Chicago InDesign User GroupMeeting Summary
Styling for Success
Wed, Mar 19th, 2008 at 6:00 PM
Columbia College
Event Details
This month's standing-room-only meeting addressed Styles — Paragraph, Character, Object, and Table. Presenting were two local experts, Anne-Marie Concepción and Ken Hollern.
Jim Maivald, as usual, kicked off the meeting with a warm welcome, and custom-made cards for each registered participant. The cards contained a variety of useful information including InDesign shortcuts and rules in picas, points, and inches.
Anne-Marie, well known internationally for her podcasts and website with David Blatner (InDesignSecrets.com and Design Geek newsletter) kicked off the presentation with her take on styles. Quite simply, use them for everything you can! (A sentiment that Ken echoed later.)
Anne-Marie pointed out a number of subtle features, including a tip on assigning the default Object style. In a nutshell, create a new Object Style defining the properites for all subsequently created text frames. In the Object Style panel, Command- or Ctrl-drag the default icon from the "Basic Text Frame" to the newly create Object Style, and voilà!
Why not change "Basic Text Frame?" That's certainly an option, but when different documents are combined, or styles imported, having more than one "Basic Text Frame" is not an option, so confusion may reign. Along with the insights came queries for Adobe, like why isn't there a "deselect all" in the Object Styles panel? It's rare that all options are required.
We also learned best practices for creating Table Styles. Anne-Marie's method is to create the table, and style it properly. Now reverse-engineer the table beginning with Paragraph styles, followed by Cell Styles and then combining them together in a Table Style. If you go to Preferences > Type and turn on the "Create Links When Placing Text and Spreadsheet Files" option, the style will be maintained when the spreadsheet is updated, with a minor caveat - the Header and Footer rows will need to be reassigned. Nonetheless, this is a great time-saving tip.
For more of Anne-Marie's insights, see her website: http://www.senecadesign.com/designgeek/.
Ken Hollern followed with some real-world insights based on his work at Ambrosi. A lot of the circulars stuffed into the Sunday papers go through Ambrosi, and although it may look simple and repetitive, there are many challenges in producing a 72-page Christmas circular for 10 North American regions -- that's 720 pages. Their accuracy rating is above 98%. Given the number of details, how do they do it? Ken concentrated on how important planning is to their success. Style guides are critical; each circular has a detailed style guide containing examples of each style defined, and the rationale behind the style choices.
Some tips Ken shared were to define all Paragraph styles in All Caps and Character Styles in lowercase. Seems simple, but when you're processing thousands of pages, that's the idea -- keep it simple, and consistent.
Ken recommends sorting the style names alphabetically (remember, keep it simple and consistent). Style groups introduced in CS3 create some issues for consistency when importing styles from other documents. It's possible to get duplicate styles, one set within a style group and the other outside the style group. (Of course, a careful examination of the Import dialog box could avoid this issue, but deadline pressure is not always conducive to careful inspection.) The style guides are stored on a central server for easy access and are imported at the start of each cycle. If there's a change to the style guide during the production cycle, it's a simple matter of reimporting the style guide to update the documents.
Typically there are a good number of editors involved in the process, submitting Word documents. Ken has found that many of them are actually beginning to use styles! A simple tip to get the right styles into the Word templates is to copy the style guide from InDesign and paste into Word. The Paragraph and Character styles come in, and if you have savvy editors, part of the battle is done.
Other tips and information that was covered during the evening (there was so much!) included using the new Repeat option in nested styles, updating numbers and figures across multiple documents, and unique ways to use Character styles.
As usual, the evening concluded with an enthusiastic raffle of t-shirts, books, and of course InDesign. |
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