This was my comment on Thomas Silkjær’s InDesigning.net post in his Better Typography series: Creating and organising styles. Thought it might be good to post it here, though it deserves a much more lengthy writeup perhaps. …Perhaps.
It highlights my use of style naming conventions to help streamline style inheritance. I'm also curious how I could do this better!!
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Problem
What’s lacking with styles is clear indication of inheritance. How do I know which style is the one to edit if I have a chain of inheritance six generations long? Or when I need to introduce cell styles in table styles which use nested paragraph styles?
Workaround
I’m working on a huge product catalog with charts in tables having multiple different formats. There are varied kinds of alternating row fills, column strokes and fills, headers, etc. My answer: a symbol acting as suffix to a style name.
The symbols are at the end of the style names to indicate from which styles it borrows (e.g. Body Paragraph (A), Header Cell {F}, Chart Table |V|, Emphasis Character Style <1>). Character styles needing clear parent styles use chevrons, paragraph styles use parentheses, cell styles use braces, and table styles use vertical bars.
Example Use in Paragraphs Styles:
- Define the parent style with a single use of the symbol: Chart Body (A)
- Variations in the style keep the reference, but double symbol use: Chart Body-Left ((A)), Chart Body-Center ((A))
- Where there is further variation that needs to keep inheritence, just add another character between the symbols. It doesn’t matter what the characters are as long as you understand their distinction.
So if I make another body style that is specific to more charts, but it’s based on ‘Chart Body-Center ((A))’, I rename the inherited chart and make it a master (using single use of the symbol again), and add another character. ‘Chart Body-Center ((A))’ now becomes ‘Chart Body-Center (Aa)’. The new paragraph style that inherits from ‘Chart Body-Center (Aa)’ will use the double parentheses to indicate it’s inheriting: Body Coatings-Center ((Aa))
Here’s the hierarchy created:
- Chart Body (A)
- Chart Body-Left ((A))
- Chart Body-Center (Aa)
- Body Coatings-Center ((Aa))
Conclusion
It might seem overkill, but where it’s most powerful is when I’m placing Paragraph styles into Cell styles to be used for Table styles. The Cell styles use the exact same protocol as paragraphs, but I just change the symbol. That way I don’t have to double-click everything to see what’s inheriting what. It’s easy to follow the code I’ve designed back to the exact style that needs to be edited. If there’s another way to do this, I’d love any advice!
How do you organize huge documents styles for syncing?
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Update (23 March 2010):
This method worked great until I had to resync the book (that had already been through rough layout). InDesign syncs styles by name and location in the styles panels (ie. if it's in “Style Groups”). I love the idea of style groups to organize massive dozens of styles, but if I rename a style or style group, synching is broken.
Fix: I had to strip all of the styles on the existing draft layouts completely and then re-sync with a “Style Master” document that I'd created.
…This catalog is the death of me, and the birth of me? I'm seeing how amazing InDesign is, and I miss it everytime I have to set type in Illustrator.
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