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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This is great! The effect is clean and doesn’t look exaggerated. Thanks David!
Dratseration. Ah well, less risks of things moving around unexpectedly that way I guess.
@Quentin: That’s the way preferences work — each document has its own prefs. If you change a pref while all docs are closed, it only affects documents you create from then on.
Huh – weird. Changing the default with all documents closed works for new documents, but when I opened an old one in which a drap shadow already existed, its settings overrode those I defined as long as it remained open. Anybody knows why?
@Don : I think that if you close all ID documents and THEN open the drop shadow dialog box, any setting you change in there (or in any other DB for that matter) becomes the new default for ID.
The only caveat in this case is that editing those effect parameters turns on Drop Shadow by default, which will apply it to any and all subsequently created items. Just remember to turn it off before opening a doc and it won’t apply – but the settings you input in the dialog box should stick.
How can you create a standard for drop shadow and keep it as a preference. Haven’t been able to make it stick as a default.
Thanks
don
Quentin: Good idea! Like it.
I may be wrong, but wouldn’t it have been slightly easier to create a duplicate style with the effects applied to the text instead of the object, through the drop-down list over the “effects” area of that dialog box?
Link to it a paragraph style that formats your text and colors it magenta and voila, you’re done in one click.
To apply it to the text, I first applied the jelly object style to the text frame. Then I opened the Effects panel. The fx icon is in the right column, in the Object row. You can drag that fx icon down to Text, a couple of rows down. Now all the effects are applied to the text, rather than the object.
Cool effect David. I’m not understanding how you applied the effect to the text. I know where the word Text is in the Effects panel but I’m not able to figure out what fx icon, from where, to drag. Lame, I know!