This is the Safari online edition of the printed book.

A knowledge of Styles is essential for InDesign users who need to improve their workflow, eliminate repetitive tasks, and produce more efficient and consistent work. InDesign Styles have evolved to become the core of the application when it comes to automating text, object and table formatting. Styles also reach out to influence and enable dozens of other features from small scale features like Bulleted and Numbered Lists all the way through cross-media export to XHTML. A true understanding of the far-reaching potential of styles can transform how design and production professionals approach and accomplish every project, small or large. Adopting a style-centric workflow can reduce tasks that would take days to mere hours, and tasks that would take hours to minutes or even seconds. In the only book exclusively focused on Styles, Adobe InDesign CS4 Styles, takes a detailed, step-by-step look at the creation and implementation of styles, and then provides a big-picture perspective for combining styles with other features for increased efficiency, accuracy and flexibility.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 10 Ratings

Buy this book - 2009-10-06
Reviewer Rating:
I've been reading through this online at Safari Books Online, and only got through about 25 pages before I realized that I had to own this book in physical form. Not since "Real World PageMaker 4: Industrial Strength Techniques", by Olav Martin Kvern and Stephen Roth, have I found a book as useful as this book on styles by Michael Murphy is. It's not so much that it deals with the software; updates and upgrades provide publishers the opportunity to put out "new, improved" texts that simply build on previous editions and discuss new features of the software. No, this book is good for all time. There is information that will help users of many different page layout applications--not just ID and not just CS4--through their various versions.

Good for Layouts - 2009-11-13
Reviewer Rating:
This book is great for anyone needing to set up documents properly in InDesign. I purchased it to help me at work with laying out a newspaper, which requires sorting lots of information from a variety of sources, stylizing lots of text in different ways and then adapting much of that content from the publication to the web. Its a great book although a little too technical for the new user of InDesign.

Good bang for the buck - 2009-09-08
Reviewer Rating:
Michael Murphy's Adobe InDesign Styles definitely picks up where other InDesign CS4 books leave off. The book's 11 chapters start off nice and easy, teaching the fundamentals of creating and managing paragraph and character styles. Further along, object styles, nesting and table styles are covered.

I personally felt a bit overwhelmed with the chapters covering GREP styles and dynamic content, but then again I am a more visually-oriented person. It's good to know where they are in the book though, and I'll know where to dig in again when the time comes.

Murphy's book also covers best practices for creating layouts that can be readily exported for Dreamweaver, by way of XML files. When a new topic (such as CSS Styles) is introduced, a list of further reading is included. For a book of its size, I felt I'd learned quite a lot of valuable information for my time and money.

Recommended for intermediate to advanced InDesign users.

opening up ID's back rooms - 2009-08-06
Reviewer Rating:
I thought I knew styles, having come to ID from SGML and Framemaker, but this book opens up all the closets and back rooms in InDesign CS4. Going to buy the book for our art director.

InDispensable reference for InDesign. - 2009-05-26
Reviewer Rating:
For anyone who uses InDesign for typesetting, this is an indispensable reference guide. I consider myself very well versed in the program, but within moments of scanning through the book, I found several tips and procedures that I didn't know about.

Michael Murphy is the genius behind theindesigner.com, and his book is as well thought out, thorough, and expertly presented as his video 'how-to' blog. Murphy manages to perfectly balance presenting things in a clear manner without talking down to his audience.

This book has earned a place on my reference shelf next to Robert Bringhurt's "The Elements of Typographic Style" and Mitchell & Wightman's "Book Typography: A Designer's Manual'.

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