So you have all these different ways to customize the color, the position, and the accuracy of the guides. The final thing I want to show you is how you can also place them on layers. Now most other applications again when they deal with guides, guides are always set to either be in front or behind of absolutely everything and if you choose to show and hide guides, it literally does every single one. InDesign, again because these are objects, allows you to place guides on different layers therefore, giving you the ability to lock and hide layers based on your own choice.
So what we could do in this case, let us just select this two bottom ochre-colored guides just like we created this a second ago, simply select one and shift click on the other one. If you come down here to the Layers palette, you will notice that next to layer one, this icon of the small pen tells us that layer is actually active and we can work with it. The small dot next to it, as you can see it, indicates selected items and it tells you to drag to move between layers. But we do not have any new layers in here at this point in time and we have a few options now as to how we can create a new layer. If we were to click the new layer icon here at the bottom, what this does, if you go ahead and click it, creates a brand new layer called Layer 2. It automatically colors it red. But if you are going through the process to generating layers for your design, you should very much get into the habit of naming them. Therefore, when you use this button, it does not immediately give you the dialog box to name it. So let us undo that, Ctrl Z. Instead, what we could do is come to the Flyout Menu here on this side and you will see there is the keyboard shortcut that we put in earlier on. A new layer is actually Shift Ctrl 5. So let us come off that, just click in here to deselect it. Let us do Shift Ctrl 5 instead and you will see it brings up the New Layer dialog box giving us access to the next color and also the ability to name this as soon as it is created. So let us call this layer Guides. Just key that one in and say OK. Now this blue dot that we see here for the items we have selected on layer 1 can be dragged up and placed onto the top layer. You will see immediately that these colors now changed to red because that selection color is based on this layer right here. But what we can do now is turn off the visibility for the Guides’ layer on the left hand side, only hiding those two that are on that layer. The other guide at the top here is still on layer 1 therefore, hiding the other one does not lose this one. So we just have this flexibility as to what we want to see and also we can choose the locked layers by clicking in this icon which means that even if the layer is visible at this point, we cannot click on that guide and move it around now because we have locked it from use.
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