Adding blocks of color behind text seems to be popular these days. Is there a way to do this without creating actual shape boxes though? Why yes there is! Thanks for asking.
By modifying the paragraph rules found under paragraph panel flyout menu>Paragraph Rules… you can make these color blocks appear behind your text.
How big your text is and how big you want your color blocks to be will determine your exact settings, but if you turn on preview (check the box) then it shouldn’t be too difficult to simply adjust the values with the arrow keys until you get the desired effect.
Want an example? Okie-dokie.
Here I have Franklin Gothic Heavy set to 24/20 (24 pt font size with 20 pt leading) and all caps, which adds to the blocky feel of this look. Use the cap feature in the character settings to do this instead of retyping your text.
In my Paragraph Rules, I’m using a 24 pt “rule above.” Here’s the important part: I set the width to text and the offset to -4 pts. I also extended the left indent (negative number means it extends further to the left of the text) and the right indent (negative number here means it’s pushing the rule farther to the right). Without those settings, this is what the block behind the text would look like.
This is also a perfectly acceptable look, though I would offset it by a (positive) point so that the round letters (O, G, U, C, etc) aren’t hovering so awkwardly.
Oh, and for this setup to work, you have to either have single lines of text or add a hard return at the end of each line (otherwise the rule won’t show). If you don’t set a space after/before paragraph, the blocks won’t have the white gap between each line. If you want to adjust that gap, you’ll need to do it with the space before or after in the paragraph settings (I set mine to 5 pts in this example), as opposed to the leading like you would normally.
It’s not perfect, but if you’re only using it for small amounts of text like headers, then it’s not too much work to do the returns. Plus, because you will turn it into a paragraph style, you can update the look in a snap! Different color, different sized text or rule or space between paragraphs? Easy.
I’ve got another one to show you, but it’s a little more complicated and isn’t quite as clean. That’ll be up next week!
Do you need more help with InDesign? Feel free to leave a comment below, contact me or head over to Lynda.com and sign up for their InDesign Tutorials. It’s only $25/mo for unlimited access! This is a resource I use myself and I highly recommend it.
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Thanks Lauren, this is really useful, going to try to see if I can replicate this in Illustrator.
Great tip
Hey Lauren
I remember learning this trick when I was studying — I remember it because it was one of those ones that made me go “… oh man, InDesign is awesome” But now that I think about it, I haven’t had an excuse to use in two+ years.. thanks for the reminder
(will have to come up with an excuse to use it again!)
Alex Charchar´s last blog post: Links: Ceramic Letters & Flowers
Nice tip, I learned of this not too long ago but it was only touched on briefly. Nice to know what the caveats of usage are before attempting it on a project.
Now to find somewhere to use it.
Great tip! I’ll have to remember this next time I’m working in InDesign
Brad Ruggles´s last blog post: My 3 Favorite iPhone Games
Esben,
I seem to remember you saying this on another post. I’m having deja vu. Does Illy have paragraph rules? I know it has styles!
Alex,
Hi!! I feel like I haven’t talked to you in forever. When are you going to join Twitter, eh? I actually use paragraph rules pretty frequently and I try to find different ways to use them. I never use them to underline a header though. If you think about it, it doesn’t make sense to divide the header from its content; I do use them above the header though—gives a separation from previous content and keeps sections together quite nicely.
Ben,
Seems to be the general consensus so far
Brad,
Indeed! Glad you liked it.
Interesting thought about dividing the header from the content.. kind of decapitating it a little isn’t it?
And, in my mind, if you make the header a different size, weight, colour, font and are deliberate in your spacing, then the extra bit of flare is just that — flare. Not really needed.. Kind of like bolding and italicising the same piece of text
Argh, twitter! In the last few days it seems like everyone in the design community but me has jumped onto twitter.. I’m going to join soonish — just desperate to focus on writing for retinart for the moment — must improve!
I too like and use paragraph rules…
but on creating outlines from type with paragraph rules the stroke disappears, the same happens if you have text in a colored box or table… and some printers do ask for type converted to outlines in pdf files.
I really wish Adobe will correct this bug… when creating outlines from a coloured text box to keep both the box and the converted text.
Alex,
Decapitating! Yes, perfect word for it (you’re good at that). See, with Twitter, you can promote your blog! I probably jumped at least 1000 subscribers since joining; wish I’d kept track of the numbers. And you don’t have to let it take all your time—even just a few tweets/day is enough!
Thinker,
I have never had to outline a font that I’ve used a rule on. I didn’t know ID wouldn’t outline the rule or colored box or table! Yikes! Do you have CS4? Maybe it has been fixed? I’m only on CS3. There is a bug/suggestion form on the Adobe website, let’s mention it to them!
hehe, I’m slowly getting ahead with articles on retinart (remember ages ago I told you I need to be ahead otherwise I fall really behind? finally getting past it!).. so while having some regular content, it would be a good time to join up and try to get some extra visitors
Alex Charchar´s last blog post: Links: Ceramic Letters & Flowers
Thanks for another informative article Lauren. I must admit, InDesign is an Adobe application where I have the least experience. I mostly use Illustrator for one-page print jobs, although lately, I HAVE been using using InDesign because of a couple of jobs containing, multi-page documents (you gave me some great advice about an issue I had on Twitter, cheers).
I’ll keep this method in my IND-arsenal for future use
Andrew Kelsall´s last blog post: Win 1000 Free Business Cards or Canvas Print with a Creative Comment
I have CS3. Didn’t had the chance to put my hands on CS4 yet.
hm couldn’t figure it out, but it might be me
yes deja vu! It was the ligtning text and that I did figure it out
oh really interesting feature, didn’t know this one
thanks 
Dainis Graveris´s last blog post: 30 Deviant Digital Artists, Painters, Illustrators Worth To Watch
Alex,
Glad you decided to join Twitter!
Andrew,
You’re welcome! I’m always glad to help, so if you have any questions about ID, just ask. If I don’t know the answer, I’ll probably have fun figuring it out (and learn something new myself in the process).
Esben,
Oh well, all the Adobe CS apps can’t all have the same functionality; they would make each other obsolete!
Dainis,
You’re welcome!
Thinker,
I’ve seen/heard of some really fantastic improvements for ID CS4, though (just like we had with the move from CS2 to CS3).
Oops, missed your comment, sorry. I don’t have CS4 yet either
Thanks for the refresher. Great tutorial!
I’m glad I joined too, just need to learn to make it part of my daily routine!
Alex Charchar´s last blog post: These Things, I Wish To Have Known
These paragraph rules are nice to follow and it is great to learn about these rules. I will surely try to include them in my designs. Thanks for sharing the information.
Loving the way you’ve set these out. Simple, Clear, Effective. I know my boss at work wants to take things to a different level with headlines, I’ll be showing him this as a guideline.
Thanks!
Karen Francis´s last blog post: Holi, the Festival of Colours
Karen,
What a compliment!
Awesome! Thanks for mentioning the article to your boss
This technique is perfect, but has one major drawback when doing hard returns.
What if you have a long document, and want a TOC, and use this style for the Headings?
Hard returns will mess your TOC up, won’t they?
Any workarounds for that?
Daytona,
I don’t understand why hard returns would mess up a TOC. You mean an automatically generated one? I don’t work much with them, so I don’t know off the top of my head. I’m sure there are workarounds, just experiment with your options. You could probably use a different paragraph style in between the TOC headings, though it would take a while to set everything up.
LaurenMarie,
Daytona is correct: hard returns DO mess up a TOC, and it’s precisely this problem that brought me here today. I “worked around” the problem by limiting all my chapter headings (the ones with the background color) to one line, which has made for some pretty scrunchity text! Your suggestion to “just experiment with your options” made me chuckle just a bit — I’ve been doing just this since I first set up these training manuals more than ten years ago in PageMaker, and have yet to find a non-kludgy (or even complete, for that matter) workaround. What would really help would be for Adobe to allow the paragraph rule to be “paragraph-high” rather than limit it to a fixed thickness (I just can’t bring myself to use the word “width” for a vertical dimension. )
A possible alternative is to use underline or strikethrough, but Adobe have seen fit to (and it does seem logical, if stingy) exclude the column-width/text-width (there’s a proper use of width!) function from either of those dialog boxes.
Please, anyone, chime right in with a solution…
Cheers,
Christian
I have many subsequential paragraphs, each separated by a line. The bottom line of the last paragraph is redundant and should not be visible. I wonder how to hide the bottom line of the last paragraph, while using same format for it! Can you help me with that?
aereal,
You know, that’s a good question and I know you could do it with an if/then statement, but I don’t think ID has that capability! You might be able to find a plugin that can do that, but barring that, I’d say, if it’s not too late, to actually make the rule above and make a new paragraph style without a rule for the first paragraph.
I think maybe it’s possible with GREP. I don’t know how exactly but it’s possible.
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