Hey, InDesign Magazine issue 31 (August/September) just came out last week, jam packed full of fun stuff. The lead article is a collection of fun and wacky special effects that you can create in InDesign. I have to admit that I’m a sucker for these kinds of things.
For example, I liked reading about Mike McHugh’s “jelly” effect so much that I had to run and mix it up myself. It took a while to get the ingredients just right for my eye, but when I did, I saved it as an object style. You can download my INX file with that object style here. Just draw your own shape, apply the jelly object style to it and it’ll transform. Even better, go in and tweak the colors or effects of the object style to get your own effect. (It’s probably a good idea to read Mike’s short recipe in the magazine first, in order to understand what’s going on.)
Here’s an example of the object style applied to a rectangle and some text:
(I had to be tricky to apply the object style to the text, of course. After I clicked the object style, InDesign applied the effect to the whole frame. So I dragged the fx icon in the Effects icon down to the word Text in the Effects panel, set the background color of the frame to None, and set the color of the text itself to Magenta. A bit clunky, but it worked.)
Anyway, thanks Mike for the fun trick, and thanks InDesign Magazine for giving us even more tricks! Check ’em out, along with two articles by Pariah Burke about free add-ons that will help you get your work done, a review by Anne-Marie Concepcion on Ctrl Changes “blacklining” plug-in for tracking changes in InDesign documents, and more!
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on August 17, 2009
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