Discover how to stylize your text in InDesign, from centering within a rectangle to creating space and changing color. Learn to enhance your layout with customized options for more professional and eye-catching designs.
Key Insights
- The article provides a step-by-step guide on how to stylize text in InDesign, starting with highlighting the text, centering it within a rectangle, and adjusting its size to 18 points for better readability.
- The article also explains the process of aligning text to the right-hand side, creating separation between different sections of text using the 'space after' option, and changing text color to 'paper' (or white) for better contrast.
- Further techniques include customizing text size for different lines of text, capitalizing certain sections for emphasis, adding placeholder text, and adjusting the text frame to fit margins.
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In this video, we're going to begin stylizing our text. So let's begin actually here with our design begins and ends with your lifestyle.
We'll select this text and let's begin stylizing it. The first thing we want to do is we're going to want to double-click and hit CTRL + A so we have all of the text highlighted. From here, let's center our text, go into the top control bar and selecting Center Paragraph.
And also let's increase the size of our text. We can do this in the control bar, clicking up and let's put it right at 18 points. Looking at this now, we now want to center it within a rectangle.
To do this, let's go back to our Selection tool and with this text frame selected, let's now change how our text is centered within the frame. To do this, we can go to our alignment options within our control bar and we're going to select Align Center. In addition, if we hit W on the keyboard, we can see a preview and this text is pretty close to the edge of our page.
So let's bring it in a little bit. To do this, we could drag the left-hand side over to our margin and hit W again, but now it's a little bit skewed to the right. So let's hit W again and hit CTRL + Z to undo the sizing.
Instead, what we want to do is still drag it over to the right, but when we drag, if we hold ALT on the keyboard, we'll see that the text frame actually moves to the inside, both from the left and the right-hand side. We'll release and this looks pretty good. If we hit CTRL + Shift + A, we can deselect this text frame and hit W and this looks good.
We've finalized the styling of this text. Let's next go back up to the top and we'll work with our text here. The first thing we want to do is click inside the text frame and let's hit CTRL + A as we want to align all of these to the right-hand side.
We'll Paragraph Align Right and from here, we want to create some separation between our top text of our phone number, our tagline, and the URL below. If you used other word document processes before, you might hit ENTER and add a couple of lines of ENTER and add a couple lines between. However, for InDesign, we have more customized options.
Instead, with InDesign, what we're going to do is highlight the top line and if we open up our Properties panel, we can go to our Paragraph options and what we'll do is we're going to add a space after. This will create space if we click up between our top line and our tagline. So let's leave it at 0.375 inches and we're going to do the same thing right after our tagline between our line and our URL.
We'll again go to Space After and let's do the same spacing of 0.375 inches. From here, now let's change our text. If we hit CTRL + A, we can select all the text and let's make this text white instead of black.
We'll go to our control bar and click on the text and for InDesign, we actually use the term paper instead of white because paper means that there's no ink behind it. We'll select Paper and this looks pretty good and we just need to resize this text. Starting at the top here, we'll highlight the phone number and let's change our phone number to a size of 12.
So it's slightly bigger but not too big. Next, we'll change our tagline and we really want to increase the size here. So let's increase it all the way to size 26.
For our URL placeholder, we'll triple-click the text to highlight this line and let's also leave it at 12 points. As one final change here, let's highlight our tagline and rather than having just capital letters for our first letters, let's actually make it all caps. We can go into our Character panel and we can actually select All Caps.
We'll hit CTRL + Shift + A to deselect and let's hit W on the keyboard to see what this looks like. This looks good. We now have our top section stylized, this yellow section stylized and now let's work on the bottom.
We'll hit W again and from here, let's triple-click this line and for this line, let's increase the size to 18. In addition, let's also capitalize this F and I'll hit ENTER right before it so that it moves to the next line. This looks a little more consistent.
From here, let's also add some placeholder text right below. To do this, I'll click right at the end of this text and I'll hit ENTER and from here, we want the placeholder text to be a bit smaller. Let's decrease the size from 18, double-clicking within our control bar and let's type 10 and hit ENTER.
Next, we're ready to add placeholder text. To do this, we'll right-click and we're simply going to click Fill with Placeholder Text and here we have lots of placeholder text now. Let's delete about half of it as we don't need that much placeholder text and we'll throw a period right at the end.
Next, let's resize this so it fits within our bottom rectangle a little bit better. We'll hit CTRL + Shift + A to deselect it and then hit V on the keyboard so that we have our Selection tool. We'll select the text frame and let's first move it in so it fits the margins and finally for the top here, let's move it down.
If we hit W on the keyboard, you can see what this looks like. I think we actually need to inch it in a little bit more, a little further from the edges. Let's hit W and with our text frame selected, we're going to move it in about an eighth of an inch.
If we go to the top here, we'll see that there's a white line along the ruler. So as we resize, we're going to be utilizing that white line to see where we are. To do this, we'll click and drag to the right and remember to hold ALT so it moves from both sides.
Then when we're about an eighth of an inch over, we'll release and I think this looks good. As our final step here, we'll click right at the end of our line, highlight this bottom line here of our title and let's add a little space. And now we have a little bit of space between our top title and our placeholder text.
It's a final step or move this period. It all looks like it's one sentence and let's hit CTRL + Shift + A and W to see our work. Let's hit CTRL + S on the keyboard to save our work and in the next video, we'll be working on page two.
See you there.