BONUS CHAPTER 13

Planning Projects
with Styles in Mind
KNOWLEDGE OF THE ins and outs of styles and their re-
lated features is essential for any InDesign user, but a
strategic approach to exploiting those features from the
very beginning of a project is equally important.

I often tell students, clients, and seminar audiences,

“If you have to do something more than once, only do
it once.” This means that any formatting that will be
repeated is worth creating a style for. Therefore, almost
every paragraph, table, and object in your project is a
candidate for a style. At the earliest stages of any project,
styles should be your first consideration before you give
any thought to typefaces, column widths, colors, or any
other specifics.

A strategic style approach starts with resisting the instinct

to dump everything into InDesign and make decisions on
the page. Instead, step back. You wouldn’t build a house
by dumping the raw materials on a plot of land and fig-
uring out what the house will look like as you go. You’d
need a plan.
2 BONUS CHAPTER 13 Planning Projects with Styles in Mind

An InDesign layout is no different, and the plan starts with determining the
structure of your incoming content. This isn’t just the most efficient strategy; it’s
the best design strategy.

To create great-looking documents, designers and production artists combine

presentation with structure. For text and tables, presentation refers to typeface,
weight, alignment, spacing, and so on. For objects, presentation means size,
color, shape, transparency, and more. Structure, on the other hand, refers to
the organization of the text and objects in a project—what role they play in the
informational hierarchy. Every project—and by extension, every document—
requires structure.

Presentation is intended to support, and when done very well, it illuminates that
structure. Hence the adage “form follows function.” By determining a project’s
structure before its appearance, you can anticipate what its style needs will be.

Style Triage
I first heard the word “triage” in an episode of M*A*S*H, where its battlefield
connotation refers to quickly assessing—and prioritizing the treatment of—
wounded soldiers. The word originates from the French trier (to separate out),
meaning “the action of sorting according to quality.” Style triage should be per-
formed before a single word or image hits the InDesign page.

ASSESS YOUR CONTENT

A preliminary examination of your content’s structure gives you a better under-
standing of what you’re presenting to the audience and what some of your chal-
lenges in doing so are likely to be. You’re assessing its condition to determine
how it should be treated. The better you understand it, the better equipped you
are to make smart, effective design decisions.

PLAN YOUR STYLES

Consider a newsletter. At a minimum, a newsletter has headlines, decks, by-
lines, and article body copy. You’ll need a style for each. Each article in the
newsletter may benefit from a special treatment of its first paragraph (a drop
cap or nested line style, perhaps). You’ll need a style for that, too, and it should
probably be based on the body copy style for greater efficiency and consistency.
Captions? Yes, captions will require another style. Pull quotes? That’s another
style. Depending on the newsletter, there may also be sidebars. Those sidebars
will have their own unique body copy and headline treatment. You’ll need styles
for those, too, and they’ll probably be in a different kind of text frame so they
stand out as sidebars. That will require an object style, and it would make sense
 ADOBE INDESIGN CS4 STYLES How to Create Better, Faster Text and Layouts 3

to build the sidebar’s paragraph styles into that object style, perhaps with the
Apply Next Style attribute selected to speed things up.

At this point, nothing has been revealed about the appearance of this newslet-
ter, nor has its audience, tone, physical dimensions, number of pages, and so on
been mentioned. But you already know of nine paragraph styles the newsletter
needs, and that at least one will be based on another. You know it will need an
object style that will have paragraph styles associated with it. You don’t know
what typeface will be used for the body copy or what color the sidebar back-
ground will be, but that doesn’t matter.

BREAK IT DOWN
Style triage is a clinical process, whereas design is an intuitive process. But
structure drives presentation, so start with structure. Look at the content
you’ve been provided. Understand it as a whole, and then break it down into its
smaller parts. Everything—travel guides, directories, catalogs, and magazine
and newsletter articles—can be reduced into smaller pieces. The more you
break things down into “content blocks,” the closer you are to determining ex-
actly what styles you’ll need and how they’ll relate to one another. Also, when
you break down a large project into smaller pieces, it immediately becomes
less overwhelming.

Web designers are quite familiar with this “chunking” method for evaluating con-
tent. Without print constraints, Web sites can grow to thousands of pages, all of
which require a uniform structure and presentation. Sheer volume has made Cas-
cading Style Sheets (CSS) the de facto standard by which Web designers format
and modify their sites. Without CSS, most Web sites—and the designers tasked to
maintain them—would collapse beneath an unmanageable workload. Similarly,
the XML markup language tags content as what it is but includes no information
about how it looks.

Print designers should take a page out of their Web counterparts’ book and
think about the content of their documents as exactly what it is—an asset to be
managed and dealt with as efficiently and consistently as possible.

Creating “Undefined” Styles

Once you know what styles a document will require, start creating those styles
in your InDesign document. Define them by creating and naming each style, but
don’t specifically set up their formatting yet. Save that for later. The particulars
of the style—its form—are irrelevant at the planning stages. In other words,
create a body copy style, a headline style, and so on, but don’t bother defining
4 BONUS CHAPTER 13 Planning Projects with Styles in Mind

their font, size, or anything else. You’re just building a “style sheet” at this point,
not choosing any specific attributes. For text, this should require no more effort
than the following:

1. Create a new paragraph style (see Chapter 1, “The Fundamentals: Para-

graph and Character Styles”).
2. Name the style.

3. If you’ve examined the content well, you’ll know if the style should be
based on another style. If so, establish that relationship from the Based
On menu (see Chapter 2, “Nesting and Sequencing Styles”). As you begin
to define the parent style later, you’ll simultaneously send those attributes
out to all of its child styles.
4. If you know the order in which styles will appear (headline, then deck,
then byline), establish those sequences with the Next Style option (see
Chapter 2).
5. Click OK.

For object styles (sidebar frames, caption frames, graphic frames, etc.), you’ll
need to follow a similar process:

1. Create a new object style (see Chapter 5, “Object Styles”).

2. Name the style.

3. If the object style is for a text frame and you know which text style should
be assigned to it, select that style from the Paragraph Style menu in the
Paragraph Styles area of the New Object Style dialog. If appropriate, select
the Apply Next Style check box to enable sequential application of text
styles (see Chapter 2) in that frame.
4. Click OK.

That’s all you need to do to add each barely defined style to your document and
build your style sheet. The next step will be to apply those styles to “mark” con-
tent as what it is—headline text, a sidebar frame, and so on.

Character styles haven’t been mentioned in this process yet, largely because char-
acter styles are a smaller detail. You may have a general idea of where you’ll need
some character styles, but they’ll still need to be built into nested styles, nested
line styles, or GREP styles as you define your styles later, so they can be estab-
lished at that time. Also, if you’ve established flexible character styles as described
in Chapter 2 and saved them as document defaults, you’ll already have a handful
of basic formatting—bold, italic, all caps, and so forth—that you can start with.
 ADOBE INDESIGN CS4 STYLES How to Create Better, Faster Text and Layouts 5

Power-apply Your Styles

After you’ve built your document’s style sheet, you need to apply those mini-
mally defined styles to the text and objects on the page. By doing so, you as-
sociate all your content with a style, much the same way XML markup “tags”
content for what it is. The difference is that later in the process these styles will
also serve to format everything they’re applied to.

In a relatively small project like a four-page newsletter or music CD package,

selecting specific text and individual objects and then applying the styles you
created may be efficient enough. For larger projects, however, you need to step
back yet again and determine a plan for applying the most styles to the largest
amount of content in the fewest possible steps.

Where aesthetics are concerned, less is more, but where text processing is con-
cerned, more is much, much better. If a handful of paragraphs and objects need
styles applied on an individual basis, that’s fine. The rest should be handled in
bulk. Here are a few useful methods of “processing” text for fast style applica-
tion that can be employed individually or combined for greater efficiency.

Capitalize on work that’s already done. If your text is coming in from a Word or
RTF file and even the most basic styles (Body Text, Heading 1, Heading 2, etc.)
have been applied in the source document, take advantage of that with Style
Mapping in the Microsoft Word Import Options dialog as you import the text
(see Chapter 4, “Auto-styling Imported Word and Excel Files”). Similarly, if you’re
placing a number of Excel files, you could apply loosely defined table styles dur-
ing the import process (see Chapter 4 and Chapter 6, “Table and Cell Styles”).

Start with the most text. If you don’t have pre-styled text to import, you can ap-
ply styles quickly by considering the entire range of text to be formatted. Deal
with the largest amount of text first, and then change the rest by exception. In
other words, if you bring in a large amount of text and 80 percent of it is body
copy, select it all and apply your body copy paragraph style. By doing so you’ve
accomplished 80 percent of your style application in one step and only have to
work through the remaining 20 percent.

If you follow this 80/20 principle on text with some character styles or local
overrides applied (bold or italics, for example), be sure to apply the “majority”
style in a way that preserves those overrides. With the text selected, clicking
the paragraph style name will not remove overrides. Option/Alt-clicking will
remove local overrides, but not character styles, and Shift-Option/Alt-clicking
will remove character styles and local overrides.
6 BONUS CHAPTER 13 Planning Projects with Styles in Mind

Let Find/Change do the work. The most powerful tool at your disposal for fast
style application is Find/Change (see Chapter 8, “Advanced Find/Change with
Styles”). Since formatting can be found and changed as easily as text, Find/
Change can make short work of document-wide style application. Implement-
ing this requires looking for commonalities in your text. Text searches may help
with text that’s entirely consistent, but if exact words don’t appear, look for
patterns that lend themselves to a GREP search. For example, in a newsletter,
the by-line for an article’s author will probably be on its own line and start with
the word “by.” A GREP query can search for the beginning of a line followed by
the word by (^b y ), leave the text intact, and apply a by-line paragraph style to all
matches regardless of the author’s name. Well-organized content will lend itself
to this kind of Find/Change-based formatting best.

Use GREP searches. Don’t just set up your Find/Change searches individually.
Go for the most bang for your formatting buck. In a truck catalog, for example,
a style might be needed for technical specifications where each paragraph
starts with one of four lead-in terms like Engine, Transmission, Front Axle, and
Rear Axle—each followed by a colon. That’s not four text searches, it’s one GREP
search (see Chapter 8) for the beginning of a line followed by Engine or Trans-
mission or Front Axle or Rear Axle, followed by a colon. Using this search, but
leaving the text unchanged and applying a “Specs” paragraph style, reduces four
steps to just one for as many times as that style needs to be used.

After you’ve exhausted all machine-based options, like those just mentioned,
you’ll have whittled your workload down significantly. Whatever’s left over can
be styled one instance at a time. Not every project will allow you to eliminate all
the manual work through this process, but if you’ve eliminated most of it, the
rest is much easier to handle.

Redefine, Redefine, Redefine

Have you ever painted a room in your home based on a little swatch of color
and then realized after covering the walls of a 200-square-foot room that it
looked nothing like the little swatch you liked so much? Imagine if you could
hold that swatch against the wall and watch as its color instantly covered the
walls throughout the room. Then suppose you could pull it away, have the wall
revert to its original color, hold up a different swatch, and immediately see its
impact on the entire room. This cascading effect is exactly what an “apply first,
define later” strategy affords.

An indecisive (although I prefer the term “experimentally curious”) designer’s best

friend is the Redefine Style option in each style type’s panel menu. As you locally
modify formatting in a style and decide that’s how you want the style to look,
 ADOBE INDESIGN CS4 STYLES How to Create Better, Faster Text and Layouts 7

choosing Redefine Style will use the parameters of the current selection (text in a TIP
paragraph, a graphic frame, a table cell, etc.) and rewrite that style to match. Character, object, cell,
and table styles don’t have
Once structure has been determined and styles have been created and applied, default keyboard shortcuts
you’re done with the “mechanics” of the process. You can then allow your free- for their Redefine Style
command, but you can as-
wheeling, seat-of-the-pants, I’ll-know-it-when-I-see-it nature to take over. The
sign your own shortcut by
details and nuances of those styles can be defined and perfected in your design choosing Edit > Keyboard
exploration process. You’re free to make decisions and refinements intuitively Shortcuts. From the Key-
on the page, choose Redefine Style, and see the results of those decisions board Shortcuts dialog,
throughout your document, instantly and consistently. Sometimes, what looks select Panel Menus from
the Product Area menu,
good in the one paragraph you’re modifying may not look as good replicated
and then navigate to the
through a page, spread, or entire document. Unlike painting a room, however, panel menu name and
your style decisions can be instantaneously undone, rethought, and fine-tuned, submenu item (Object
and the styles can be redefined again. Styles:Redefine Style or
Cell Styles:Redefine Style,
for example).