Styling lists in InDesign

Having recently been working on a large brochure, I came across the problem of trying to style lists in Adobe InDesign. With the brochure requiring quite a few lists, I thought the best method would be to create a paragraph style that could be applied easily, and updated easily if required.

After quite a bit of messing, I finally managed to style my list the way I wanted.

Here’s how I went about it…

Step 1: Create your style

The first step is to create your style in the paragraph styles panel - I’ve named mine “Bullet List”. In the style’s settings, choose your bullet point style (you can add one if you like).

Step 2: Adjust the indents

By default, InDesign will wrap the bullet text underneath the bullet the point. So, in order to create a visual margin between the bullet points and your text, we need to adjust the indent spacing as shown below. The First Line Indent should always have a negative value for this to work correctly.

The finished style …