Resizing gaps without resizing the frames underneath

[DigitalDesigner1]

I have a simple header section on my page, with first a thin colored rectangle that is page width, followed by a page width gap below it. Underneath the gap I have various columns of content (text & images). This content also has vertical gaps that differ in each column.

At the moment what is happening is that if I try to increase the height of the gap it forces the content underneath to shrink, and if I decrease the height of the gap, it decreases the height of the element above it. Essentially I would like a way to "lock" certain elements so that while using the gap tool everything that is not locked will resize very fluidly but the locked elements will stay the exact same size but will move based on the changes in size of the content around it.How can this be done?

[Eugene Tyson · Accepted solution]

There are some keys that are "modifier keys" holding down certain combinations modifies the behaviour of the tool. By no stretch of the imagination is the "Gap Tool" intuitive or easy to use - I tend to stay away from it.

http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=2121389&seqNum=13

[DigitalDesigner1]

Hi Eugene, that article cleared up a lot about the Gap Tool. The closest to what I am looking for is opt/alt + Gap Tool, since this moves the objects instead of resizing them, and I can lock any objects I don't want to be moved by the Gap Tool.

The only problem left is that the Gap Tool only moves the one object directly below the gap, so all other objects need to be moved down manually. What I can do though is group all of the objects that I would like to move together and lock those that I don't want the Gap Tool to move, and then the Gap Tool will essentially move multiple objects based on a single gap. The challenge though is if you then need gaps between the objects in the group the Gap Tool will again only affect the two objects the gap is between.

I suppose the functionality I am looking for is closest to MS Word tables or the Bootstrap grid system, where moving/resizing a single cell, responsively adjusts all the other cells on the page.