From the course: InDesign 2021 Essential Training

Stroking and filling frames and paths - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2021 Essential Training

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Stroking and filling frames and paths

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- [Instructor] I have my magazine file open from the exercise files folder, and I want to apply some color to this text frame on the first page. Now in Design, just like Illustrator, lets you apply a fill or a stroke color to any object on your page, even text. To do that, I want to come up to my control panel and use these little pop-up menu widgets here. The top one lets you control the fill color, and the bottom one lets you control the stroke color. And right now, they're both set to none. That's what that red diagonal line means. So let's go ahead and fill this. I'll click on this little pop up menu, and you can see a bunch of different swatches here. Registration looks like black, but it's not black. It's actually kind of dangerous to use this registration swatch. It's just for drawing crop marks on your page, which you'll probably never need to do. So, just ignore registration, don't use it. Paper is what InDesign calls white. Let's just scroll down here and choose a different color. Maybe this cyan swatch. Then, to close the pop-up menu, you can just press the Escape key on your keyboard, or just click anywhere else on your screen. Now let's change the stroke. First, I'll apply the black color swatch. Then, let's look at this little pop-up menu to the right, that's the thickness of the stroke. I'll pick something thick like six points. Now that's a solid black stroke. You can change the style of the stroke by choosing the pop-up menu below that. There are all kinds of options in here. Let's just go ahead and pick this one here at the top called thick thick. Now, the control panel is the fastest way to make all these kinds of changes, but I should point out that you can also make them over here in the swatches panel over in the doc. This gives you the same kinds of controls. In fact, it looks almost exactly like the pop-up menu as we saw in the Control Panel, but there's one big difference. And that's how do you choose between fill and stroke? It all has to do with this little icon in the upper left corner of the panel. Whichever icon is on top, is the one that you're changing. So right now, the stroke icon is on top. So if I choose a swatch, it's going to change the color of the stroke. If you want to change the color of the fill, you need to click on that icon, and then that one comes to the top. Now we could change the color. For example, I'll pick this red color. You can also change the tint of this color. Let's come up here and click on the word Tint. That's just a shortcut for selecting all the texts inside that field. And I'll type say 50, and then hit Return or Enter. There we go. Now we've got a 50% red color swatch for the background fill. I'm going to be covering colors and how to create new color swatches later on in the chapter. By the way, if you squint, you'll see another tiny little icon up here in the upper left corner of the panel. It looks like a double-headed arrow. You'll see the same thing at the bottom of the tool panel over here. That double-headed arrow means swap the fill and the stroke colors. So if you click on that, it literally switches the colors. So what was the fill color, becomes a stroke color and vice-versa. Now of course, that black's not going to work, so let's choose a different fill color like paper. Okay, now as I'm looking at my beautiful masterpiece here, I noticed that something is strange. Something's wrong here. The fill color kind of peaks out past this red line into the middle part. Here, let me zoom in. I'm going to hold down command space bar on the Mac or control space bar on Windows, and then drag to the right. You see that space in between the lines? That's called the gap of the stroke. And right now, the gap is set to none or transparent. So you can see right through it to the edge of that little bit of white sticking out. I don't like that, so let's change it. And the way you fine tune your strokes is with the stroke panel over here in the doc. You can see down here that the type pop-up menu is set to thick, thick. And down at the bottom, the gap color is set to none. Now you could change this gap color to any of your other color swatches and that would fill it in. But in this case, I'm going to show you a different way to handle this. Instead of changing the gap color, you can change the alignment. In other words, where does the stroke sit on the path? And right now, you can see that the alignment is set to the center of the path. But if you click over here on the third button in the align stroke area, you get a very different effect. Now the stroke is aligned to the outside of the path. Click on the second one and that's aligned to the inside. I think that looks much better. By the way, if you ever need to make arrowheads, the stroke panel is also where you do that. You just draw a line and then use these controls down here, to add an arrowhead. Now, as I mentioned at the beginning of this movie, you can also apply, fill and stroke to text. Let me show you how. First I'm going to press command one, or control one on Windows, to jump back to 100% view. Then, I'll scroll over to the right. I'll switch to the type tool, and I'm going to select just this E, this drop cap. And now actually, why don't I zoom in here a little bit by pressing command plus, or control plus on Windows. Once again, I could feel this inside the swatches panel, or I could use the same fill and stroke widgets up here in the control panel. For example, I'll fill this with a different color, like blue. And remember how earlier I said you could swap the fill in the stroke? Well, why don't we do that. Over here in the swatches panel, I'll click that little double-headed arrow. And now I've got a dark brown stroke with a nun fill. You can literally see right through that text. There is so much more that you can do with fills and strokes. And that's what I'm going to be covering in the rest of this chapter.

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