From the course: InDesign 2025 Essential Training

Stroking and filling frames and paths - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2025 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Stroking and filling frames and paths

“

- [Instructor] I have my Magazine file open from the Exercise Files folder, and let's apply some color to this frame over here on the left page. InDesign, just like Illustrator, lets you apply a fill or a stroke color to any object on your page, even text. So let's apply a fill and stroke to this frame. To do that, you can come up here and use these little widgets in the middle of the Control panel. The top one is fill color and the bottom one is your stroke color. You'll see these same options in the Properties panel if you use that. Right now both are set to none. That's what that red diagonal line means. So first, let's go ahead and fill this. I'll click that little fill popup menu, and up comes the list of color swatches. Now, don't choose registration. I know it looks like black, but it's actually kind of dangerous to use this registration swatch. This is just for drawing crop marks on your page, which you'll probably never need to do, so ignore that. Paper is what InDesign calls white. Let's come down here and pick a different color, maybe this pink. That's 100% magenta. Then to close the popup menu, you can press the Esc key or just click anywhere else on your screen. Now let's change the stroke. First, I'll apply this black color, and then let's come over here to the popup menu to the right and change the width of that stroke. Let's make it thicker like 6 points. So that's a solid black stroke, and you can change the style of the stroke down here in this popup menu. There are all kinds of options in here. I'm going to choose this one near the top called Thick-Thick. I think the Control panel is the fastest way to make these kinds of changes, but you can also make them here in the Swatches panel too, here in the dock. This gives you the same kind of controls. In fact, it looks almost exactly like the one we saw in the Control panel, but there is one difference, and that is how you choose between fill and stroke. It's this little icon in the upper left corner. The key is whichever icon is on top is the one that you're changing. So right now, the stroke icon is on top. So if I chose a swatch, it would change the color of the stroke. If I want to change the color of the fill, you need to click on that icon to bring it to the top. So now I could pick a different color, like green. You can also change the tint of the color. I'll click the word Tint to highlight the text inside that field, and I'll change this to say 20%. Then I'll hit Return or Enter, and there we go, we have a 20% green color for the background fill. I'm going to be covering colors and how to create your own new color swatches later on in this chapter. Now as I'm looking at my beautiful masterpiece here, I notice that something is strange. The fill color of this frame peaks out a little past the black line into the middle part. Let me zoom in and you'll see. This is called the gap of the stroke, and right now the gap is set to none, so you can see right through it to the edge of that little bit of color sticking out. I don't like that, so let's fix it. And the way you fine tune your strokes is with the Stroke panel over here in the dock. Now you can see the type here is set to Thick-Thick, and down at the bottom, the gap color is set to None. You could change this gap color to any of the 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 this stroke sit on the path? And right now you can see the alignment is set to the center of the path. But if I come up here and change the aligned stroke to say this third button, well, now I have a different effect. The stroke is aligned on the outside of the path. I'll click the second one, and now it goes to the inside of the path. 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 over here to add a shape to it. Okay, now as I mentioned at the beginning of this movie, you can also apply fills and strokes to text. Let me show you how. I'm going to scroll over here to the right and select this little drop cap in here. I'll double click to switch the Type tool and then drag over this E. Let's go back to the Swatches panel. And if you squint, you'll see another little tiny icon in the upper left corner of the Swatches panel. It's a double-headed arrow. You'll see the same thing at the bottom of the Tool panel way over here. That double-headed arrow means swap the fill and stroke colors. If you click on that, it literally switches the colors, so what was the fill color becomes the stroke color, and vice versa. So now I've got a brown stroke with a none fill. If there were a picture behind that text, you could literally see right through the middle of the letter. Now 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.

Contents