Holiday Text FX, part 3: Fun With Nested Styles

Mike Rankin

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For the third and final installment of Holiday Text FX, I thought it would be fun to use some nested styles to make this cheery greeting.

Start with some text in a fun font. This is Neuva Std.

Use the text as the basis for a new paragraph style. In the Drop Caps and Nested Styles panel, create and apply two character styles.

The first character style applies a red fill and a baseline shift.

The second character style just applies a green fill.

Be sure to use the Repeat option so the character styles alternate throughout the text.

Also, be aware that if you apply the nested character styles to alternating characters instead of letters, you might run into some problems with white space or punctuation, since spaces, apostrophes, commas, etc would be counted in the alternating pattern. For example if your text was “Season’s Greetings” applying the nested character styles to alternating characters would result in this look where you end up with three green letters in a row:

This is because the apostrophe and the space between the words are counted as characters in the alternating pattern.

By applying the nested styles to alternating letters you avoid that problem.

Now, back to our original example. If you want to add some effects to the text, you can experiment with things like a thick stroke in a very light tint of black, enhanced by a little bit of bevel and emboss and a drop shadow.

You can add a golden glittery texture to the fill of the letters by first creating a second copy of the text frame directly on top of the original by copying it and choosing Edit > Paste in Place. Then remove the stroke from the new set of letters and apply an Inner Glow with Choke and Noise. Sounds kinda violent, but it looks quite nice.

The Noise creates the texture, and the Choke limits the spread of the texture to the center of the letter shapes.

To finish it off, add a wintry photo underneath the text.

As I mentioned in the previous posts, if you enjoy these text FX, definitely check out my InDesign FX videos on lynda.com. So far, there are 70 of ’em for your viewing pleasure and new ones premiere every other Thursday.

And most of all, Happy Holidaze from one InDesign geek to another :)