From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Stroking and filling frames and paths - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Stroking and filling frames and paths

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- [Instructor] I have my magazine file open from the Exercise Files folder, and let's apply some color to this frame over here on the left side of the 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'll come up here to the Control panel and use these little pop-up menus in the middle. The one on top is fill, and the one on bottom is stroke. You'll see these same options in the Properties panel if you use that. Right now, both are set to none. That's what that red diagonal line means. So let's go ahead and first fill this. I'll click on the fill pop-up menu, and up comes a list of color swatches. Now, don't click Registration. I know it looks like black, but it's not black. It's actually kind of dangerous to use this registration swatch. It's just for drawing things like crop marks on your page, which you probably never need to do, so ignore Registration. Paper is what InDesign calls white. In this case, I'm going to scroll down here and choose a different color, like this red. Then to close that pop-up menu, you can press the escape key or just click anywhere else on the screen. Now let's change the stroke. I'll go ahead and apply the black color. That stroke is kind of thin, so I'm going to come over here just to the right of those pop-up menus and change the stroke width. I'll make it thick, let's say six points. Just below that is the stroke style. You have all kinds of styles to choose from. I'll choose Thick - Thick. Now, I find the Control panel is the fastest way to make these kinds of changes, but you can also make them in the Swatches panel, too, over here in the dock. This gives you the same kind of controls, and in fact, it looks almost exactly like the one we saw in the Control panel, 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 panel. Whichever icon is on top is the one that you're changing. So right now, the stroke icon is on top, so if I chose a swatch, it would change the color of that stroke. If you want to change the fill, you simply have to click on that so it comes to the top. Now I could change the color, say to green. You can also change the tint of this color. Up here at the top of the Swatches panel, I'll click the word Tint. That's just a shortcut for selecting all the text inside that field. Now I'll type 20 and then hit return or enter. There we go. We've got a 20% green color for the background fill. 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. The fill color kind of sneaks out past the black line to the space in between the Thick - Thick. You can see this better if you use the Zoom tool to zoom in on this. Now, this area between the two black strokes is called the gap, and the gap currently is set to none or transparent so you can see through it to the edge of that little bit of color sticking out. I don't like that, so let's change it, and the way you fine tune your strokes is with the Stroke panel. I'll choose the Selection tool, and then go to the right side of the screen and click Stroke. Here you can see the type pop-up menu is set to that Thick - Thick stroke, and down at the bottom, you can see the gap color is set to none. You could change this gap color to any color swatch you want 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 alignment. In other words, where does the stroke sit on that path? Right now in the Align Stroke section, you can see that the alignment is set to the center of the path, but if you click on the third button in this section, that changes it. Now the stroke is going to go on the outside of the path, or if you click the second button, it goes on the inside of the path. I like that. It looks much better. By the way, if you ever need to make arrowheads, the Stroke panel is also where you do that. You just draw a line and then use these controls down here to choose something like an arrow. Okay, 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 scroll over to the right side of my page here so I can see this big E. I'll choose my Type tool and then drag over that E to select it. If I open my Swatches panel again, I'll see a little tiny double-headed arrow next to those two icons. You'll see the same thing at the bottom of the Tool panel way over here on the left side of the screen. That double-headed arrow means swap the fill and stroke colors, so if you click on it, it literally switches the colors so what was the fill color becomes the stroke color, and vice versa. Now, I've got a dark brown stroke with a none fill. If there were a picture behind the text, you could literally see right through the middle of that letter. There is 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.

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