can you create your own strokes and borders using InDesign cs2?

[Sam/B]

I've not seen this done before in a magazine so I scanned it in, I thought it was quite a nice affect for the right magazine or the right article:

white content box holding the picture and the text:
http://img152.imageshack.us/img152/6793/box17ya.jpg

left content box:
http://img152.imageshack.us/img152/7594/box20vn.jpg

How do you think the borders on those white content boxes were created? My guess would be either it's a custom stroke/border if you can do that in InDesign or it's a simple masking job done done in photoshop with a zero opacity background. If it's the latter the second scan would have the main content box and 2 seperate images placed underneath at the bottom edge and the left hand/top edge?

What would be the best way to create a similar effect in photoshop for the borders to start off with to intigrate into a content boxes border? Only thing that's coming to mind is drawing out the lines using different brush thickness' then apply a combination of artistic filters (dry brush maybe) to it and adjust the brightness/contrast and other variations in the channel mixer?

 

[ATD]

You could use a product like this

http://www.autofx.com/gallery_pages/pgegallery.html

or create custom brushes in Photoshop or Illustrator. I'm sure there is a lot edge products out there.

 

[Sam/B]

thats a really good idea actually, be pretty easy then to adjust the levels and a few other things to make it white for laying underneath those content boxes.

Could have some fun experimenting with these:

 

[gernb]

another way to do this would be to save the edge effect image as a tiff in bitmap color mode. place into InDesign and set the object color to 'white.' that way you don't have to mess with transparency and the image will overlay your background just like your example layout.