351 Change default fonts

- [Instructor] A lot of people who use InDesign wanna know how can I change the default font? The default type face that's selected whenever I start writing out a new text frame. I'm going to show you a common way that people do that that is wrong, I'm sorry, and I'll show you why it's wrong, and three alternative methods from easy to more formal and a little bit more complicated to do so in your InDesign documents, okay? So we're looking at a brochure that's from one of the Adobe InDesign stock templates.

Let me switch to normal mode and zoom in here a bit. You can see in this template almost all of the text is Balboa UltraLight, which happens to be a Typekit font. Now if I were the designer and I were creating these blurbs of texts, and I were typing them out, it might start to drive me crazy that the font that I'm using is Minion Pro. That's the default font in more recent versions of Adobe InDesign.

If I look at the paragraph styles panel and double click basic paragraph, it's in brackets because they're automatic, you can't delete it, however you can edit it. You can see it's Minion Pro Regular 12 on automatic leading, which equals 14.4 points. Now I might be persuaded to change the basic character format for the basic paragraph style to the one that I'm using throughout this document. Or maybe it's my corporate font so I'm going to be changing basic paragraph in every document that I'm creating.

This one happens to be Balboa and it is UltraLight. There you go. We'll just leave everything else as is. And now yeah it's Balboa UltraLight, and every time that I write something out it comes in in that font. Right? That's what a lot of people do, but that's the wrong way to do it because it can really hurt you in unexpected ways and usually by surprise and sometimes you don't even notice it. You really should never edit any of the basic settings, the ones that you see in brackets throughout the program.

There's better ways to do this. Here's the typical way that this hurts you. Say that you have created this and then you want to copy and paste it into a new document, I'll select this guy and I'll copy that frame and click in a new document that I created. There's only one paragraph style that's the unchanged basic paragraph, which uses Minion Pro. And then paste, and what font is this? Why it's Minion Pro. Because whenever you are pasting or importing text that's been styled with the same style but different attributes, the receiving document, the one that you're bringing them into, those attributes trump, all right? They win.

So the type was converted to Minion Pro. Unless you're aware that's happening, then you can accidentally introduce strange fonts into your documents. Or imagine if you gave this to a freelancer who didn't even know that you had modified basic paragraph, and then he or she started using it. So that's probably the main reason why you never wanna change your default font by editing the basic paragraph style. Instead, let's take a look at another document. Here is a document that uses the regular basic paragraph.

Let me zoom in. But this designer's, the font that they use all the time is DIN 2014 Light, which happens to be what they're using in all their body copy. One thing you can do would be with nothing selected, no text frame selected, you can go up to the edit menu and make sure that you choose deselect all. Then switch to the type tool and choose that font. That was DIN 2014 right? I think it was Light. All right, that's all. That's now the default font.

Basic paragraph is still selected, but of course it's an override. So now if I swipe something out and I start typing it comes in in that font. So I have not committed the sin of editing basic paragraph, but it is still the default font for this document. You know, another thing you could do rather than changing it from here is with nothing selected, you could simply choose that body style. Now that's gonna be the default style. So here if I start dragging out a paragraph and start typing it comes in in that style.

And I normally don't recommend that because I really think that your default style in all your documents should always be basic paragraph for paragraph styles and none for character styles, so that as you drag out frames you don't get surprised. But if you're the lone designer and really you don't share a lot of your documents with anybody then it's okay. I'll allow it if you want to change the default font in one of these ways, but honestly editing the basic paragraph style is the wrong way. Now you may also, I'll give you permission to do this, with no documents open you could change the default style the same way.

So if no document's open switch to the type tool, choose your default font, there we go, DIN 2014 Light, and then quit out of the program just to write those changes to the application defaults to your computer and then start up the program again. And this will be the default font for every new document that you create from then on. So I'm creating a new document and I'm dragging out a type frame, and you can see there it is. But I have not needed to edit the basic paragraph style.

So there you have it. A few different ways to really change the default font that will not harm how you use the basic paragraph style or when you share it with other people.