Adobe InDesign object styles enable you to quickly apply (or change) a collection of formats from paragraph & character styles, fill & stroke colors, spacing, padding, text wrapping, corner options (rounded, anyone?), independent effects for text vs. object vs. stroke vs. fill, and more.

In EightShapes custom documentation systems, our focus has been on paragraph styles (and to a lesser extent, character styles). However, the burgeoning array of InDesign CS3 style types have enabled us to increase our systematic reach: objects, tables, table cells, and even predefined table of contents. And while we have few object styles so far, they are now central to some of the most important conventions we’ve established.

For deliverables, we’ve created an “Artwork Frame” style that acts as a container for any placed artwork, be it a full page view, variations of a component, a mockup, or even a separate diagram. Really, it’s for any piece of artwork that you want to overtly separate from the annotations. Remember, pictures and words, pictures and words.

In our system, the “Artwork Frame” object style creates a white bound box with thin, light gray stroke, along with the only use of drop shadows within the system for further separate. It lifts the artwork off the page slightly.

For design, object styles have recently been employed when creating a large collection of wireframe components, each of which is contained in a gray bounding box. Similar to the artwork frame (white fill, gray stroke), this box does NOT have a drop shadow.

Instead, the “Container (padded)” wireframe style employs a text inset that serves as padding from that stroke to the text area inside that object.

With that, we need not worry about individually styling each and every component as they are assembled. And trust me, entering in insets of 8pts four times for each box you create is annoying. Plus it’s rife with potential for inconsistency, since a colleague created 30 others at 10pt. Argh! Instead, do some simple formatting of text inside each text area, highlight them all, apply the style, and boom - you’ve got a nice set of consistently formatted building blocks for a broader page.