Creating object styles in InDesign

- [Instructor] In this movie, we're going to look at yet another kind of style in the form of object styles. But just before we do that I want to do something to the text that I finished off in the previous movie because I'm not happy with it. It's not sitting on all the baselines or filling this side as I'd expected. So what I'm going to do is double click on it and that will, first of all, activate the text and also place a cursor in the paragraph. And I'll go up to the icon here, the little pilcrow icon and click on it and this is where I can edit my style with the style options.

So if I choose that, I'm going to go straight to indents and spacing and I'm going to change the Align to Grid to All Lines and hopefully, even behind the dialogue, you can see how now that's matching all of those lines. I'm going to make one other change here because there's a sort of uncomfortable jump still in there somewhere and I think if I change the baseline grid to half its value, it will overcome that. So I'll go up to the InDesign menu here and come down the Preferences.

That would be Edit and Preferences on the PC. And I'll go to Grids and I'll change my grid from the 12 points that it is currently to half that, which of course, 12 is a multiple of 6 so that should work quite well. If I hit okay, suddenly, we've got much better fitting text there. It's looking really, really, lovely. I'll just turn the baseline grid off here, which I did to open the movie. I could make one edit to this text and that would be good and you can hopefully see I only had to make a couple of changes and it changed everything else in the document.

If I hit Escape to leave the text and to go back to the selection tool, I'll show you how this can work with objects. Now there's a lot more here than you can do in just one single movie because it's quite involved, but you'll get an idea. First of all, I'm going to get the Object Styles panel. If I go to the Window menu and come down to Styles, you'll see that Object Styles is in here. So I'll bring that out and I'm going to select an item and then go to the fly out and choose New Object Style.

So the Object Style dialogue opens and I'm going to check Apply Style to Selection and make sure the preview is on so I can see it. So there are several different things you can do, effects and you can apply them to the object itself, the stroke, the fill, and any text in there. So there's quite a lot that goes on this dialogue. But what I am going to do is just add something simple like a drop shadow. If I choose that, you can see there's a good old 90s drop shadow behind there.

I'm going to leave it there just for a minute. I will however dial the opacity down because that's truly, truly dreadful. And I'll go up to the dialogue at the top and I'll just type in a name for it. I'm just going to call this Demo so that I can get rid of it later on and I'll hit okay. So equally, as I could with text, I could select a range of objects. For example, I'm going to use Quick Apply just here. So command+return, control+return, type D-E and it highlights Demo, hit return and suddenly everything there has got a drop shadow.

If I need to change anything here, I'll go to the fly out and I'll go to my Style Options. Let's just say for argument's sake I'm still okay with the drop shadow but I want to change the color of it. I'll click on this swatch here and make it blue. You can see how everything there has suddenly got a blue drop shadow. And with that I'm going to uncheck drop shadow so it's all gone and hit okay. So there you are, object styles are another way that you can work a lot smarter in InDesign.