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Author: Michael Murphy
Publisher: Adobe Press
Edition: 1 edition (April 17, 2009)
ISBN-13: 978-0-321-60606-8
ISBN-10: 0-321-60606-X
Pages: 245
Price: USA - $44.99; CAN - $53.99; UK - £32.99

He who controls InDesign's styles controls the world. (It's true; look it up in the preceding sentence.) Adobe's InDesign page layout application is an incredibly powerful program that can help you create a flyer, an article, a magazine, or a book. But under the maxim, "Hey, a computer should do the grunt work, I have more important things to do," one should learn InDesign's various styles' prowess. Once learned, it's possible to set up a series of cascading events so that simple or complex formatting can take place while you create. This book is rather unique in that it assumes you already know a fair amount about InDesign and/or page layout programs and focuses solely on InDesign's Character, Paragraph, Object, Cell, and Table styles.

Styles are certainly not exclusive to InDesign, they can be found in just about every word processing and page layout program there is. But I'd be hard pressed to find any as deep and complex as with InDesign. Michael apparently feels the same, and, as such, has devoted this entire book to styles.

I am a big fan and admirer of the Michael. His ability to break processes down to their instrumental layers and to explain clearly what's taking place is found in all too few instructors. I was first introduced to his work from the podcast "The InDesigner." [Note: you can also subscribe to this on Apple's iTunes.]. His work is well suited for podcasts, in that you can watch him present a process, stop, try it, and go back to the video to re-see things and see how that instruction applies to what you are doing. In other words, sort of like what you can do with a book. Well, here's the book.

Michael's podcasts cover the full range of InDesign's abilities so that to see this book only focuses on Styles seemed a bit of a disappointment. However, since styles really are the heart and soul of InDesign, when you get deep into them, you really are covering some of the biggest strengths (but certainly not all) of what InDesign can do.

I also want to point out that the book is beautifully made. The pages are good quality paper and every image is crisp and clear. One of Michael's fortes is design, and you can learn a lot by just seeing how he blocked out the book. The various sidebar tips are clearly identifiable from the figure captions (which occupy the same space on the pages), leading, type, text, examples, headers, etc.; it's all there and is easy to follow. I point this seemingly trivial point out because it's important to see things put in practice from what you are reading. Think of a book on photography with badly taken and/or processed images; no matter how good the information, it's difficult to want to follow the author. Not so here.

Michael lays out the fundamental reasons for being so emphatic about the importance of styles on the first page of Chapter 1 where he states "More than 50 distinct kinds of formatting can be applied at the paragraph level. Even if you take advantage of only ten, that's ten separate formatting steps that can be reduced to a single mouse click if they're built into a style." Again, when you add in Character, Object, Cell, and Table styles, that's a lot of power the reader can have the computer do for him or her.

I have three standards for judging a book. The first is how easy it is to find something. In that regard, the book is excellent. The table of contents is sufficiently descriptive to let you quickly ascertain where any given process can be found, and the index seems to cover all of the terms I was looking for and was sufficiently descriptive so I knew which indexed example I wished to go to.

The second standard is whether the explanations are sufficiently broad and not too specific, yet have specific examples." Let me explain this one. Books that rely upon a specific case scenario to explain a process are limited in use to those who happen to only need that single example. A book on fishing that offers only fly fishing examples is not very helpful if you are on the ocean. The reality is that it's best for the author to explain the full dynamics of a process rather than to just give a single example. Admittedly, though, that takes more work. For example: drop caps. A book that's in a hurry might provide a paragraph or two and explain how to create a drop cap. Michael's book has five pages on drop caps.

A deeper example would be a numbered list. Most of us are all familiar with MS Word's penchant for "observing" that we have started a numbered list, followed by the subsequent struggle to get out of the default numbered pattern as we fight the program for control, and try to create at the same time. In InDesign, a numbered list is part of a Paragraph Style. That means when you invoke a paragraph style, you are opting in or out of any numbering pattern of and for that one style. Thus, you can have a style for basic text, one numbered list for tables, and a completely separate numbered list for illustrations. This also means that you can have Table 1-2 and Table 1-3, and if you insert a new Table 1-3, the previous Table 1-3 is now automatically called Table 1-4. And, none of this numbering effects the separate list of Illustration 1-3. Michael is good here, but, as he admits, achieving the full power of numbered lists is "not for the timid." Despite the challenge, Michael provides examples of how one's desires can be thwarted by limitations within InDesign. More importantly he also shows how these limitations can be overcome. [For example, InDesign cannot accept tab characters in the Number field, but Michael does show you how to right-align numbers in a numbered list.]

As I've said, my only complaint with this book is that it is limited to styles. Michael's ability to explain processes and techniques is so good that I want him to teach me everything about InDesign. As he doesn't, this book is best limited to those who already have a basic understanding of InDesign and want to (significantly) improve their expertise in the subject of styles. If you are just learning InDesign or want a better understanding and/or instruction of other dynamics of InDesign, this book will not be enough. As such, this book is a tough choice, and that leads me to my third criteria for a book: is it the only book you will need? Alas, perhaps not. Adobe InDesign Styles: How to Create Better, Faster Text and Layouts is one of the best books you can find on InDesign, but its focus is narrow. If you wish to learn more of the functional dynamics of InDesign—such as how to set up Master Pages, how to set up a Book, how to work with images, how to use the Place command—you will need to purchase an additional book. Thus I can only give Adobe InDesign Styles a 4A rating. Trust me, though, were it not for my "only book you need rule," this would easily be a 5A.

Even if you do choose to purchase a different book for a broader range of information, I strongly suggest you check this book out for the wealth of knowledge that can be obtained herein. You very well might end up purchasing this as well.

___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.