Can you supply any other information?

How wide are your margins? Are they uniform (left and right, top and bottom)? It looks to be about 20 columns for the spread and the crosses are likely 80mm wide (240/3), which are likely used to setup the horizontal crossing lines of the grid.

This might also help: http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/five-simple-steps-to-desig...

And here are some templates that could be useful: http://www.thegridsystem.org/categories/templates/

hi andrew, thanx for the reply

i didnt design the grid. I'm working on a cd cover + inside booklet for a client and they sent me a pdf of their guidelines and templates. the image i attached here is a screenshot. There are no specific measurments which is why i am so confused as to how I am supposed to recreate this in indesign.

You might want to post the PDF (if it's not proprietary).

My take: I'd open the template and save it as a TIFF image and then set up a master page at the document size and just put the image in the master page as a background template. Then when you're done designing, delete the image on the master page.

Simple work around. You can drag out your columns and margins to match the image so you have something to "snap" to.

Does that help any?

yes thats what ive been doing. apparently the grid has been constructed from a photograph and there are no defined measurements etc. its all abit 'free' as they said. thank you for your help andrew, much appreciated.

> put the image in the master page as a background template

Yes that's how I'd do it.

> save it [PDF] as a TIFF

Or you could just import the PDF. InDesign can place PDFs as images.

(If the PDF is more than one page, make sure that the "Show Import Options" checkbox is checked in the "Place" dialog box, so you can select which page of the PDF to import.)

@James, I wasn't aware that you could import PDFs into InDesign. Thanks for the nugget.

> I wasn't aware that you could import PDFs into InDesign.

I didn't discover it until recently myself. It's very handy at times.