Color shortcuts - InDesign Tutorial

- [Instructor] During the design process, we constantly apply color to elements in our design. InDesign provides the tools to do this, but sometimes it doesn't work as easily as we'd like. Let's take a look at a few of the problems we encounter and a few ways to overcome those problems to make applying color easier. I'm starting here on page 23, and using my selection tool, I'm going to go ahead and click on this triangular object in the upper left hand corner. And, so one of the things I'd like to do here is I'd like to change the fill color of that object. Now, one of the things that often happens when you do this and the properties panel has made this pretty easy, but one of the challenges we run into often happens when we use the swatches panel. So I'm going to go ahead and open up the swatches panel and what I want to do here is I'm going to kind of force this problem to occur. So this typically occurs when your stroke indicator is front nosed, right? So, you have an object selected, and you're not really paying attention, but instead of the fill being front nosed, you have the stroke that is front nosed. So, when that case happens, if I come over here and click on the blue swatch, what I've really done is apply blue to the stroke instead of the fill. So a couple things we can do to fix this because what a lot of people will do is undo and then kind of go back and change the properties so that it works as expected. But instead of wasting time doing that, what I wanted to show you is on your keyboard, when you are focused on the color here, if you press the X key, that'll change the focus between the stroke and fill of the property. So each time I tap X, it's going to change the focus. So, as I change the focus, I'm going to tap the X key to change the focus to the fill, and I don't want any fill right now at all. So if I tap the forward slash button, that is going to change the fill to none and the none icon is this slash that goes from the lower left to the upper right, similar to the slash key. Now I'm going to tap X again, right, and now if you press Shift X, it's going to swap your stroke and fill color. So it's a really helpful keyboard shortcut that you can use to change the focus between stroke and fill and then Shift X to swap the stroke and fill. And that Shift X is the same as clicking this icon right here. Now things change a little bit when you're dealing with text because if I highlight text and I want to change that property, the same thing can happen. If I click on the blue color, what I've actually now just done is changed the stroke color instead of the fill color. Now the problem here is that if I wanted to swap those colors, I can't just use Shift X, because what'll happen is I'm going to type a capital letter X in my text. And I can't apply none to it, because if I tap the forward slash button, it's going to type a forward slash. So, that is the default behavior of InDesign, but we can change that behavior and the way that I like to do that is if you go to your edit menu in InDesign and choose keyboard shortcuts, I'm going to go to the product area of tools up here. If I scroll down towards the bottom, you have an option called swap fill and stroke colors. And, instead of the default of Shift X, I'm just going to add the Alt or Option key, and when I press Shift Option X, or Shift Alt X, you can see that that's unassigned, and I'm going to assign it to this command. Now when you do this, you do have to create a new keyboard shortcut set, so I'm going to go ahead and do that and I'm going to call this Chad's Shortcuts. And now I have a new shortcut for that command, I'm going to remove the default and then I'm going to scroll to the top and where it says apply none, instead of just the slash, I'm going to use Option slash. Again, that is unassigned, so I can assign that to that command, and I'm going to remove these other ones. And what that does for me, now that I have the new keyboard shortcut and I have the text selected, I can use my new keyboard shortcut, which in this case, is Shift Option X and that now swaps the stroke and fill and then if I want to set the fill to none, I can use my new keyboard shortcut Alt or Option slash, to remove that property. And now I've applied the appropriate color and formatting to that object. I'm going to go ahead and hit the Escape key to get out of that. So what I'm now going to do is I'm going to scroll down to page 24 and I want to show you one other thing. I'm going to go ahead and highlight a cell here, so I'm going to go ahead and click in that cell and hit Escape. And one of the things we run into when we're working with objects is being able to apply the last used fill or the last used gradient. Now we can't see it here right now, because my tools panel is in a single column view. But I'm going to click this bubble arrow up here and you'll now see these icons right here. And we have three options, apply color, which is the comma key, apply gradient, which is the period, and apply none, which is now Option slash. So I just wanted to show you that if I wanted to apply the last used gradient, all I have to do is tap the period key on my keyboard and that's going to apply that gradient to that object. Again, the comma will apply the last used fill and then the slash or now the Option slash key will apply none. By taking advantage of these shortcuts, you can save time, work faster, and avoid frustration when applying color to objects in InDesign