[Music] hello all creative people out there this is Kevin from CC pipe here where we focus on productivity and pipeline for creatives and in this video I'm going to show you how to use a baseline Grid in InDesign to align your text columns perfectly every time so let's jump straight over to InDesign and take a look every document has a baseline grid it just doesn't show by default and to reveal it simply go to view grids and guides and then show Baseline grid now we can see it and the idea is to lock your type to this and you'll always have your columns perfectly aligned and to make this work properly however we need to set up the grid to match our document and we need to know our top margin I.E where it should start and also the leading of our body text body text being what we're going to align to the grid the top margin happens to be 13 millimeters and if I just select some text you can see the body is eight points with 9.6 points leading and we need leading not the font size because we want the spacing for both the type and the space in between for the rows all right now we can go to settings Ctrl k for short and next find the grid tab here under the Baseline grid we can insert input we just looked up start at 13 millimeters relative to top of page and increments every 9.6 points then just press ok also notice even though we are in the InDesign settings this one is document specific and now we have successfully set up our grid so how do we get our type to align to all these rows well it's really simple we need to have a paragraph style and I have already set up some then just go into the style and then find the indents and spacing tab and right here we have a drop down for Align to grid simply set this to all lines and all the text using this paragraph style will lock onto the Baseline grid then just press ok now if we take a look we should see all our body text locked onto the grid and therefore these columns will always align with each other which helps keep the text block looking nice and neat and that's really it however you can see that it kind of messed up some spacing for us where there are some headings and if I just toggle the undo you can see our spacing between paragraphs also got slightly bigger and this is the downside of the Baseline grid and means you need to do a little bit more work to make it look good so here are some tips the space between body paragraphs can now only really be one or multiple rows that's just how it works with a baseline grid so not much to be done there but regarding the subheadings and this is usually in my experience where you encounter the most problems as of now only the body is aligned which means that it places the headings as you'd expect based on the paragraph style and if we look at the H2 Style you can see it has three points spacing after but what happens here is there isn't enough room for it to fit on the nearest line that we'll see over here and therefore it has to jump down to the next creating a big gap in between so here are two approaches for dealing with this we can choose not to align the subheading then in the paragraph style for H2 that we already have up I'm going to reduce the spacing after we just looked at and you see what happens now there's enough room for the row below to jump up one step that's already better then next go over to Advanced character formats and here we can use Baseline shift to move it up or down to make some finer adjustments and I'll go for minus two points to move it a bit closer to the paragraph it belongs to then just press ok now it looks a bit better the downside to not aligning the inline heading is this watch what happens when I move this text frame here on the right side The Heading moves but the body doesn't up until the point it forces it to a new row and this isn't great but it's only a problem for the first row and you then need to nudge the frame for a decent spacing so instead we could just align the H2 style to the Baseline grid as well so let's try that go back to the paragraph Style find indents and spacing then set it to all lines down here and now we just need to adjust spacing a bit differently this time and in this case I decided to actually just remove any space between paragraphs and then over in advanced character formats just move the heading a bit upwards before points that should be somewhat decent now and that's all I had to show you this time now we have a light columns and control over the spacing using the Baseline grid I also wanted to mention these were just some examples of how to approach this your documents will of course be different and it can be a bit annoying getting everything spaced out the way you want but as long as you try and understand why your type is behaving the way it is with the grid you can usually find a way to make it do what you want eventually so thank you so much for watching especially if you made it all the way to the end see you in the next video and I wish you a wonderful day