From the course: InDesign 2023 Essential Training

Stroking and filling frames and paths - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2023 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Stroking and filling frames and paths

“

- [Instructor] I have my magazine file open from the exercise files folder and let's apply some color to this text frame on the left page. InDesign, just like Illustrator, lets you apply a fill or a stroke color to any object on your page, even text. So, let's apply a fill and a stroke to this frame. To do that, I want to pay attention to these little widgets, these little options right in the middle of the Control panel. You'll also see these same options in the Properties panel if you use that. The top one is the fill color and the bottom one is the stroke color and right now, they're both set to none. That's what that red diagonal line means. So first, let's go ahead and fill this with a color. I'll click on the pop-up menu to the right and you can see a number of swatch colors that are listed here. You might be tempted to choose registration, but don't do it. That's actually kind of dangerous. This is just for drawing crop marks on your page which you probably never need to do, so ignore that. Paper is what InDesign calls white. In this case, I'm going to scroll down here and pick a different color. Say, this red color. Then, to close that pop-up menu, you can press the Escape key or just click anywhere else on your screen. Now let's change the stroke color. Here, I'll just choose the black color and now I want to change the width of that stroke with this little pop-up menu on the right. I'll change this from one point to something larger, say, six points. Now, that's a solid black stroke. We can see it better if we zoom into a hundred percent by pressing Command + 1 or Control + 1 on Windows. In InDesign, strokes don't have to always be solid. There's a style popup menu underneath the stroke width that shows you a number of different stroke styles. In this case, I'm going to choose thick thick. Now, I should point out that the Control panel is the fastest way to make these kinds of changes, but you can also make them over in the Swatches panel here in the dock. This gives you all the same kinds of controls, but there is one big difference and that is how you choose between fill and stroke. It's this little icon in the upper left corner of the Swatches panel. You have to pay attention to that because whichever icon is on top is the one that you're going to change. So right now, the stroke icon is on top, so if I choose a swatch, it's going to change the color of that stroke. If you want to change the color of the fill, you need to click on that icon to bring it to the front. So now I can change the color, say, to paper. By the way, you can also change the tint of the color. For example, I'll click back on stroke again, and then I'm going to change the tint of this blue color to something lighter, like 50%. I'm going to be covering colors and how to create new color swatches later on in this chapter. Now, as I'm looking at my beautiful masterpiece here, I noticed that something is strange. Something is a little bit wrong. The fill color, that paper white, kind of sneaks out past the blue line a little bit into the middle. That middle part of the stroke is called the gap and right now, the gap is set to none or transparent so you can see through it to the edge of that little bit of white sticking out. I don't like it, so let's change it. And the way you fine tune your strokes is with the Stroke panel, again, over here in the dock. You can see that I have a six-point stroke and the type is set to thick thick. Down here, you can see the gap color is set to none. Now, you can change the gap color to any of the other color swatches and that would fill it in, but in this case, I'm going to show you a different way to handle this. Instead of changing the gap color, you can change the stroke alignment. In other words, where does the stroke fit on the path? Up here in the aligned stroke area, you can see that this is set to align along the center of the path. But if I click over here on the right side, that makes the stroke go to the outside of the path, or the middle button makes it go to the inside of the path and I like the look of that. By the way, I want to point out that if you ever need to make arrowheads in InDesign, the Stroke panel is also where you do that. You just draw a line and then use these controls down here to add an arrow. It's pretty cool. All right, I'm going to scroll over here to the right, and maybe just move up a little bit so I can get to this E. Now, as I mentioned at the beginning of this movie, you can also apply fills and strokes to text. Let me show you how. I'm going to grab my type tool and then drag over that letter E. Let's go ahead and zoom in just a little bit by pressing Command or Control + a few times. Now I can change the fill and the stroke color of that letter, that single letter that's selected here in the Swatches panel, or up in the Control panel. For example, I could change the fill by making sure the fill icon is on top and then changing the color to, say, blue. By the way, if you squint, you'll see a tiny little icon in the upper left corner of the Swatches panel. It's a double-headed arrow. You'll see the same thing at the bottom of the Tool panel on the left, way over here. That double-headed arrow means swap the fill and the stroke colors. If you click on that, it literally switches the color, so what was the fill color becomes a stroke color and vice versa. You can see the result. Now I have a blue stroke and a non fill, so that's pretty cool. There's so much more that you can do with fills and strokes, and that's what I'm going to be covering in the rest of this chapter.

Contents