Layer and text styles

Learn how to speed up your work with layer and text styles

Layer and text styles are sets of predefined properties (fills, borders, effects) that you can use to speed up your design workflow and ensure a consistent look throughout your projects. When you update a style, all associated layers automatically reflect the changes.

The only difference between layer and text styles is that the latter also include typography properties like font, size, line spacing, etc.

You can manage and organize styles in the Styles tab.

Creating styles

There are two ways of creating styles.

Way 1. Select a layer with the properties you’re likely to reuse and save them as a style.

Way 2. Click + in the Styles list and define all the required properties.

Applying styles

Select the required layer or several layers, then choose the style you want to apply from the right panel.

Optionally, you can apply styles using the left panel (watch the video above).

Modifying a layer style

There are two ways to modify a style.

Way 1.

1. Switch to the Styles tab, then click the style you want to modify
2. In the displayed panel, make the required changes.
3. Close the panel to apply changes.

Way 2.

1. Select a layer using the style you want to modify.

2. Make the required changes in the right panel. When you are done, you will see an asterisk (*) next to the style name in the right panel. It indicates that changes have been made to the style.

3. Use one of the following options:

   • Update Style (): Saves the changes to the existing style.
   • Create New Layer Style (): Saves the changes to a new style.
   • Reset Style () : Discards all changes that you have made.

Detaching a style

Select the required layer and click the Detach style button shown below.

The appearance of the layer remains the same, but it is no longer associated with the style and further changes to the style will not affect the layer.

Organizing styles

It is a good practice to organize styles into groups similar to those shown in the figure below.

To organize your styles into groups, consider the following format of style names:

Group name / Subgroup name / Style name

For example, to organize your styles of backgrounds, you can give them the following names:

• Backgrounds / Light
• Backgrounds / Dark
• etc.

The number of nesting levels for subgroups is not limited.

Another way of organizing styles:

1. Holding down Shift, select styles in the left panel.
2. Right-click.
3. On the context menu, click Group.
4. Rename the group to the desired name.

To rename a style or a style group:

1. Double-click over the style/group.
2. Type the new name and press Enter.

Style groups and styles appear in the A-Z order in the left panel.

Duplicating styles

You can duplicate your existing styles and quickly create new ones based on their parents.

To duplicate a style:

• Click the style in the list and press Ctrl + D.

  OR

• Right-click the style in the list and select Duplicate on the displayed menu.

Also, you can select and duplicate several styles at a time.

Copying styles between documents

To copy styles between documents:

1. Select one or several styles in the source document (hold down Ctrl or Shift to select multiple items).
2. Right-click and select Copy style on the displayed menu.
3. Switch to the target document.
4. Open the Styles tab.
5. Right-click over the left panel and select Paste style on the displayed menu.

Also, if you’re working with a cloud document, you can consider sharing styles.