Water, water everywhere…better not spill any on your keyboard. While liquids and computers are not a very good combination in real life, there’s nothing preventing you from using InDesign to make a liquid effect in your documents. As I show in this week’s InDesign FX tutorial, the trick is to use Bevel and Emboss in combination with a blending mode trick or two.

The key to liquid effects is getting the highlight part of the bevel correct so that an object or text looks wet. To get that highlight just right, you’ll usually have to experiment a bit and adjust the Angle, Altitude, and Size of the bevel until you get it looking the way you want it. Once you get the highlight right, then you only need to change the fill color to switch from a wet paint effect…

to a gooey, melted chocolate effect…

to a blood effect that might tempt a vampire to sink his fangs into the page.

To simulate plain water, you have to apply the Hard Light blending mode and it’s important to always use a background object or texture.

From there, you can vary the fill color to simulate other translucent liquids, like the maple syrup letters you see below.

For lynda.com members, I also have another new member-exclusive video this week in the lynda.com library called Creating Editable Knock-out Text. In the video, I show how to use InDesign’s Knockout Group feature to make live text that you can see through. Then, by varying the opacity of the text frame’s fill, I show you how to use this technique to create different effects, including blending the fill of the frame with the image that is beneath.

I also show you how to achieve a more dramatic effect by making the frame’s fill opaque and using the text as a mask for underlying objects.

See you here again in two weeks with another InDesign effect!

Tags: InDesign, InDesign FX, Mike Rankin

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