Layers Tip of the Day writer, Jeff Witchel demonstrates some shortcuts for working with frames in InDesign.
Author: jeff witchel
Jeff Witchel graduated from Pratt Institute in 1973 with a B.F.A. (Cum Laude) in Advertising Design and Visual Communications. He has been an award-winning advertising art director, writer, designer, illustrator, and TV producer ever since.
Before starting his own advertising agency in New Jersey, Jeff built his career at top New York ad agencies such as Young & Rubicam, Grey Advertising, and Wells, Rich, Greene. Over the years, he has created award-winning work for many clients including AT&T, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Jell-O Pudding, The Plaza Hotel, and Pfizer. His many prestigious awards include N.Y. Art Directors Club Gold Award, One Show Gold Award, N.J. Art Directors Club Award, multiple Andy Awards, Graphis Annual, numerous readership awards, plus an Emmy Award nomination.
Jeff is a self-taught computer artist with over 19 years of experience. His initial introduction to the computer was with PageMaker, but he switched to Quark 1.0 when it was first introduced in 1987. Having arrived on the desktop publishing scene so early, Jeff became the “go to” guy for answers when others started getting into computer graphics.
As an Adobe Certified Expert, he’s provided online support for Adobe and is now an Adobe Certified Training Provider for both Adobe Illustrator CS2 and Adobe InDesign CS2. Jeff is one of just a handful of Adobe Certified Instructors in the New York metropolitan area. He also is a Quark Certified Expert in QuarkXPress 6 as well as a master of Adobe Photoshop and related applications. He counts among his training clients ad agencies, design studios, magazines, illustrators, and photographers in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland.
Very useful tutorial. Thanks. Is there a way to get the really nice picture that you use to demonstate the frame manipulations ?
This leads to a question I’ve always had. I like being able to knock out one side of a rectangle as you demonstrated. However, if you want to knock out a second side using the same technique, it doesn’t work. You end up deleting the whole rectangle.
I thought maybe the scissor trick you demonstrated might work in this case. And you can cut out another piece, but then it is no longer a rectangle… it’s two separate pieces.
So my question is, how can you delete two sides of a rectangle without affecting the content inside and keeping ? For example, you might want a call-out in a magazine where there’s a bar across the top and bottom, but not the sides.
You could do this with a single-cell table and just turn off the side strokes, but I’d like to be able to do this with a normal text box.
Hi Fabrice,
Glad you like the tutorial.
I’m afraid that the illustration used for the tutorial is not available. It’s an original piece of art that I drew over 13 years ago in Illustrator.
Jeff Witchel
Hi Jake,
Interesting!
You’d have to fake it!
Select the top of the Stroked Frame with the Direct Selection, and shift-click on the bottom segment. Go to Edit>Copy. Remove the Stroke from your original Frame in the Swatches panel. Then go to Edit Paste in Place to paste the top and bottom Stroked segments right in front of the original “strokeless” image.
It works! Give it try.
Jeff Witchel
[...] Having Fun With Frames in Indesign – Video by Jeff Witchel [...]
Very clever, Jeff.
I did try it and it does work. However, the one extra step that you’d probably want to do is to group the strokeless frame with your new top/bottom borders.
At least the way I did it, you can’t put text in the new bordered box even though InDesign shows the Content as Text.
But if I group the two together, I can place the text inside the unbordered text frame while getting the advantage of having the top/bottom bordered frame.
Thanks for the tip.
Very useful tutorial. I am new to Indesign and have had no formal training so am struggling to do basic stuff. Can I make a rectangle frame with 3 right angle corners and 1 curved one? the corner options only lets me do all 4 the same.
Great video! I now know what the ‘scissors’ tool does!
Thank you
Just what I needed to know! Thanks!
[...] Having Fun with Frames in InDesign [...]