From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Creating and controlling layers - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Creating and controlling layers

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- [Instructor] In a complicated layout, it's always a good idea to create at least a couple of layers and then use them to organize your objects. Every document starts with one layer called layer one, and you can see that by opening your layers panel over here in the dock, or you can find it in the window menu. There's layer one and all our objects are currently on that layer. Let's start organizing this document by creating a couple more layers. First, I'll open the layers panel menu and choose new layer. I'll call this one images and then click okay. Another way to make a new layer is to hold down the Option key on the Mac or Alt on Windows, and click on the plus icon at the bottom of the panel. That forces InDesign to open the new layer dialogue box, and here I can name it and press Enter or Return to click okay. Okay, now we've got three layers, so how do we get objects onto those layers? Actually, to do this, let's jump to the fourth page of this document. I'll do that by pressing Command + J or Ctrl + J on Windows. That opens the go to page dialogue box, and then I'll press 4 and hit Return or Enter. Now I'm on page four. From here, if I click on an object, you'll see over here in the layers panel, the little blue square lit up. That square is a proxy for whatever is selected on the page right now, and if you drag that blue square up from layer one into the text layer, then you can see that the blue square turned green and the edge of the object changed colors as well. Now, the object itself did not really change, but the frame edge highlighting did. The edge highlighting always reflects the color of the layer. The text layer right now is green, so the object highlights as green. Again, the color change does not affect how this document will print or export to PDF. It only changes on screen. All right, let's go ahead and move these pictures by clicking on one and then dragging this up. This time I'm going to go to the images layer. Let's go ahead and do this one as well. Also, if you were paying attention in the last movie, you know there's one more image hiding behind this one, so let's Command or Ctrl + Click to select through this image to the frame behind it. I'll drag that one to the images layer as well. Of course, once you have layers, you can move them around, like we can move this text layer down simply by clicking it and dragging it between the other two layers. There we go. By the way, in the last movie, I talked about the send to back and bring to front features in the arrange sub menu. You should know that all those commands refer just to the current layer, so send to back does not actually mean send behind all the objects on the page. It means send to the back of this particular layer. I just need to be clear about that. The layers panel gives us even more control over our document. For example, you can click on these eyeball icons to the left of the layer name to show or hide all the objects on that layer. On a complicated layout when you're trying to manipulate a lot of objects, being able to hide all the distracting items is really helpful. You can also lock these layers by clicking in the second column. That locks all the objects on that layer, and you can see that anything that's on a locked layer cannot be selected. For example, if I try and click on this image right here, it doesn't work. It selects right through it to the text frame. Okay, there are a few more layer tricks you should know. One is if you want to select all the objects on a particular layer, you can just click on that little selection proxy square on the right column. That selects all the objects on just this one spread. The second trick I want to point out is that you can double click on a layer to open the layer options dialog box. Here, you can change the name, the color, or even various behaviors. For example, I can turn off the lock layer checkbox and also turn off print layer. This means the layer will display on screen, but if you print or export a PDF, the objects will just disappear. Let's click okay, and you can see an indication of that in the layers panel because the name of the layer is in italic. Italic layers means they're non printing. You can even see that by going into preview mode, by pressing the W key. All the non printing objects simply disappear. I'll press W again to bring them back. Now, whether you use lots of layers or only one, the layers panel has one more super important trick up it's sleeve. It lets you see and manipulate the stack of objects inside each layer, and you can do that by clicking this little triangle next to the layer name. Every object on my page or spread shows up here inside the layer, and we have the same controls that we had for layers, like being able to lock or even show or hide each of these objects, and this also gives us fine control over our stacking order because we can just drag these objects up or down or even onto another layer. For example, I'll open layer one and select this text frame over here. Now I can simply drag it up into my text layer. As you can probably tell, I'm a fanatic for having total control over each and every object on my page. After all, without control, how can you manage your design? I encourage you to use this layers panel, especially when you're working with complex layouts.

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