From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Using object styles - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Using object styles

- [Instructor] Now that you're familiar with character styles and paragraph styles, it's time to talk about object styles. Yes, that's right, you can define an object style that with a single click will apply all sorts of object formatting, such as fill and stroke, transparency effects and more. Let's make an object style in this document from the exercise files folder. First, I'll press option or alt page up a couple of times to jump to this spread. Now I can select one of these images and I'll apply some formatting to it as an example. How about we apply a gray stroke here? Let's make it much thicker, how about eight points? Next, let's make it really pop by going to the effects menu and choosing drop shadow. That looks fine, so great, I like this. Let's make an object style out of that. The object styles panel is over here in the dock. If you don't see it in the dock, you can switch to the advanced workspace and the application bar, or you could find this in the window menu. Now we want to make a new object style based on the frame that we've selected on the page. To do that, we'll go to the object styles panel menu in the upper right corner and choose new object style. I'll give it a name, I'm just going to call it photos. You can call it anything you want, and it's hard to tell at first, but all the formatting that I had applied to that object is pulled up here into this dialog box because I had it selected on the page. For example, I'll click on the stroke pane on the left, and we can see that, yep, there's my eight point gray stroke. Down here, it even shows the drop shadow, and you can add some cool additional features here inside this dialog box. For example, I want to ensure that the images are always filling the frame, so I'm going to scroll down in this little list here, and I'll choose frame fitting options, and I'll set the fitting pop-up menu to fill frame proportionally. Let's go ahead and set the crop amount to zero as well. Great, that's good enough, let's go ahead and click okay. And then we can apply that object style to the selected object simply by clicking once on it inside the object styles panel. So now next time you want to apply that object style, you can simply select a frame. I'll click this one down here, and then I'll shift click this one over there, and then to apply it, we simply click on the object style. Easy peasy. All that formatting is now applied to those frames. Of course, just like paragraph and character styles, it's really easy to edit those styles too. To do that, just change one of them on the page. For example, I'll select this one on the left. Let's remove that drop shadow by clicking on the drop shadow button, and then I'll click on this little yellow box in the upper right corner. That gives me my corner options diamonds, and I can drag those over to get rounded corners. Nice, so then as we saw in the last movie, you can make all those changes apply to all the other objects that have this style applied to them by opening up the object styles panel menu, and then choosing redefined style. Object styles are one of the most powerful but most underused features in InDesign. You can use InDesign without using styles, but you'll never be truly efficient unless you do.

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