How to set up guides for this kind of content

[wutbkk]

Dear all,

I have this design where the guides are set up 8 rows, 8 columns, with .4cm gutter inside the margin.

The design works fine like this:

However I want to insert a colored box behind the content in the lower section, but now I got this problem:

The image and the right-most text frame need some padding to look good, but if I only apply the padding to both, then their widths would not be the same as the two middle text frame:

My question is how would you set up margin/guides for designs like this?

[datap6156868]

The only option i know is to extend the width of the colored box beyond the margin.

[wutbkk]

Thank you for your reply.

[Peter Villevoye]

HA !! That's indeed a real designer's dilemma ! You can't have your cake and eat it. You can't have identical column widths and adjust these column aligned boxes with inside padding (to give the text a decent margin). These widths indeed create an uneven vertical alignment and an extra optical line...

Try finding a nice optical interplay between these widths and other aligned elements, in order to de-emphasize the visual difference. Welcome to the not-so-perfect world of layout 😉