Chapter 6

Color and effects are what graphic designers affectionately know as the super powers to “make it pop” for those requests from clients. I’m joking, we all know it’s all about comic sans and WordArt! InDesign isn’t all about type and layout, it’s got so much more power under the hood. The ability to use color and effects actually saves you from having to jump between apps to create stunning artwork and content. With the Swatches and Color panels you can completely control all the color in your projects, whether it applies to frames, fills, text, strokes, gradients, highlights, or something else. You can create multiple swatches either manually or by extracting colors from placed images (a feature I would love to have in Photoshop), and save them in your CC Libraries (which are covered in chapter 9). It was David Blatner who once said that Photoshop and Illustrator are just plugins for InDesign, and to some extent I would agree with that. InDesign has consistently become a more powerful app for the design professional and has come to celebrate 20 years as the industry standard. I am proud to teach InDesign at conferences such as Photoshop World (don’t let the name distract you—it includes design too).

InDesign Fun Fact #6

InDesign CS originally shipped with 78 fonts. Today, with the CC2019 release, it is shipped with 16,000 available fonts and growing.