Easter Egg Stroke Styles
Hey, it's Friday. Time for a little fun easter egg involving stroke styles (including one brand new one in CS4).
It’s Friday, and my brain is pretty shot from doing conference sessions all week. So I think it’s time to revisit an old easter egg which has gotten (very slightly) improved in CS4. This undocumented easter egg has been around for years:
- Choose Stroke Styles from the Stroke panel menu.
- Click New.
- Choose Stripe from the Type pop-up menu.
- Give the stripe this name: Rainbow
- Click Add (to add it and keep making more strokes) or OK (if you’re done making strokes).
There are a number of other stroke styles you can make. For example, use a Dash (instead of a Stripe type) and name it Woof, Happy, Feet, or Lights. Here are the results of each of these special stroke styles applied to lines:

Now, in CS4, there is one more: You can make a stripe called Rasta. It’s sort of like Rainbow… but different.
No, you can’t make your own. No, you cannot customize these. Yes, they really do print.
The fact that InDesign can put relatively arbitrary shapes along a path like this leads me to wonder if we will someday be able to create our own. But I’d be pretty happy if we could even just import the custom Brushes made in Illustrator. That would be truly awesome. Well, a guy can dream, no?
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on November 14, 2008
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