Creating Default Styles

If you create paragraph styles, character styles, or color swatches with no document open, the styles and swatches will be in every new document. Most documents have a similar structure: heads, subheads, body text, captions, sidebar text, etc. So it might be worth creating a default style sheet so you're ready to go every time you create a new document. Just because their styles names may be the same doesn't mean they have to look the same from one document to another. What's important is the hierarchy of the styles.

Make sure you have no InDesign document open when you create your styles or load them from an existing InDesign document. That way they will show up in every InDesign document you create thereafter. Of course this doesn't mean that all your documents will look the same. You have infinite choices for how you define your styles, but just about all documents will have such features as headlines, subheads, body text, captions, etc. What you make them look like is entirely up to you.