in Acrobat5m 30s
-
(Locked)
110 Adding custom text at the beginning of each line automatically4m
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
089 Three great Object Styles for any designer8m 1s
-
(Locked)
090 Choosing alpha channel image transparency2m 25s
-
(Locked)
091 Adding and reading metadata for InDesign files3m 25s
-
(Locked)
092 Adding ALT tags to your images6m 59s
-
(Locked)
093 How to Place & Link a text frame's text but not its formatting7m 4s
-
(Locked)
094 Setting the baseline position of a caption2m 39s
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
051 Five things that should be in every new file5m 19s
-
(Locked)
052 Forcing EPUB page breaks with invisible objects6m 21s
-
(Locked)
053 Understanding component information6m 39s
-
(Locked)
054 Creating running heads using section markers4m 16s
-
(Locked)
055 Making a font with InDesign using the IndyFont script5m 20s
-
(Locked)
056 Finding where that color is used7m 17s
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
047 Specifying an exact amount of space between objects5m 17s
-
(Locked)
048 Fixing last lines that are too short8m 16s
-
(Locked)
049 Creating web graphics from your InDesign artwork7m 20s
-
(Locked)
050 Using “No Language” to suppress unwanted hyphenation, spell-checking, and smart quotes2m 48s
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
037 Updating a linked table without losing formatting5m 18s
-
(Locked)
038 Creating electronic sticky notes4m 49s
-
(Locked)
039 Moving master page items to the top layer for visibility2m 48s
-
(Locked)
040 Five guide tricks that will impress your coworkers6m 18s
-
(Locked)
041 Letting InDesign add the diacritics4m 21s
-
(Locked)
042 Using single-cell table cells for custom paragraph formatting6m 2s
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
027 Creating running heads using variables5m 1s
-
(Locked)
028 Live Caption tips and tricks8m 3s
-
(Locked)
029 Making professional drop caps10m 37s
-
(Locked)
030 Making two-state buttons in interactive documents5m 5s
-
(Locked)
031 Moving pages from one document to another3m 15s
-
(Locked)
032 Wrapping bulleted text around a curve5m 58s
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
007 Selecting through and into objects using cmd-click and Select Above/Below5m 46s
-
(Locked)
008 Some great tips and tricks for the Swatches panel9m 40s
-
(Locked)
009 Saving down for backward compatibility with INX and IDML5m 54s
-
(Locked)
010 Using the INX and IDML formats to fix problems4m 46s
-
(Locked)