Fills & Strokes

Any frame can be filled, and/or its edge can be stroked, with a color or gradient or nothing at all. Some complain about the term “stroke,” but a stroke can be applied to a simple line as well as along the edge of a closed shape, so the term “border” would not be as useful.

Although there are multiple places from which to apply a fill or stroke, the Control panel offers the most flexibility. Clicking either the Fill or Stroke box menu will show the Swatches panel. Holding the shift key while doing so shows the Color panel. Usually, you can choose from a rainbow of colors along the bottom of the Color panel called the Ramp, then fine-tune with the sliders above. However, if a swatch had been chosen previously, you’ll be shown tints of that color instead. To have a rainbow again, select a color model from the Color panel menu (RGB, CMYK, or Lab).

Create a New Color Swatch

If you’d like a color to be a swatch so it can easily be chosen later, use the Swatches panel menu and choose New Color Swatch…. Remember, you can do this via the Swatches panel that appears when you click the Fill or Stroke menus in the Control panel, too.

The New Color Swatch dialog box has a number of choices that confront you. Easily missed among them is the name of the swatch. I will typically name a swatch for its purpose (or at least I aspire to do so). To enter a name, you must first uncheck Name with Color Value.

The Color Type is a choice between the swatch using the four-color process (CMYK) or a custom ink known as a spot color. In principle, any color can be a spot color, but to be completely unambiguous we usually rely on a standard color library such as those from Pantone™.

Learn much more about color modes, spaces, and models in chapter 5 of the Compendium, Color Management (page 293).

If you choose RGB as the Color Mode, you’ll find that you can specify the color with a hexadecimal value, as well as individual red, green, and blue ones. Also exclusive to that mode is a dropper that lets you sample from anywhere on your screen, whether in InDesign or not! This is handy for matching a color from a placed RGB image. To use the dropper, click and hold on it as you drag it to what it should sample, releasing the mouse when the dropper is over the target. If you simply click outside InDesign, you’ve left the application.

Gradients & Gradient Swatches

Gradients are gradual transitions from one color to another (and to others, perhaps). A gradient can be linear, transitioning at a consistent angle, or radial, radiating from a point outward. You can apply a gradient to a fill or stroke. To choose which, and to begin the process of defining a gradient, click on the Fill or Stroke box in one of the panels in which they occur (Color, Swatches, Tools, or Control, but, oddly, not Gradient).

Use the Gradient panel (Window > Color > Gradient) to start a gradient by clicking the square preview in that panel’s upper-left corner. The gradient ramp and its sliders, called stops, at the bottom of the panel are now available. At any time in the process, you may switch the Type from Linear to Radial and back.

The stops’ colors can be edited, of course. You’ll need the Color panel and/or the Swatches panel. Select (click on) a stop, then dial in a color with the Color panel. You need to drag a swatch to a gradient stop to apply it. Since the stops are sliders, you can drag them: when moved closer together, more of the selected object will be filled with solid color and the gradated part will be more abrupt. You can maintain a gradient but give emphasis to the color at one end by moving the diamond-shaped slider on the top of the gradient ramp. When that slider or one of the color stops is selected, the Location field shows the relative position of that slider between the ones on either side. So if the gradient stops had been dragged inward, and the diamond slider is exactly halfway between them, its location will read 50%.

It’s easy to add more colors to the gradient, too. Just click between two gradient stops and a third will appear—or a fourth, fifth, and so on. To remove a stop, drag it away from the ramp, keeping in mind that there is a minimum of two stops.

If you’re editing a linear gradient, you have access to the Angle field. A 90° linear gradient starts at the bottom of an object and ends at the top. Although setting the angle to 180° will reverse a gradient, using the Reverse button is easier. To set arbitrary angles, choose the Gradient tool from the Tools panel and drag across the shape to set where the start and endpoints of the gradient are. The angle at which you drag is entered into the Angle field. Interestingly, you can drag out a line larger than a selected shape, perhaps leaving only part of a gradient visible in that shape. Even more interesting is dragging the Gradient tool across several shapes with gradients in them—the gradient will now span across all of them. Using the Gradient tool on a radial gradient sets the center and outer edge of that “radius.”

Beware: A gradient can also be applied to a stroke. I sometimes do this accidentally.

A reliable way to store a gradient for later reuse is to create a gradient swatch. Using the Swatches panel menu, choose New Gradient Swatch…. If a gradient was being edited, its settings are now before you. You can also build the gradient from scratch in this dialog box; in fact, I prefer to do so. Select a color stop in this dialog box, and then use the Stop Color menu to switch from Swatches to one of the various color models to define that stop’s color. As with color swatches, the Add button adds the swatch, but allows you to continue to build more. When you’re done, click OK.

The Stroke Panel

The Control panel offers a few stroke options: the Weight, color, and Type (solid, dashed, dotted, etc). The Stroke panel (Window > Stroke) offers considerably more. Subtle but pleasant options are Cap and Join. A Round Join slightly softens sharp corners and a Round Cap can round the ends of dashes, underlines, paragraph rules, or any line.

Stroke Type

Some stroke options sound pretty obscure (until you need them), others are really cool. Among the latter is Type, of which there are three categories: Stripe (Solid, Thick-Thin, Wavy, etc.), Dash (Dashed and various Hash options), and Dotted (regular and Japanese Dots). Most impressively, you can make your own!

Align Stroke

By default, a stroke straddles the edge of a shape. However, when an object really needs to maintain its size, I may set the stroke to Align to Inside. However, if I cannot allow a stroke to obscure the frame’s content, perhaps an image, I’ll set it to Align to Outside.

Gap Color

All the stroke types (except Solid) have gaps. You can choose a color to fill those gaps in the Stroke panel (near the bottom: Gap Color). For a dotted stroke, the dots themselves will be the main stroke color, but the space around and between those dots is the Gap Color.

Start/End

This is simply a way to attach decorative ends to an open line. Note that each end can be scaled.

Miter Limit

This is a fairly obscure setting, but enough of my students are dismayed by truncated corners that I should mention it. As the angle of a corner diminishes, the extent of its corner (d in the figure) increases. When that length exceeds a certain multiple of the stroke weight (w), the point gets truncated. Luckily, we can adjust that multiple: the Miter Limit. In this example, I had to allow the corner length to be 5 times the stroke weight.