How to Take Advantage of Guides & Grids in InDesign

[Music] good afternoon everyone and welcome welcome welcome scanner say good afternoon folks but you know good afternoon everyone welcome to my live stream on InDesign this is InDesign Tuesday it's been a minute I looked at I looked back and alas InDesign Tuesday I did was back in March oh my god I skipped the whole month of April I didn't really skip it I was kind of doing other streams other other priorities so I didn't get a chance to do any InDesign Tuesday's for the whole month of April but we're gonna make up for today and we're gonna make up for it with a fan requested topic a user viewer requested topic and that is you just give you a little backstory so I've been doing into the InDesign streams for around over a year or two now and every now and then there'd be one or two people that come into the comments and say can you show us guides and grids or baseline grid that was I think the specific request and I just always you know because it would be at the end of the stream I didn't have time but I said you know what I'm gonna make a dedicated stream for showing baseline grid and I just figured I would show guides and grids in general in that way we kind of cover everything so if you are a guides and grid expert then this is probably not for you because it's gonna be the the basics of guides and grids but we're going to talk about it some of the stuff I noticed because it's been a long time since I looked in some of these settings so a little bit have moved over the year so I was like where is the where is the checkbox for this where is the checkbox for that and so it took me a minute to kind of kind of find myself hide my find my settings by my way in and designs guys and grid settings but I'm up to date now I know where things are now where they've moved to where they've been shipped it to so we go and get started so I see a bunch of folks already in the room I see Steve Coco Stephanie Anthony Victoria is there I see some folks over on YouTube so sis Donna Sesenta welcome and I also see a bunch of folks on Twitter and periscope great to see you guys here all right so let's dive in let's not waste any more time let's go ahead and jump right into today's topic on a switch over to my desktop and now that I'm on my desktop I've got InDesign running in the background here and I'm just going to go ahead and create a new document like we always do so let's create a new document I'm going to use a standard print setting but I'm going to customize it a little bit I'm just going to make it wide because Y just shows better on live streams as opposed to a tall document I actually kind of remember what I just played with so I'm gonna do four pages just in case we need some more pages to work with and we're not worried about page numbers we did a whole stream on numbering pages I think last time master pages and numbering pages so now we're going to do columns so let's start off with this right off the bat you have Kopp margins and columns when you create your page and that is a form of guides because you have guides to kind of just show you where your columns are so this is you know this is one of the reasons or one of the places where we start and this is probably the majority of what I do with guides happens here and ruler guides those are probably my two main go twos but we're gonna get into some of the grids as well alright so number of columns and this this goes all the way back to magazines and remember newspapers this off get us all the way back to when people are laying out strips of type for newspapers so you had columns of types of our type to read the article in a particular newspaper or magazine and of course that still exists today but it's just it was more of a printed thing than it is a digital thing because digital depends on the size of the page for columns on a smart phone it's probably too skinny so you might not need that many columns depending on the size of the screen that you're watching alright Colleen great to have you here from Africa I tried to do I'm trying to do things a little earlier for people that are in different countries as well that way you can not be up so late watching these alright so anyway we're number of columns I'm just gonna play with let's say four and then the column gutter so what the gutter means is you have four columns well you don't want your tight next you you don't want it touching each other so the gutter is that space in between the columns so you can make that whatever you want make it as thin or as thick as you wanted to be I'm gonna start on a stick with a quarter-inch that's what I usually do but it depends on the design you might want more space in the gutter you might want less it is totally up to you and also the number of columns is totally up to you in case you haven't figured that out then you have margins so columns are those strips of type and images the margins is that space on the outer edge of the page and typically what margins were always for is not not only to give your your content some some breathing room some white space but also from a printing standpoint you typically didn't want content going into the fold so like if you're making a book and it's a thick book where the pages are kind of curled like that you don't want tight down here you don't want people having to stretch the the book to read it so you have margins to get that white space also depending on the printer you're working with meaning you're a little like your own desktop printer chances are if it's not a photo printer that can print to the edge of the paper you also have a margin restriction that's Hardware implemented meaning you can only go in so close to the edge of the page before the hardware is going to cut it off anyway even if you try to go all the way to the edge depending on the printer it's gonna just cut off those words or images anyway so specifying a margin is not only a good thing from a design element or standpoint it's also a good thing in some cases because you have to you have to have space depending on what you're printing all right let's go into I'll be happy when sees you between the top the text frame and the baseline alright I'm not sure what you're asking but I'm gonna try and explain what I think it is so you think is asking tight area I would be very honored if you could explain what the issue between the top of the text frame and the first baseline okay so I'm going to show you some baseline options and hopefully that'll cover it because I think I know what you mean all right so anyway I'm just going to leave these at a half inch again margins are up to you or your hard work getting on your hardware if you can go all the way to the edge or using a traditional praying press type operation that where they can print to the edge or a print on a bleed then that's you know you can go further I'm just going to leave it at a half inch which is my usual default okay and there is my page my half inch all the way around on the outside my four columns with a quarter inch of space in the gutters and by the way I'm more if you haven't guessed I'm working in inches you can easily be working in pikas points millimeters centimeters whatever measurement system you want I've just worked in inches for decades and I know inches but work it you know translate those and you can change your preferences to any one of the settings that you prefer so you say what's this inches crap and you liver can points and pikas or whatever you can certainly set it up that way all right so now that I got my four columns these are guides meaning they're there to show you what four columns is they're not there to lock you in place so what I mean by they're not there to lock you in place let's bring an image in let's go to my credit card libraries which is where I get all the images from usually and I'm just going to bring in this bike image it's one of my own photographs I'm just gonna go ahead and lay it across the column oh my god I broke the rule I split it across a column Oh No here come the column police they're gonna arrest me now it doesn't matter if they're there have to say hey if you want this between two columns here here's where we'll be evenly spaced but if you don't put it between two columns no one cares but you so it is up to you so now if I said hey I got these nice column guys let's go ahead and take advantage of them and let's scale this up so that it is now evenly spaced between those two columns that would be a good idea that's what the column guides are for or if you said hey I want all the content to fit within one column then you can of course scale that image down and you have your nice guides there to align it on and that way it is now aligned within the column perfectly the way you want all right is inch the correct measure unit when the type is always measured in points there is no correct it is your preference so again I work at interest but of course type is measured in points I just have dealt with that correlation for years if you prefer to work in points across the board then working points across the board there is no it what's right it's what's best for you or your environment meaning the people you that you work with but there is no it has to be one way or the other all right so now let's go in and let's talk about the second type of by the way one more thing these you do not pick up and move around first and foremost that way I can't grab one of these and move it first and foremost they were designed on the master page by default so if I go to my pages panel and I go to my a master that's where they exist but I still can't pick them up and move them there is I believe a keyboard shortcut that will let me grab them and move them but for most part they're designed to be locked down because you specify them that way for a reason now for the sake of example I'm going to remove them off page two I'm going to just drag a blank master page to page two and when I go to page two there should be no they're still there they're still there even though okay so it's they're still there i I was going to show you an example of what we can do if you didn't have them ready but we'll do that example anyway on just a different way alright but anyway let's go back to page one and on page one what I want to do now is I want to talk about the second type of guy so ruler guides so ruler guides are as the name implies you get them from the ruler so if you don't see the rulers like right now I don't see my horizontal or vertical ruler because I just turn them off so you can turn them on or off with your command key or control key shortcuts so in the Mac command are for rulers PC control are for rulers and that will bring up your rulers and again your rulers are and whatever your default measurement is as well so my default measurement was inches so my rulers are in inches you can also right-click on a ruler and change the measurement so if I did want that horizontal ruler to be measuring points boom I just changed at the points I wanted it to be measured in something else I could change it to something else and you could do that for either ruler so with tools to your point if you want it to really concentrate on a vertical part being in points you can I did go to page I did go to page two yeah so I was on page two still didn't see it so nice try all right okay you can have the vertical ruler points and the top ruler inches or whatever you want so again those are all customizable to whatever your heart's content even if your measurement system is start it in one way or another all right next let's go in and talk about those rule guys so I brought up the rulers because once they're available whatever way they're being measured you can then pull down or pull across manual guides to put them wherever you want so if you're trying to line things up that aren't necessarily aligning to columns but you want to align them up in a specific way you can pull out as many of these guys as you need to line up those specific things and these are easily moved around and they are so for example we put them on page one you notice they are not on page two so they are specific to a page or spread and you can pick them up and move them around at any given time they also work like objects so if I if I marquee select all for now all four will if I can click on it area net I still keep missing it hang on I still missed it area I can move them around how can I should go to move them all together though if I can ever grab them Erica I can move them all together so that they move as a unit so you can select multiple guides ruler guys that you pulled out and move them all at once and if you want to get rid of guy you can just click back on it and hit delete I've sat on all selected hang on deselect and click on one and then delete it and then you can delete individual guides so back in the old days you had to drag out a ruler guide and the only way to get rid of it was to drag it back up to the ruler or back over to the ruler you'd have to do that you can just simply click on a guide you don't need anymore and simply delete it now dragging out these manual guides is great except for when you want something custom so and you don't wanna have to build it guide by guide so let's go to that page to it on page two I'm going to go in and build a set of guides from a menu in other words instead of me having to go in and do them one by one like drag on a ruler and measure where it's going to be drag out another ruler and measure where it's going to be so forth and so on I can have InDesign do all that for me so one of the things that used to drive me crazy way back in the day was that you could have these nice column guides in an instant you just click put in your number put in your gutter building you got four column four column six columns whatever you want it but what if you want it rose what if I need it to divide up the page vertically as well as horizontally so I was like I got a drag ruler guides to divide up the the rows well that's not the case you can actually go into the layout menu and there is an actual create guides command so while selecting the ruler do you need to hold down the shift key you do not need to hold down Shift key just drag it down so if I say create guides this lets me pick the number of rows and columns I want so let's already have columns I could make new column guys but RAF columns I'm gonna go ahead and say that I want five rows and again same thing what kind of gutter space do you want between them you can specify whatever you want and this is also a very nice option do you want them to start with the margins or the page so do you want it to start up here and divide up all the way down to the bottom of the page or do you want it to start with your margin and go down to the bottom of your margin I want it to be within the margins just like the columns so that way I can just go ahead and click and you can preview it by the way which is kind of nice so if you want to play around and see what you're going to get you can play around so this is starting with the top of the page to here to here to here to the bottom of the page that's why they're uneven at the top and bottom these are a little smaller than these because they're starting at the top of the page but what I really want is with the margins so that way these are perfectly the right size or perfectly the same size I should say from top to bottom so now if I click OK I've got those guys and these are just as if you had drug them out yourself so they can be easily moved if you need to so it's just saving you that time of me having to go in one by one and drag down I don't know how many guys that would be 2 4 6 8 dragging down eight guys and measuring them perfectly on the vertical ruler I don't have to do that and just say clean them vertical horizontal both in a way they go all right pages are defaulting to the grid on the master a master make it be master you don't okay let's try that probably is what I need to do let's go and oh sorry didn't want to do that I meant to create a new master new master so if I do it this way let's see if he's right I guess he's right all right so now there oh did I create it sorry dude beat masters got him to smell their own bow all right let's go in and let's keep going so I got my vertical horizontal guides the vertical guides were created with columns the horizontal guys were created with the column guides or the create guides feature and again you can do anything you need on any particular page all right so let's say for example that I want it to create a let's talk about grids so we talked about guides we talked about margins we talked about column guides we talked about ruler guides we talked about how to move the guys around we talked about how to get rid of them so for example if I don't need these top two anymore I just delete those two and I'll still have the rest we talked about all that if you create them on a master page they'll be on all the pages we talked about that there's one more thing let's go in and let's talk about grids there are two grids that I'm going to talk about today there's the document grid which is always there and the baseline grid which is technically always there to the baseline the document grid is just the underlying grid that you don't see that it's just there to align things to or snap to if you needed to so even if you've never created any guys let's do a new document that way we won't have any got the columns all right so let's do another new document and let's say wrong way let's go to one column all right so now we don't have in this document we don't have any columns so back to that other example if I were to go in and create guides and I specified before five with let's do this one is 0.15 or 1.5 and let's do three columns at 1.5 and let's do it to the margins and let's click OK and that will show me balance so you know it's a tie to 1.5 sorry do i specify one of those incorrectly all right let's try that again 5 with 0.15 let's do it that way and 4 with 0.15 alright so now let's click click OK and the margins we're seeing the preview that's doing exactly what I want and that will do it and by the way there is an option I don't know if you caught that if we go in and say create guides one more time there is an option to say I want to do a new thing I want you to remove the ones that are already there so if I say remove the ones that are already there because I really meant to say four rows and three columns it will get rid of the ones that were already there to make your new setup so just so you know that's an option alright now let's talk grids so if we go to review menu and you come down to grids and guides this is also a way to hide all your guides it's a way to lock all your guys way don't look this is where you would unlock the column guides so that you can move them around apparently they took away my keyboard shortcut but this is where you go do it manually snap to guides that's but on by default and and smart guys that's on by default but there's two more things here show baseline grid and show document grid so the document grid that's the one I was talking about and that's this this is just always here it's just off meaning you don't see it by default but it's always there so for example if you tried to use it let's say it was off let mean left mean the visibility was off and you didn't see it you still wouldn't be using it by default and let me explain why if I go to my library again and I pull out an object well let's pull out different photos let's grab this photo let's just make it small I can freely move this around all day long it's not snapping anything I can put it between grid gridlines if we zoom in on that it's not snapping anything it's just there but if I were to go back up to view and I'll come down to grids and guides there is a the options of very bottom snap to document grid whether you see the grid or not this would just give you that little magnetic snapping at each grid mark and again if you if you're caught trying to line up two things and you didn't pull out a ruler guide that will help you because this grids there all the time so if I just turn that on and then now as I drag this it's snapping to those grid points it's not as strong like it's not like the force where it's really pulling the object to the guy like really hard but it is there so it's it's a very minut snap but it will snap and so that way if I were to pull out a different photo let's do that and let's pull out that one and again those items were snapping now even if I turn off the visibility of the grid by say don't show hide the document grid that grid still there and these items are still snapping so you don't have to see it for it to be working is what I'm trying to say all right so that's four objects so whether it's text frames images rules whatever they will snap to that document grid if you have that feature turned on whether you see the grid or not now I'm going to go back to that original document because this one has columns let's go back up let's go back up a page and now I want to talk about the other grid which is the original question the original question that a viewer kept asking was could I demonstrate baseline grid so baseline grid similar to the document granite is really designed for type so what is what he he or she I don't remember but what he or she was asking for was to show that feature all right so first and foremost just know just like the document grid it's always there you always have it not using it unless you tell it to so if I go to my guides and grids there is a show document grade which is the one we just did for all objects and then their show baseline grid which is primarily for type so when I show baseline grid this was the frustrating thing that will happen to many of you you will say well wait didn't I just turn it on how come I don't see it you'll go back and you'll go here and you'll check no no it's on it yeah it's on why do I see it because the InDesign team tried to give you a feature that is a good feature but if you don't know it's the hair you'll be frustrated because you'll keep turning on and off the grid and you'll never see it because there's something called a view threshold what I I didn't turn it back off I didn't do anything I just showed you where it was so I'm gonna go back to guys and grids it's still on so because now the option is to turn it off it's still on we don't see it you don't see it because we're zoomed out if i zoom in there it is if i zoom out it's gone if i zoom in i keep zooming in it's there but keep zooming out it disappears because they tried to make it so you don't see it zoomed out when you're trying to look at the overall page you only see it zoomed in when you're working with it so that's a view threshold that's designed to do that by default all right so let's go in and let's talk about where that is and how you would set it and change it so in your preferences Mac or Windows doesn't matter but go find your preferences and go to grids and there's review thresholds so my view thresholds set to 75% by default so if I if I'm zoomed in zoom out to anything less than 74 percent or less then I won't see it if I'm zoomed in to 75 percent all the way up to a hundred percent or more I see it so you can change that view threshold to whatever you want it to be you can either type in a number or you cannot choose it from the menu so let's say I change it to I don't know 50 then i zoom out to a fit and window again hey let me zoom this and now I'm at 51 do I still see it I can zoom down some more and I still see it I can zoom down some more until I get down below 50% which right now I'm at 25% I won't see it so you set that threshold to whatever you like I like it at 75 I'll keep it that way because that's a nice balance between I see it when I'm zoomed in I don't see it when I'm at fit fitting window alright so let's go back to grids I'm gonna put my him back to 75 75 and click OK and we see it zoomed out we don't or zoom to fit and pay fit fit page in window we don't see it all right so now what's it for like I said it's for type that's why it's only horizontal because typically or you're lining up type across the page and you want the stuff to line up no matter what so how does it work and there might just setting you want to change so let's go back to the there's a couple settings you might want to change let's go back to the grids preferences first and there's the baseline grid and the document grid so all the grid settings are here between the two types of grids so there's two things you might want to or free things you might want to look at you might want to look at the color because if all the grid lines are blue it's hard to know which ones which so you could change the grid to a different color that's easier on your eyes or easier to distinguish which type of grid it is so let's just for the sake of example I'm not suggesting you pick this color but let's just say we make it something of not just like orange and I won't see it till I click OK yeah there that's great use orange all right look at our orange grid and so just just so you know you can change the color so wrong one could've gone to it in the tab hold on didn't have to close it let's go back okay so now we're on we have a warrant grid or whatever Cully want I'll leave it on light blue and this is the second one you want relative to what and this might have been the question that was asked earlier relative to the top of the page or the top of the margin I typically prefer the top of the margin because I have margins for a reason I'm usually not a lining text outside the margin so that's where I want my grade disturbed you can tell it what in what position to start you can tell it what increment so this is this gets into the spacing you want between your lines right now the default is 12 point you'll see that demonstrated in just a minute and then last but not least grids and back is on by default so that means you notice that if we move this over you don't see it over the top of the image that's the way I like it and I agree it should have a lot of preview that's the way I like it I don't want to see it on top of the images because it's not for the images for text now if I'm laying out a bunch of text on top of images then I will go ahead and turn this off but for the most part I want it behind the images that I just don't need it on top and less I didn't need it on top don't come in here and turn that off all right so now let's let's see how it works on by the way that's what the half-inch means it so it starts a half-inch I don't like that in this case let's go fix it mm great all right let's change that to kind of start at zero let's say I can't okay so now it starts at the top of my margin at zero there's no extra space at the top it's not over the top of my images it's only underneath everything else and now let's go and put some text in so let's grab our type tool let's create a frame I'm just going to I'm making it off-center on purpose I'm making a star that start not in the grid on purpose and I'm just going to go ahead and fill this with placeholder type so type fill with placeholder text and I'm going to change the size of it because right now my default size is also 12-point so that's really not gonna look great 12-point on a 12-point grid so typically body copy is smaller on average usually so I'm going to make it 10 and I'm going to go ahead and set my letting to 12 as well so by default my text is make it yeah okay there we go by default my text is not paying attention to the grid at all I can move it just like that and it just looks like oh there's a grid there I don't care what do I care I don't care if you have a grid I'm just going to ignore it now even though I've set the fine to be in between the grid I can have the text behave and snap to the grid by just changing that option so here's what we're gonna do we're gonna select all the text because this is a paragraph setting we're gonna go to our paragraph settings and we're going to choose there's a sometimes depending on there there's an icon for it right here and here's the icon so let me zoom in so you can see it so right now the icon is set where you see kind of things just wishy-washy it's set to let me see what that's called do not align to baseline grid versus align to baseline grid so here's what's gonna happen when I click on it watch what happens by default the text automatically spaced and jump to the grid so I cannot make it not be on the grid if I try and move this down half way again no matter what it's gonna make that text stay on the grid I cannot have it not be on the grid I cannot put it halfway in between I'm trying my best and the text will keep snapping to the baseline grid so that's what baseline grid is for it's for aligning your text evenly across your pages so if they always line up no matter what is in the way no matter what you do so if I were to duplicate this text you're sold on my option key and drag it and again you see I'm just kind of even putting it halfway in between does it matter it's going to snap I'll move it up here doesn't matter it's kind of snap it does not care what your what your frame is set to it's going to always put that text on the grid so what if I change the text to be smaller what if I do that let's go ahead and select the text and let's make it nine point or a seven point or eight point let's make it eight point it doesn't matter it's still going to keep it on the grid it's just going to put more spacing between it but still gonna keep it to the grid no matter what you do that's why we love baseline grid because everything will stay lined up no matter what you've done to it now the only thing that will will obviously kind of throw it off what if I make the text too big what if I make the text bigger than the grid well it will still try it but it's just probably gonna look weird let's go to 13 point text and see it's still trying to keep it to the grid are let's even go crazier let's do 18 point text and it's still just gonna try it's best to keep it on the greatest trying to make it tight but the the landing is gonna get really tight it's just gonna jumble up all the text but it's still doing what you told it to do you said the line on the baseline grid I'm gonna stay on the baseline grid unless you turn it off once you turn it off and by the way we can change our letting let's change our letting back to auto then it does that if I turn it on then it starts to keep the stuff on the grid even though the text is higher than the grid it will just still put the baseline which is the whole reason why it's called baseline grid the baseline of each line is on the grid no matter what the text size is so that's what the baseline grid is for what is the usual font font size for a body copy again there is no rule there is no it has to be 10-point but on average it's around nine or ten point depends on your audience to think about it this way if you're building a document for on average a younger audience then the text can be smaller you're building a document for our list let's call let's call them the AARP crowd then chances are you don't want to type a little bigger they'll appreciate it so there's no rule there no it has to be a certain size it's more about your publication and your audience who's your audience do they need type to be bigger or can they get away with it being smaller what looks better it is how much sex do you have I mean pages do you have so it's it's all up to you it's your design but just keep type size in mind when you're thinking about the audience that's got to read it okay are you uh are you a doctor he's sending documents do your clients then you might want it to be a little bigger I don't know if they're having a hard time saying things okay am i zoom out the baseline grid is still there we just don't see it because I want to zoom out look at my publication and so that way I keep making this text smaller and it'll keep aligning and no matter what it will do the right thing and even when I get down to ten point where it can space it out even away it does the right thing and so the baseline grid is there or not there depending on the size of the document all right so the person that kept asking me how do you make the grid show and print you don't grids and guides are designed to be non printing elements so they don't print I don't I don't know if we ever added an option to make them print maybe I've been a long time since I look at the print dialog box but you can't go there this you can print non printing objects that might do it so if you do non printing objects and there you are print visible base lines a grid so they did at it it's been a long time since I've been in print dialog box so your wish is their command your wishes the InDesign Jean scheme and they've done it for you all right so you can just turn those on so non printing objects would be like your frame edges and things like that that don't print normally and of course visible guys and grids meaning don't print them if they're not showing so don't waste time printing guide you hidden only print the ones that are visible all right so why don't we look so now I know the answer to that one as well so that's it everybody that that was the how to use the baseline grants how do you take advantage of guys and grads how to use them to align things now and again even if you never ever set up guys and grids or you you just need to line something up this one time and you don't really need to pull out a ruler guide forward just also remember if I need to align these both on their left sides I do have a lineman options too as well so even if there's no guides no grids you just click hey put put these things align these objects on their left sides and I'm gonna do that all right Oh wrong one okay align them to their left sides and now they're aligned on the left sides align them on their right sides and or they're sent to Center them now they're centered align them on the right size now they're relying on the right size so even if I never pull out a ruler guy I just need to align a few things I can't all right Coleen I'm glad I've managed to show you a thing or two I was like Sean call anything or two and everyone else for that matter thanks everybody Cheers thanks for watching and we will catch you in the next one so I'll be on Adobe live tomorrow and Wednesday our tomorrow on Thursday tomorrow's Wednesday Wednesday and Thursday and I'll be hosting I'm Darryl you are one of our previous creative residents at Adobe all right so we'll be doing some photography stuff on Adobe live tomorrow all right cool and Gareth um I'm glad you thought it was great and I'm glad you guys that needed this got something out of it cheers everybody had a great one stay safe and we'll catch you in the next one bye everybody [Music]

Channel: Terry White

Views: 7,266

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Id: 09ZcGHmtY5A

Length: 39min 11sec (2351 seconds)

Published: Tue May 12 2020