Setting Up Your Grid

Before continuing with this post, please read the blog post "Creating a New Document". Once you have followed those steps, come on back to this post and follow these directions. Thanks.

Setting up your grid

With your new document now created we have just a few more steps to complete before we can start designing our layout. 

While there a infinite number of ways to help organize our layout, we are going to use a simple grid that will offer everyone flexibility and be easy to use. This grid is called a Modular Grid.

If not already open, open your "Pages" panel and double click on your "A-Master".  

Note: To tell quickly tell what pages are selected and therefore editing you can use two different visual references. One the name or number of the pages will be highlighted in black with the text in white. Second the thumbnail of the page you are working on will be highlighted in blue. 

When you first double click on the "A-Master" page your "Pages" panel will look like the following image. See how both the name and page selected is highlighted.

In order to apply the changes we are about to make to both pages we need to first select the second page in the spread. To do this hold down "Shift" on your keyboard and click on the page next to the first highlighted page, turning them both blue. See below…

Once we have the appropriate pages selected we can move on to setting up our columns. To do this navigate to the "Top Menu" and select "Layout" > "Margins and Columns…"

A new window pane entitled "Margins and Columns" will open.

First, I like to see what I am changing so make sure that "Preview" is selected (selecting "Preview" is a small function that will make you more efficient in any of Adobe's Software as it can prevent mistakes.)

Secondly we need to change the "Number" of columns and the "Gutter". For this project we want four (4) columns with a "Gutter" of .125 (1/8) of an inch. 

Once you have made these changes, click "OK"

The visual appearance of your document should have changed to match the image below.

Now we want to create horizontal grids that will finish out our Modular Grid and give us vertical touch points for our layout.

To do this navigate to "Layout" in the top menu and select "Create Guides…"

A new window pane entitled "Create Guides" will open.

We need to change the Number of rows to five (5) and the "Gutter" to .125 inches.

Under "Options" make sure "Margins" is selected under "Fit Guides to". Again it is a good idea to make sure "Preview" is selected. 

Click "OK".

Again the visual appearance of your document will change and should look like the image below.

At this point save your document. The keyboard shortcut for this action is "command S".

Now if you double click on any of the other page thumbnails within your "Pages" panel you will notice that the columns and guides you just created have been applied throughout the document.

Start designing … go, go, now, start creating magic … you can do it!!