3.3 Character & Paragraph Styles

Hi everyone. In this lesson I'm going to show you how to tackle character and paragraph styles for your magazine design. Now the great thing about character and paragraph styles is they make life so much easier for you. And I have touched on this in other lessons but I'm gonna show you how to use this specifically for magazine design because you can set your typography styles in advance, and you have access to those throughout your entire project. Or if you are like me, and you tend to design on the fly, you can create these styles as you work. Now another thing to note about paragraph styles is that they make it so easy to swap things out. So if you for example have a Sans Serif rather large, rather bold, and you want to try a Serif headline that is thinner and less bold. You can do that very quickly with the character paragraph style and see what you like. This is a great way to test your fonts against each other and see what styles work well without having to manually go through and change out everything. One little change in your style will apply to any instance of that in your magazine design, which again, makes it very quick and efficient. Let's go ahead and design here and investigate what's possible with our paragraph styles. Now, you'll find those options over here in your panel. If you don't see them, you can go to Type & Tables and you can hit your paragraph and your character to bring those up. If they're not there, that's actually there in older versions, it will be under Styles in CS6 and you can see that you have your Character Styles and your Paragraph Styles. I already have those open so lets go ahead and take a look. These are pretty standard. You'll see these in a lot of different, for example if download any templates or anything like that, you'll see a lot of because they're common to magazines. Now you can see there's quite a list of Character Styles here, and that right now there is only a couple different options for Paragraph Styles. First off, what's the difference Character Styles work well for individual areas. So if you have headlines, if you have quotes, if you have little bits of text that you wanna style, Character Styles are good for that. Paragraph Styles work well for giant blocks of text that you want to style. Where character styles are better for those individual areas. So that's why you'll see more in a Character Style than in a Paragraph Style listing. However, it's entirely up to you how you want to use this. So let's look in here a little bit to see what's up. For example, if we go into our headline one, everything here is styled for us for a headline. And I'm actually going to select some text, that way as I make some edits to this, you can see it in action. And notice that the little plus sign comes up to a style, if you change a style that little plus sign comes up until you save it. It means that you've edited a current style. And so you can give it any name that you want here. This one is H1 Headline. H1 stands for large headline. It's the biggest headline that you have. It kind of goes to web design, if you are familiar with that language, where H1 is the biggest of all headlines. H2 is smaller, H3 is smaller still, H4 is smaller still. So that's an easy way for you to keep track of the size of your headline that you're using. Under Basic Character Formats, it's just selecting your font choice. So you have your Font Family here, the style the size, any letting, tracking current in case. All of that can be decided for you. If you wanna have any other options down here, you can use that. There's some advanced character options as well. For example, if you want to scale vertically or horizontally down you can do that. And then you can select a color If you want to have a specific color for your headline you can do that here. You can even add any strokes or tints to this. And then there's other options down here that you more than likely will not get into unless you want to use them such as underlining or strikethrough options. You can have that down here. The neat thing is that as you're working through you can select Preview here, and you can see these options come into play for your headline as you change them if you want to. So you can see that in action before you hit OK. I'm gonna hit Cancel. And you can see that it changed that for us to all one color, all one size for our headline. I'm just going to undo that real quick. So this was editing a current style. You can do the same thing by clicking this arrow and having a new Character Style and you can build one completely from scratch, name it whatever you want and go through all of these steps. See how it's blank for you and you can add anything that you want here to create your own style. So just for some basics, we have some basic body_black, that's just this paragraph text here. Just black paragraph text. Then we have a bold version, and you can see that I have that text frame selected, it's changing that for us. As I go through and click through, and then we have larger text as well. So this works really well if you wanna have the majority of your text black, for example, but then you just wanna highlight a certain area and have that large. See what happens. You can emphasize that. That works great for interviews. Where you have one color for the question and one color for the answer. We have a drop cap option so if I select the first letter there it automatically applies this great drop cap for us and again, this is all just styles of a selected font. Then we have all of our headlines, we have sub head options. Quote options if I want to select it and make it immediately make a block quote. Notice we have different color, we have a different font, it's italicized, and that we have some spacing between the lines to make it larger and easier to read. Then we have a smaller headline, then we have some other options down here. So that's what makes character styles so awesome. And the same thing where, its the same principle for your paragraph. It's the same idea. You would click over here, and then you would style your paragraph as you need to. You have this same option, you have basic character formatting. The only thing you have different with paragraphs versus characters is the ability to indent the entire paragraph because again, dealing with blocks. So you can set tab guidelines, you can set rules for your paragraph, how you wanna hyphenate it. I usually don't hyphenate my paragraphs for example. If you want to justify it you can have spanned columns, drop cap options here. So this is for the bigger block of text and how this entire section of work versus individual selections that you would use for your Character Styles.