Now I mentioned a second ago that the color of the guides was controlled by the preferences and the layer color it self. What we would do is let us expand the Layers palette for a second by clicking on it over here on the left hand side, we can see we are currently working on layer 1 and its color here, this small dot shows us that the layer color it self is blue. You can double click on that to bring up the Layer options dialog box and it will show you right there, this is the Layer color. You have a whole selection you can choose from and every time you actually create a new layer, InDesign will choose the next color down in the list for you. But for now, let us just leave that as blue. You can see that the guides that we see on screen are currently designed and colored, but again, when deselected, they show up with the same color as the layer it self, it is blue. But let us say you are doing a layout and you need this guides to show up as different colors. Maybe this top line suggests this is where the headline ends, this guide should suggest where the subhead ends and maybe, let us just drag another guide down there from the ruler, drop it into position. This is where the main body copy should begin.

If you are laying out a template for someone who would actually be quite nice to have each of these guides to different colors, so they know what is suppose to go where, that can be done by simply selecting any one of those guides or if you wanted to multiples, right click or control click on the MAC to bring out the context sensitive menu and you will see an option there called Ruler guides. If you select that, it does give you two very simple options. First one is guide color, cyan as set by the general preferences, but in this case, maybe I will go down and choose Fiesta. This option here, this confuses a lot of people, the View Threshold. This means that if we change the percentage view size of our page, I zoomed down on it. This is the value at which the guides will actually disappear from view. It would not go away altogether, they are still there. But if you view your document at 5% or less, you would not actually see the guides.

So, you can play around with that if you want to and choose different values, but normally you want to see the guides at all times so you can leave at 5% for now. If I clicked “Okay”, again, this confuses people. They have realized they just change the color to red, but it still showing up blue. Do not forget, it is still selected. Soon as you deselect that, it is now showing up as the color we just changed it to.

So we could now select these two guides left at the bottom here. Again, right click or control click. Go to ruler guides on there. Maybe choose another different color and maybe ochre at this point, say, “Okay”. Again, that will still show up blue, click and deselect and you will see those are colored separately.