How To Create Nested Styles In Adobe InDesign CC

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Course contents
SECTION: 3
Creative Cloud APP 5:45
SECTION: 12
Workflow Speed Tips 20:41
SECTION: 17
Photoshop & Illustrator 13:32
SECTION: 22
Exporting & Printing Tricks 8:17

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Course info

74 lessons / 9 hours Certificate of achievement

Overview

Hi there, my name is Dan. I am an Adobe Certified Instructor and an Adobe Certified Expert for InDesign and I work as a professional graphic designer. This course is about advanced features, productivity & workflow speed tricks using Adobe InDesign. 

This course is not for people brand new to InDesign. It’s for people who already know and understand the fundamentals. 

If you are already happy adding text & images to InDesign documents then this course is for you. Even if you consider yourself a heavy user, I promise there will be things in here that will blow your InDesign mind. 

You’ll learn advanced font tricks using Typekit & Opentype fonts, font grouping & font pairing. Mastering colour features like the colour theme tool and colour modes as well as professional proofing for colours for print. We’ll set permanent defaults for fonts, colours & will learn how to turn hyphenation off for good, once and for all.  

What would an advanced InDesign course be without all the tactics to fully control paragraphs, auto expanding boxes, spanning & splitting columns. You’ll become a Styles master, using nested styles, grep styles, next styles & advanced object styles.  

We’ll make beautiful charts & graphs for your InDesign documents. You’ll learn the pros & cons of various digital distribution methods including Interactive PDF’s, EPUBs & the amazing Publish Online. 

You’ll become a master of long, text heavy documents, autoflowing, primary text frames & smart text reflow, cross referencing, indexes, text variables & the InDesign book feature. There is entire section dedicated to how to speed up your personal workflow & how to speed up InDesign and get it running super fast. 

We look at interactive forms & scripts. There is just so much we cover and I want to share everything here in the intro but I can’t. Have a look through the video list, there is an amazing amount we cover here in the course. 

If you’re one of those people using InDesign and you know there is probably a better way, a faster way to work then this is your course. 

Daniel Walter Scott

What are the requirements?

  • You will need a copy of Adobe InDesign 2018 or above. But you find that 95% of all the features in this course will work with earlier version of InDesign (e.g. CS6). A free trial can be downloaded from Adobe.

What am I going to get from this course?

  • 70 lectures 5+ hours of well structured content. 
  • Create PDF Forms
  • Master Long Documents.
  • Advanced Fonts
  • Master Styles
  • Shortcut Sheet
  • Create Charts & Infographics
  • Create Interactive Documents
  • Workflow Tactics
  • Shortcuts & Speed Tips
  • Advanced Creative Cloud Features
  • Tips for working with Photoshop & Illustrator
  • Using Scripts 
  • Exporting, Prepress & Printing tricks 
  • You will get the finished files so you never fall behind. 
  • Downloadable exercise files & cheat sheet. 
  • Forum support from me and the rest of the BYOL crew. 
  • Techniques used by professional graphic designers. 
  • Professional workflows and shortcuts. 
  • A wealth of other resources and websites to help your accelerate your career. 

What is the target audience?

  • This course is for people who already know InDesign and want to take their skills and speed to the maximum level. 
  • This is an advanced InDesign course, so you’ll need basic InDesign skills to find this course useful. 
  • This course is perfect for anyone that already knows how to insert images & add text. 
  • If you a completely new to InDesign try my InDesign Essentials course before starting this one.
  • This course is perfect for anyone that has completed my InDesign Essentials course.

Course duration 7 hours 45 mins + your study.
Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

Downloads & Exercise files

Download Exercise Files

Transcript

Hi there, in this video we're going to look at how to create a Nested Style. And what it's going to do is, I'm going to click in this paragraph anywhere, and I'm going to apply the Style that I've created for Feature, and magically, it's going to also apply a Character Style to all words right up until this colon. Super useful for a numbered list, or in our case, this Featured list. Let's go and learn how to do that now in InDesign.

So for this to work, let's open up a file that I've got made for us. It's in '06 Styles', open up 'Nested Styles', click 'Open'. Open up your 'Paragraph Styles' panel. It's under 'Window', 'Styles', 'Paragraph Styles'. Now our Nested Style, remember, is a way to connect Paragraph Styles and Character Styles together automatically. So you need both of them to exist first. So, first of all we're going to work on this Features list, and what you'll notice about it is that ‘Build to last’, and the colon ':', same with Timeless. So I would like a Style that automatically made this kind of bold and green.

So we need two things, we need a Paragraph Style, so I'm going to select all of this, and I'm going to say, let's make a new Paragraph Style. Even though there was a Body Copy 1, they have to be separate. Double click 'Paragraph Style 1', this one's going to be my 'Feature'. 'Feature Style', based on, I'd like to just go back to my 'Paragraph Style'. Click 'OK', it's up to you, that doesn't really matter. It's just my personal preference.

So we've got a Paragraph Style now, we're going to create a Character Style. So with nothing selected, go to 'Character Styles'. I'm going to create a new one. Double click it. This is going to be my 'Feature Character Style'. I should have called the other one Paragraph Style. And we're going to go to 'Basic Character Formats', and all I want to do is make it 'Bold'. And I'd like it to make the Character color our-- actually I don't have that green one, different document. I'm going to make mine the awful green. Just to prove a point. Click 'OK'. Nothing really happens. I've got a Paragraph Style over here called 'Feature Style', and then I've got a Character Style that's just as bold, and ugly green.

Now is when we connect them up. So nothing selected, go to Paragraph Styles, double click 'Feature Style'. And the Nested Style connects them in here. And some of the 'Drop Caps and Nested Styles'. So they get connected through the Paragraph Style. And we say, 'Nested Styles', that's 'New Nested Style'. Click there. Where it says 'None', I want this Nested Style to apply the 'Feature Character Style' that we made. That's the bold and ugly green. And now if I kind of click around, you'll see, preview's on, and at the moment, it's doing it all automatically through one word. So just going to the first word, applying the green and bold. That might work for you, you might just have the first word, and you need to make it that green and bold. So just a play at the Paragraph Style, and that will work.

What I'd like to do, is I'd like to go-- actually just so you know, you can go up to '2' words, click out. You'll see, it goes 2 words, up to you, but I would like to go through one, and instead of words you can go through here, and look at the different options. You might have a tab that you want to break across. Might be a certain amount of 'Letters' or 'Digits'. You go through the first three digits. You might have an 'Em Space', so we're on Em Space. I am going to actually delete the word 'Words', and actually use my own character, and put it in a colon, because that matches there, click off.

So what it's going to do now is, it's going to apply that Character Style through to the colon. This becomes really nice when I'm doing something else, so 'Graceful Design', click on this one here, I'm going to say, I want you to be a 'Feature Style'. Ah, it's broken. Because it's looking for that colon, it can't find it. I'm going to put in the colon here. Awesome, huh! So that's a Nested Style. And it's just a way to automatically connect Paragraph Styles and Character Styles, and in particular, it uses the beginning of the Paragraph as its starting point.

Now I want you to, on your own, create a new Paragraph Style for this group. And instead of using the Character for colon to stop it, I want you to change it and go and use this open bracket '('. The only difference would be, there was an option that said 'Through to', you're going to say 'Upto', because we want it to stop before it gets here. All right, so that's how to create a Nested Style in InDesign.

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