About object styles

Use object styles in InDesign to consistently format graphics and frames. Object styles can define stroke, color, transparency, drop shadows, paragraph styles, text wrap, and more. You can assign different transparency effects to the object, fill, stroke, and text independently. You can define a style based on the settings you’ve already applied to an object, or you can create a style from scratch or based on another style.

Control how styles affect objects

Apply object styles to objects, groups, and frames, including text frames. A style can clear and replace all object settings or update only selected settings while leaving others unchanged. You control which settings the style affects by including or excluding categories in the style definition.

Use object styles with frame grids and related styles

Object styles also apply to frame grids. By default, every new frame grid uses the Basic Grid object style. You can edit the Basic Grid style or apply a different object style to the grid. For grid styles, the Story Options section defines writing direction, frame type, and named grid.

When multiple styles share common characteristics, base one object style on another instead of redefining the same attributes each time. When you modify the base (parent) style, InDesign automatically updates the shared attributes in all dependent (child) styles.

Object style categories

To apply only certain attributes and leave others untouched, set the categories you want the style to control to the right state. Each category has three states: turned on, turned off, or ignored.

For example, selecting the Drop Shadow option includes drop shadow formatting in the object style. Clearing the Drop Shadow option turns drop shadow off in the style, so any drop shadow applied to an object appears as an override. Setting Drop Shadow to ignore (a small box or a hyphen, depending on your OS) leaves the drop shadow out of the style, so a drop shadow applied to the object does not appear as an override.

Categories whose settings you can turn on or off individually, such as Fill, Stroke, and Transparency, have only two states: turned on or ignored.

The Paragraph Styles category is ignored by default, even when you create a text frame, and applies only to unthreaded text frames.

Use default object styles

InDesign applies a default object style every time you create an object. Each new document includes a default set of object styles in the Object Styles panel, and InDesign automatically assigns one based on the object type.

You can control default styles from the Object Styles panel menu and manage which styles InDesign applies by default.