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InDesign’s Super Strokes

Jeff Witchel shows how to unlock the power of custom stroke styles.

If your inner designer has ever wanted to spice up an otherwise fairly staid project—or if you hanker for the extravagant creative possibilities for line styling in Illustrator—you may sometimes wish you had a little more creative leeway with stroke styling in InDesign. But, wait—you do! Hidden deep in the Stroke panel menu is your key to unlocking a little-known feature: custom InDesign stroke styles. I think you’re going to like these. But before we jump into the details of creating cool stroke effects, let’s walk through the fundamentals of working with stroke styles.

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Jeff Witchel graduated from Pratt Institute in 1973 with a B.F.A. (Cum Laude) in Advertising Design and Visual Communications. He has been an award-winning advertising art director, writer, designer, illustrator, and TV producer ever since. Before starting his own advertising agency in New Jersey, Jeff built his career at top New York ad agencies such as Young & Rubicam, Grey Advertising, and Wells, Rich, Greene. Over the years, he has created award-winning work for many clients including AT&T, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Jell-O Pudding, The Plaza Hotel, and Pfizer. His many prestigious awards include N.Y. Art Directors Club Gold Award, One Show Gold Award, N.J. Art Directors Club Award, multiple Andy Awards, Graphis Annual, numerous readership awards, plus an Emmy Award nomination. Jeff is a self-taught computer artist with over 23 years of experience. His initial introduction to the computer was with PageMaker, but he switched to Quark 1.0 when it was first introduced in 1987. Having arrived on the desktop publishing scene so early, Jeff became the ?go to? guy for answers when others started getting into computer graphics. As an Adobe Certified Expert, he?s provided online support for Adobe and is now an Adobe Certified Training Provider for both Adobe Illustrator CS4 and Adobe InDesign CS4. Jeff is also a Quark Certified Expert in QuarkXPress 6, which comes in handy in helping ?switchers? to make a smooth transition to InDesign. He counts among his training clients ad agencies, design studios, magazines, newspapers, illustrators, and photographers. Jeff writes for both Layers magazine and InDesign magazine and has authored and been the Instructor for various training DVDs as well as online videos for both InDesign and Illustrator. He also writes online tutorials for www.LayersMagazine.com and is the author of ?Layers Magazine Tip of the Day,? which is received by nearly 20,000 subscribers each weekday.
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