Making Snowflakes with InDesign

David Blatner

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I’ve spent the past week shoveling snow in my driveway, so it’s no wonder that I’m thinking about snowflakes. So even though this post is a little late (most people probably wanted snowflakes for pre-Christmas holiday art, not now), it’s worth adding it for posterity. Here are a couple of ways to make fun snowflakes in InDesign.

First, there’s the rip-off-a-font method, which Ted posted about last week. There are lots of snowflakes in fonts, so that one could be helpful.

Here’s one way to build your own:

1. Draw a frame (some regular-sided polygon is best; either a triangle, square, or hexagon)

2. Choose Object > Corner Effects, and pick a fun corner effect, such as Fancy or Inverse Rounded.

3. Choose Object > Paths > Close Path. This appears to do nothing (it closes an alreaedy closed path), but it actually converts the corner effects into real bezier curves and points.

4. Then, do one of the following:

• Apply another corner effect. In most cases, you get a cool fractal effect.
• Option/Alt-click one of the rotate 90-degree buttons in the Control panel. Holding down Option/Alt duplicates while rotating. Similarly, you could just type a rotation value into the angle field in the Control panel and then press Option-Return/Alt-Enter. (Make sure the Reference Point is set to the centerpoint before you do this.)
• Duplicate the object in place and adjust the size of the duplicate in the Control panel.

Repeat these various steps in whatever order you feel like for a while. If you have duplicated the shape, then try selecting two or more of the shapes and using the Object > Pathfinder (or Pathfinder panel) features to merge them together in wacky ways.

Here’s a few I just threw together quickly:

If you make even cooler ones (wouldn’t be hard… I’m not must of an artist), email them to me (david at indesignsecrets.com) and I’ll post them here.