Why Should I Use Character 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

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Transcript

Hi there, we're going to create a Character Style. Why? Because we've created a Character Style for this first paragraph here, and the nice thing about it is that because it's connected to a Paragraph Style I can open up 'Body Copy', just pick a new font, let's pick 'Comic Sans'. And our lovely Character Style adjusts, it's pink, it's Bold, but it's taking the lead from our Paragraph Style and staying in that font, but being bold and pink, and awfully Comic Sans, sorry, Comic Sans. All right, let's look at how to set one of these up.

So to learn what a Character Style does let's first of all go into 'File', 'New', and create a 'Document'. Let's go to 'Print', we're going to use 'US Letter', make it '2' columns. Click 'Create'. I'm going to bring in some long text, so let's go to 'File', 'Place'. I'm going to use one of our earlier shortcuts. I'm want to bring it over from '06 Style', it's called 'Text'. I want to turn on 'Show Import Options', but I don't want to turn that on forever. So remember, I hold down my 'Shift' key, and I click 'Open'. I get the little custom box, just for this one instance. And I'm going to say 'Remove Styles', click 'OK'. And, remember another little shortcut from earlier? What do I hold on my keyboard so this generates lots of pages? Hold down 'Shift', and get that little curly arrow icon. If I click once in the top left here it generates pages for me all the way through, and they're all linked. Lovely!

First of all we need to create a Paragraph Style because you'd never have a Character Style without a Paragraph Style. You kind of use them on top of, to add value to a Paragraph Style. So we're going to select on all, we're going to pick-- I'm going to pick 'Roboto Medium'. I'm going to pick '10 pt', and I'm going to create a Paragraph Style. So 'Window', 'Styles', 'Paragraph Styles'. We've created lots of Paragraph Styles already. Click on 'Create New Style', double click where it says 'Paragraph Style 1' We're going to call ours 'Body Copy'. So we've got a Paragraph Style, now we want Character Styles.

The reason we have a Character Style is that you can add a little bit of extraness to our Paragraph Style. Let's say I want to do this first paragraph here, and I want to go through and make it bold, and a color. I want to go through and make it bold, and I want to make it pink color. So that could be my first Paragraph Style. I can create any other Paragraph Style but then I've got two styles doing a lot of the same work. The only thing different about this is the color and the boldness. So what I want to do, I'm going to undo that, and going to have nothing selected, and create a Character Style that does one thing. So I've got nothing selected, new Paragraph Style, click on this one. He's going to be 'First Para'.

What I'm going to do is, under 'Basic Formats' I'm going to say, whatever font it is, make it bold, and the Character color now is going to be switched out for the pink. Click 'OK'. That Character Style does nothing but those two things. You double click on it and say, I'm bold, and I'm pink. The cool thing about it is that if I apply it to my Paragraph Style Body Copy on top of it, I'm going to add this paragraph. Where it becomes quite useful, especially over longer documents is that if I go in and adjust Paragraph Styles now, so with nothing selected, double click 'Body Copy', 'Basic Character Formats'. Actually we're not using Roboto anymore, we're going to be using Arial. But that's okay, click on 'OK'. Now you'll notice that it changed from Roboto to Arial including everything that was underneath this Character Style because that Character Style said, remember, just do two things, be bold, be pink. So it doesn't really care what font it is. Let's go and change it again, something a bit more craziness. Let's go mad, okay? 'Comic Sans'. The font we love to hate, but it's bold and pink, let's undo that quick.

So that's the reason for a Character Style. They're quite simple, you might already know about them but we need to know this to carry on with lots of other styles we're going to create like Nested, and Grep. So let's get on with those now.

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