Adobe InDesign CS3 Bible

Applying Color to Type

Applying color and gradients is almost exactly the same as applying color to strokes, except you choose the Fill icon in the Tools palette or Color pane. Follow the steps for creating a stroke in the previous section, substituting fill for stroke. The same tips, notes, and caveats apply for fills as for strokes.

Although I recommended earlier a case where it makes sense, via the Attributes pane, to overprint black strokes rather than have them print cleanly, that case doesn't apply for black fills. The only time you want to overprint black on a color is to get a richer, deeper black, but in that case, it makes more sense to not use the Overprint option and instead create a "superblack" color from 100 percent black and either 100 percent magenta or 100 percent cyan, and use that as the fill color.

You can mix the use of colors and gradients for strokes and text to get some unusual typography. Figure 28-3 showed some examples; Figure 28-5 shows some more exotic ones, using 30-point text in all cases. Here are the techniques used:

• The top text frame uses a linear gradient for the 6-point text stroke and the same gradient ‚ with the colors in the opposite order ‚ as the fill for the text frame.

• The first frame in the second row uses a light-gray fill with a radial gradient from white to black for the 2-point strokes. An optical illusion makes the gray fill appear to be a gradient as well, since the progression of white to black next to gray makes the eye think the gray is changing as well.

• The second frame in the second row uses a 3-point gray stroke on just one letter to accentuate it.

• The first frame in the third row uses a 0.5-point, radial white-to-black gradient to soften the edges of the letters .

• The second frame in the third row uses a thicker gray stroke for each subsequent character, starting at 0.5 point and ending at 3.5 points.

Figure 28-5: Exotic examples of how you can apply strokes and fills to text.