Solving Complicated Layouts with Space/Align

If there’s a secret ingre­di­ent in the suc­cess of good peri­od­i­cal, adver­tis­ing, lay­out, or gen­er­al graph­ic design, it would have to be well con­struct­ed grids. Well, now that I think about it, and to be per­fect­ly hon­est, the secret ingre­di­ent is prob­a­bly cof­fee. But, you don’t need this arti­cle to learn about cof­fee, so, for the sake of learn­ing some­thing new in InDesign, let’s pre­tend the secret ingre­di­ent to the suc­cess of most print lay­outs is grids.

Though the unini­ti­at­ed often view grids as restric­tive to cre­ativ­i­ty, pre­fer­ring to shoot from the hip, they are exact­ly the oppo­site. A strong doc­u­ment grid enables active and pas­sive white space and lines of force, cre­ates orga­ni­za­tion, and gives the read­er’s eye a map to fol­low from the start of the doc­u­ment, through all of its impor­tant parts, to the final mes­sage. Information-based lay­outs rely on log­i­cal struc­ture and direc­tion to con­vey their com­po­nents in order to deliv­er a com­plete mes­sage. That struc­ture and direc­tion is cre­at­ed with a lay­out grid. Of course, anoth­er ben­e­fit not to be sneezed at is that grids make it easy to align frames and oth­er objects with­out embar­rass­ing misalignments.

So, we’re all agreed? Designers need cof­fee–d’oh! I mean, grids! We’re all agreed that we need grids, right?

The InDesign Guides Manager

Assuming you’re still read­ing, you’re prob­a­bly bemoan­ing the fact that mak­ing grids in InDesign is tedious. Naturally, you build your grids with non-printing ruler guides. Therefore, you have to drag each guide from the ruler, posi­tion it, prob­a­bly repo­si­tion it a bit, and then grab anoth­er guide. Once your ver­ti­cals are done, you’ve got to man­u­al­ly place the hor­i­zon­tal guides. Ugh! What a chore! Even QuarkXPress has the Guides Manager–a dialog-based means of auto­mat­i­cal­ly cre­at­ing and posi­tion­ing mul­ti­ple guides. Why does­n’t InDesign have a Guides Manager?

Actually, it does. It’s just not in a dia­log. It’s not on a palette, either (shock­ing, I know). InDesign’s means of man­ag­ing guides is, for the most part, cool­er, and it’s def­i­nite­ly more intu­itive. Let’s check it out with a lit­tle exercise.

1. Start a new doc­u­ment. I chose a tabloid (11 x 17 in.) for a news­pa­per page layout.
2. Click and drag away from the ver­ti­cal ruler to pull out a ver­ti­cal guide. Drop it any­where on your page, and repeat three more times for a total of four ver­ti­cal guides.
3. Now, your guides, once dropped, are prob­a­bly immo­bile. Let’s solve that by select­ing View > Grids & Guides > Lock Guides, which is a tog­gle switch. We want to clear the check­mark beside Lock Guides. If yours is already absent, then guides are already unlocked; don’t click the com­mand again.
4. Grab your Selection tool (black arrow), and, start­ing from off to the side, click and drag in a straight line into the page. You want to make sure that your drag­ging cross­es all the ver­ti­cal guides you just cre­at­ed. Did you see them turn a dark­er blue? That means they’re selected.Ruler guides are, in sev­er­al ways, treat­ed by InDesign as sim­ple objects–like paths and frames–including the abil­i­ty to select them. If you want­ed to get rid of them (which you don’t at this point), sim­ply press­ing the Delete key would do the trick. So, if you trad­ed up to InDesign from PageMaker, you can drop the habit of drag­ging guides off the page to delete them (that does­n’t do it in InDesign any­way, they’ll just stay on the pasteboard).
5. Now, with all the guides select­ed, open the Align palette from the Window > Object & Layout menu. Once open, choose Show Options from the Align palet­te’s fly­out menu. The palette will expand to show a third sec­tion of controls.
6. In the last sec­tion, Distribute Spacing, click on the Distribute Horizontal Space but­ton. Your guides will snap to and become equidis­tant from one another.

Behold the InDesign guides man­ag­er! (Cue omi­nous native drums.)

Of course, you would­n’t just cre­ate a grid ran­dom­ly. To do it for real, before dis­trib­ut­ing space, cre­ate two more guides. Select one at a time, and, using either the Control palette or the Transform palette, set its X coor­di­nate (or Y, for hor­i­zon­tal guides) to match the page mar­gins (e.g. 0.5 in. for the left, 10.5 for the right on an 11x17 lay­out with half-inch mar­gins). Once the left and right (or top and bot­tom) guides are posi­tioned, then select them and the guides between, and dis­trib­ute spac­ing. The guides on either end will define the bound­aries for dis­tri­b­u­tion, and all the oth­ers will cre­ate uni­form columns (or rows) between them.

If, instead of even­ly dis­trib­ut­ing a spe­cif­ic count of guides across an area, you know how far apart they must be, use the last option on the Align palette. Check the Use Spacing box, and enter the in the field the required dis­tance between guides (or width of columns, if you pre­fer). Clicking one of the dis­trib­ute spac­ing but­tons will then space out the select­ed guides accord­ing to your mea­sure­ment, start­ing from the left most guide. This is espe­cial­ly use­ful when you need a cus­tom doc­u­ment grid of, say, .25-inch blocks.

Next, asym­met­ri­cal grids, account­ing for col­umn gut­ters, and more.