From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Adjusting corner options - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Adjusting corner options

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- [Instructor] In the last movie, I discussed how to change the shape of objects on your page. Here's another way to change a shape, but this time we're only going to be changing the object corners. I have my magazine document open from the exercise files folder. So let's jump to the first page by choosing that in the layout menu. We're going to work on this brown box over here. I'll also turn on preview mode by pressing W on my keyboard. That way I'm not distracted by all those other frame edges. And let's zoom in to 200% with Command or Control two. Now I want to change the shape of the corners on this object. So I'll head up to the object menu, and choose corner options. Up comes the corner options dialogue box. I'll move this out of the way a little bit so I can see what I'm doing. And right now, all four sides are set to sharp edge corners. But if you click on this pop-up menu here, you can see that you can change this to fancy, bevel, inset, inverse rounded, or even a rounded corner. Most people just go with rounded corner, so, let's choose that. And you can see that when I choose it, all four of them changed. That's because this little link icon in the middle is enabled. If you want to affect some corners and not others, you can turn that off. For example, I want to have a sharp edge in the lower left, so I'll just choose none here. Let's do the same thing to the upper right. Now to actually make these rounded corners round, I need to give them a corner radius. You can think of this number as the radius of a circle that's placed in that corner. So for example, let's change this to say 30 points, and I'll change the other one too. In order to see that change. I could click okay or turn on the preview checkbox. That looks pretty good, so I'll click okay. Now, there's another more interactive way you can change the corners as well. Just click on this little yellow box in the upper right corner of the frame. When you do that, you get four diamonds, one in each corner. These yellow diamonds determine how each corner is going to appear. For example, if you drag this yellow diamond in the upper right corner to the left, it changes the radius for all four corners. If you want to change the radius for a single corner, hold down the Shift key while you drag the diamond. Shift drag lets me change the radius of a single corner interactively, without affecting the others. Okay, now one of the coolest things about this corner options feature is that it doesn't only work on frames. You can use it on open paths as well. Here, let me show you. I'm going to scroll over to the left so I can see more of my pace board, and then I'll press the W key on my keyboard to jump out of preview mode. Now, I'll grab the pen tool, and just start clicking, to make sort of a lightning bolt shape. Let's apply corner options to this. I'll choose the selection tool, press the D key on my keyboard to apply that default one-point stroke, and then I'll head back to corner options. You'll notice that some of these fields are grayed out, because InDesign knows this is not a rectangular frame, but we can change this first pop-up menu to rounded, and then increase the value. Let's go back to 30 points. And you can see, because the preview checkbox is turned on, that it applied that rounded corner to each corner on that path. I'll click OK, and switch over to the direct selection tool. So technically, these are still sharp corners. In fact, I'm going to click out here to deselect, and then click on that path one more time with that direct selection tool. This lets me move a single point on the path, and you can see I can reshape the path, and you can see that InDesign automatically rounds the corner for me. These kinds of corner effects make it so easy to create great looking layouts, and even better, quickly update them later.

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