Boost style consistency and creativity with the Smart Styles InDesign plugin

The importance of consistent style usage

Consistent style usage is important for a professional appearance, contributes to brand consistency, and prevents confusion for the reader. Uniformity in the design of your documents and design projects is a key ingredient to avoid unnecessary aesthetic, communicative, and practical problems.

In an ideal world, you have enough time to manually adjust and thoroughly check designs. You can tweak the styles used for typography and layout as needed, just a little, so the result matches exactly what you had in mind. In most cases, however, the world is far from ideal. You spend a lot of time manually adjusting and checking your work. Changing style elements is a lot of hassle. And if you also feel the hot breath of a client on your neck, you quickly compromise the quality of your work.

The consequence? You have too little room for your own inventiveness and last-minute changes that give your design just that little bit extra. But it can be different—if you use the right Adobe plugin.

Expand the capabilities of Adobe InDesign with the right plugin

What if you could drastically reduce the time needed for repeatedly formatting page designs, tables, text selections, et cetera? Then you would have more time to focus on the design and content, which benefits the quality of your publication.

If you want to adjust a style that has been used once, you can implement this change automatically with a single command at all places where this style has been applied. Formatting a page element in InDesign typically requires ten actions. Why not do this with just one action?

This and much more you can do with Smart Styles, WoodWing's InDesign plugin. You don't need an extra 'read' plugin because applying a Smart Styles element does not result in a Smart Styles 'print'; it is all purely InDesign. Thus, you do not need the Smart Styles InDesign plugin to open the document, make changes, print, or export.

How does the Adobe InDesign plugin Smart Styles work?

WoodWing Smart Styles works by converting each item in your layout into an element in the Smart Styles library. This preserves the properties of the object, as well as text and table styles. Once an element is created in the Smart Styles library, you can flexibly deploy it by selecting which properties to apply. If you want to use the saved formatting options, simply drag the Smart Styles element of your choice onto the object on the respective page, where it will be applied all at once.

You can see how it works in the video below.

Get Started with the InDesign Plugin for smarter styles

Do you also want to boost your consistency and at the same time have more time for your own creativity? Then get to know WoodWing Smart Styles today through a free 30-day trial! This gives you full access to all functionalities of this Adobe InDesign plugin. If you like it, you can subscribe after the trial period to continue using Smart Styles.

With the following information, you can ensure a flying start with Smart Styles:

• An introduction to Smart Styles
• Working with Smart Styles elements

With WoodWing's Smart Styles InDesign plugin, you accelerate your design workflow and your multichannel publishing efforts, and still save valuable time. Apply consistent styles quickly and easily throughout your document and create space for your creative touch to make a difference.

Now comes the fun part: getting started and playing with Smart Styles. Reading about it is interesting, but it really comes to life when you try it yourself. So go ahead and try out WoodWing Smart Styles now!