Hello, my name is Mike Collins. In this lesson you will learn how to create a new style group, use nested styles, redefine styles, and break links to styles in Adobe InDesign. Let's open the InDesign application and create a new document that is letter sized in a portrait format. We'll go ahead and use the template, put it up on the screen, and reduce it slightly as normal. We'll begin this lesson on using styles in Adobe InDesign by looking at different kinds of styles. So, let's go to the top menu of our screen and select Window and Styles. And you'll see a variety of styles offered in the menu. As you can see, there's cell styles, character styles, object styles, paragraph styles, style packs, and table styles. But for today's lesson, we'll focus on character styles and paragraph styles. Character styles are a collection of character-forming attributes that can be applied to a variety of text. Now, we can make a style for almost anything, font, size, color, any type of unique look you want for your text to have that you can go back and repeat as often as you like. A paragraph style, also called a text style, includes both character and paragraph-forming attributes that can be applied to a single or group of different paragraphs. Styles are important because they can help you keep your Adobe InDesign document format consistent and can save time and effort when you're designing larger documents. They can be used over and over again and you can create as many as you like. Now, let's create some text in our document with a text frame, but actually, before we do that, let's go ahead and just type in some text that we want to put in here instead of using placeholder text. And let's talk about hiking. Let's choose a font that's easy for us to see, increase the size of it, in this case we'll take this up to 24, we're going to increase our text frame, there's a couple ways we could have done this, but in this case, we just went ahead and increased it. And let's change the color, in this case, to green. And there we go, now we have our headline. Now, let's create some bullet points and we'll go ahead and do this, we'll reduce this text frame. In fact, we could just double click on it, we'll create a new text frame and create some bullet points to talk about why hiking is a great way to see nature. Before we do that, let's go ahead and choose some different fonts. In this case, let's choose Times New Roman, we'll make this bold and we'll increase it to 16 points. Hiking is fun with friends, hiking does not require special equipment and hiking can be done almost anywhere at any time. Now we have our headline, hiking is a great way to see nature and we have bullet points, hiking is fun with friends and so on. Let's create one more text frame. Now we're going to go ahead and fill this with body or with placeholder text and we're going to put this in and we'll just leave this for now, minion pro, it will increase the size to 14 points. Now as you can see, this is over set text, so let's increase the text frame until it's not. Now we have three text frames and it could be one text frame with a headline with bullet points and with body copy. Now let's take a look at how we can create a new character or paragraph style. So to create a new character style, there's several ways we can do this. As we talked about, we can go to Window, drop down to Styles and create a character style or if we go to the right and look here on these and all this menu, we can see Style Packs, Character Styles and Paragraph Styles. Let's start with creating a character style. What we'll do, there are several ways again we can do this. We'll go ahead and highlight this, click on Character Style and create a new style by clicking on this small box with the plus sign at the lower right hand side to create a new style box and a new style is created. We'll double click on it and we can give it a style naming. In this case, let's call it a headline. Now if we look at the style settings, we can see the styles that relate to this particular character style, it gives us the font, the size, the color. We can go on here as well to basic character formats and modify these as we want, but for now we'll leave them the way they are and click OK. Now we have our first character style. Now let's create a character style for our bullet points. So we'll go back, create a new style, double click on it, call it what we like. In this case, we'll call it bullet points. We can verify that the style settings are correct or modify them how we like. In fact, let's do that. Let's go ahead and change this color to a dark blue and click OK. Now we see we've modified this. In fact, let's go ahead and make all these. Well, we'll just leave this one for now as it is. And we could go even down to the body copy down here and create a character style for this. Now none means no character style is applied and will be just as is. But in this case, we'll create one and we'll call it body copy. And as we can see, this is basically just the font at 14 points and we'll click OK. Now we have three character styles defined, headline, bullet points and body copy. And for example, we can choose on any one of these. We can go and choose our particular style. And now you can see it changed from what it was to the current style that we defined. In fact, we'll do the next one and we'll make all three of our bullet points fit this bullet point style. Now you can see, for example, if we wanted to change it to body copy, we get highlighted. And we'll just highlight the one line, go back up to our character style and let's choose body copy. As you can see, now it's been reduced to same as the body copy at the bottom. If we wanted to turn it into a headline, we go up and hit our character style, choose headline. And it actually is now off of the screen, so let's enlarge it and there we see because the text is larger than fits in the text frame. So let's go back and take a back to our three character styles, headline, our bullet points and our body copy. We can do the same with a paragraph style. And in this case, what we could do is we could define a paragraph style that has all three of these elements. Now we could create one, we'll call this style one, we'll call this main style for now so that I know what it is. And we can go ahead and look at the rules. And then what we can do here is we can define it. We go to drop caps and nested styles, we can add a new nested style down here by clicking on it. We'll go to the menu and we'll select each style in this case headline. And now it's going to ask how far does it want us to extend this style and we have the option of through or up to. We have the option of words, we can choose, in this case we have periods and since there's no word period here to choose, we can actually enter in here a symbol, in this case we'll enter in a period. Now we'll do a new nested style, let's choose bullet points. And in this case, let's do the same, and actually the headline didn't have a period on it. So I'm going to change this to an exclamation point, and I'll add one more, in this case we can do body copy, and we can say, whatever we want in this case, we'll say, we'll just choose letters for now, and we can do as many numbers as we want, we could say 100, we could say 10, we could say whatever we like, but let's just leave this for now, and we'll take a look at what happens. If we go with this option with a new paragraph style, let's go ahead and select this, we'll go to our paragraph style, we'll hit main style. Now we can see it's going to give the attributes that we defined to our paragraph to whatever we like, and we can modify this again any way we want to. Thanks for watching.
