Solving Complicated Layouts with Space/Align

Asymmetrical Grids

While sym­met­ri­cal grids (iden­ti­cal width columns) have their place, asym­met­ri­cal grids, where one or more columns are not equal to the rest, adds dra­ma and vital­i­ty to many designs. Creating them with InDesign’s guides man­ag­er is near­ly as facile as build­ing sym­met­ri­cal grids.

1. Create a blank 11x17-inch doc­u­ment, and unlock guides.
2. Decide how wide you want your left (non-facing pages) or out­side (fac­ing pages) col­umn. Drag out your first guide to approx­i­mate­ly that loca­tion. This first guide will become the right or inside edge of that column–the mar­gin guide han­dles the out­side bound­ary. In my lay­out, I’m going with a 3‑inch out­side col­umn, so, with a 0.5‑inch mar­gin, I’ll drop the guide as close as pos­si­ble to the 3.5‑inch mark.
3. With that guide select­ed, set its X coor­di­nate to 3.5 in. (or what­ev­er is the appro­pri­ate place for your layout).
4. Drag a sec­ond guide from the ver­ti­cal ruler, and drop it atop the right or inside mar­gin guide. If it does­n’t line up exact­ly, use the Transform palet­te’s X coordinate.
5. And now, drag two more ver­ti­cal guides to some place between the first two. You should have four guides present on your page.
6. Select all guides again. You can do that with the Selection tool, as we did the first time, or you can use the key­board short­cut CMD+OPT+G (CTRL+ALT+G).
7. On the Align palette, click the Distribute Horizontal Space but­ton. The out­side guides won’t move, but the two inner ones will snap into place to pro­duce three equal width columns after your left/outside wide column.

If you need guides for half columns (for align­ing things like half-column illos, cap­tions, and sub­heads, for exam­ple), do them the same way–just insert an extra set of guides, one for each col­umn, and dis­trib­ute spac­ing again.

Column Gutters & More

But, wait! These guides don’t account for col­umn gut­ters! Anything you place in one col­umn is going to butt right up against objects in the columns to either side. No, we haven’t account­ed for col­umn gut­ters yet. Let’s go ahead do that.

1. First, decide how wide you want the spac­ing between your columns. I’m going with 0.35-inches. Then, fig­ure out what half of that is–so, in my case, half of 0.35 is 0.175.
2. Select the first guide, and note its X coordinate.
3. Using the Selection tool, select all the guides cur­rent­ly on the layout.
4. Remember when I said that InDesign tends to treat a ruler guide as just anoth­er object? What else can you do with objects in InDesign. You’re absolute­ly right: you can copy and paste objects. (You must be drink­ing cof­fee, ’cause you’re sharp!) Press CMD+C (CTRL+C) to copy the select­ed guides to the clipboard.
5. With them still select­ed, go on up to the Object menu and take advan­tage of some­thing else InDesign guides can do: Lock Position. Once locked, you can select the guides, but they’re not mov­ing. Unlike the View > Grids & Guides > Lock Guides com­mand, which bat­tens down all guides every­where in the lay­out, Object > Lock Position can be used to lock guides selectively.
6. Paste. Now that’s convenient.
7. You should have a com­plete sec­ond set of guides there. With them all still select­ed, go up to the Transform or Control palette, and enter in the X coor­di­nate box the loca­tion of the first guide as you not­ed it in step 2 above. Don’t hit Enter just yet. After those coor­di­nates, type – (hyphen) [half the width of your gut­ter]. With my asym­met­ri­cal lay­out and 0.35-in gut­ters, I’ll enter 3.5 – 0.175 in. When you hit enter, InDesign does the math and moves your com­plete set of guides 0.175-inches to the left of the locked down versions.
8. If every­thing looks right, lock this set of guides the same way, and repeat steps 6 and 7. This time, though, add half of your mar­gin width instead of sub­tract­ing it to form the oth­er side of your col­umn gut­ter. When you’ve fin­ished, you’ll have col­umn dividers and gut­ter guides. Don’t for­get to lock down all of your guides with View > Grids & Guides > Lock Guides before begin­ning to build and posi­tion print­ing elements.

Using dis­tri­b­u­tion and align (and cof­fee), you can quick­ly lay­out com­plex grids with ease. This method­ol­o­gy of copy, paste, and posi­tion guides also opens up the pos­si­bil­i­ties for very com­plex lay­outs. It need­n’t be employed sole­ly for col­umn gut­ters. Just remem­ber: Designing on a grid does­n’t mean you can’t think out­side the box.