Last week I was asked to help out teaching Adobe InDesign at King City High School. I was trying to figure out what the most valuable features of the software could be for a high school and then it came to me - styles.

I think that styles are some of the most under-utilized features of Adobe InDesign, however they are really easy to set up and even easier to use. In this post we will take a look at how to use this function of the software.

A great way to learn how to use styles is to create a mock document. To demonstrate, I will create a layout with 4 different houses for sale.

Hopefully by following the steps below, you will have a better understanding of how styles work. If you have any questions, please post a comment or email me at ryan.casey@caseyprinting.com

1. Create a new InDesign document. This document will be 8.5 x 11 in size, set it up to have one column and half inch margins.

2. Create a border around the whole document. I do this by drawing a square, giving it no fill, and a 10pt stroke. I used a color that is 75% cyan and 50% magenta.

3. Use guides to divide the document into 4 equal sized quadrants. You can use guides by clicking on a ruler and dragging the line that appears to wherever you want on your page.

4. By now, your document should look like this:

5. Use the guides to add 1/4 inch margins to each quadrant, using the ruler to correctly position the guides.

6. Create a text box that is 1/2 inch x 3 3/4 inch and place it in the top of each section.

7. Put mock street names in each text box. Do not adjust anything about the type yet.

8. You should now have a page that looks like the image below:

9. Now its time to create our first style. Make sure that you have the paragraph styles palette open. You can do this by clicking command + F11 (cntl + F11 on a PC)

10. Click the “new style” button. This button is on the bottom of the pallette and looks like a notepad with a sheet of paper being removed from it.

11. A new style will appear on the list called “Paragraph Style 1.” Double click on it to edit its attributes. See the picture below.

12. Use the selections from the list on the left hand side of the screen to scroll through the different options that you have for this style. I set up my style with the name “Headline Style.” I used the “Character” and “Indents and Spacing” sections to specify 30pt Adobe Garamond Pro. aligned to the center of the text box.

13. Click “Ok”

14. You should now see “Headline Style” listed as a paragraph style. Use the selection tool (solid arrow) to select each of your text boxes. With each box highlighted, click on “Headline Style.” You should see the attributes of the style immediately applied to your text.

15. You should now have a document that looks like this

16. Now lets add some pictures. I did this by  then typing in “house” to images.google.com and downloading the first 4 that I found suitable. Save your chosen images to a folder.

17. Add 4 picture boxes to your document - 1 for each quadrant. Make these picture boxes 2″ x 3 3/4″ in size.

18. Use command-D (ctrl-D on a PC) to place 1 photo in each box. Use the white arrow to size and position your photos within your boxes. Remember when sizing your photos within the boxes that you can use the shift key to maintain proportions in your photo size.

19. You should now have a layout that looks like the one below:

20. Now lets add some text boxes. Make a text box for each quadrant that is 3 3/4″ x 2 1/8.” Place them in the bottom of each quadrant.

21. Create a new style for these text boxes. I called mine house description style and used left justified 12 point Gill Sans text.

22. Apply the style to the text boxes.

23. Fill each box with placeholder text by clicking in the text box with the text tool. Next click on the text menu then choose the “fill with placeholder text.”

24. You should now have a document that looks like the one below.

25. Now we will examine the true power of styles and how they save time. After looking at this document there are some changes that I want to make, I think that we need to switch the fonts so that the headline is Gill Sans and the description is Garamond Premier Pro. I also think that we should have a 1/8″ space between each paragraph. We could manually highlight each paragraph and manually preform each change. Instead, we can use the styles that we created to make the changes for us. All we have to do to accomplish this is to bring up the paragraph styles menu and change the styles for the headline and the description. Use the preview checkbox in the bottom left-hand corner of the dialog box to see what your changes look like in real time.

26. Here is how mine looks now:

Thats it for now. Please feel free to comment with any questions, comments, or corrections. Thanks for reading.