Layers can play an important role in managing the content in your documents.
In order to organize and more easily select content in this brochure, you'll first learn how to create a new layer then you'll add content to that new layer, and finally you'll change layer properties like layer name.
You can open this file from the downloadable practice files for this tutorial if you'd like to follow along.
Now to see the layers in the document, you'll open the Layers panel.
Choose Window, Layers.
In the Layers panel that opens, you should see the default layer, named Layer 1, it's currently the only layer and it contains all of the existing content in this document.
There may be times in certain documents when you may not find it necessary to work with layers in the Layers panel.
Maybe there are only a few elements in a business card you're working on for instance.
In the case of this brochure, it would be helpful to organize the content into layers since there will be a lot.
You'll create a new layer and place an image on that layer in the background to start.
Now, to rename a layer like Layer 1 so you can better keep track of them, double click the layer name Layer 1.
In the dialog box that appears, change the name to Text.
There are a lot of options for working with your layers that you can explore.
But for now, simply click OK to change the name.
You can name your layers anything that makes sense to you or even leave the default naming.
Changing the names of your layers will be beneficial in a document with a lot of content and a lot of layers to more easily keep track of the content you have.
Now you'll place an image in the background of the brochure to add more interest.
First, you'll create a new layer so that the background image can be hidden or selected more easily.
At the bottom of the Layers panel, click the Create New Layer button to create a new layer.
The new layer is added above the default layer in the Layers panel and named something generic, like Layer 2.
To change the name, double click right on the layer name and change the name to Background, then click OK.
With the layer selected, you can tell it's selected because it has this highlight, you add content to the new layer.
Selecting a layer in the Layers panel tells InDesign CC to place new content you add onto that layer.
Now you'll place an image.
To zoom out a little first, choose View, Zoom Out.
Then, to place the image, choose File, Place...
Navigate to the folder of practice files you downloaded for this tutorial and in the Links folder, choose the image named background.jpg.
Click Open, then to place the image, click in the upper left corner of the page.
With the image selected, look in the Layers panel.
You can see that the new image is on the Background layer that was selected.
This small red box means the selected content is on this layer.
Now the image needs to be behind the other brochure content, so you can see the other content.
To do that, you'll reorder the layers in the Layers panel.
Drag the Background layer down in the Layers panel.
When you see a line appear below the Text layer, release the mouse button to reorder the layers and the content on the page.
So, you can deselect the content, click in a blank area of the document window.
In the Layers panel, click the blank area to the right of the eye icon in the Background layer.
This locks the layer, so you can't select the content on that layer.
This will help to focus on editing the artwork on the Text layer for instance without accidentally moving the background image.
In the Layers panel, click the arrow to the left of the Text layer and you'll see all the content on that layer.
Now you'll move to another page in the document.
In the lower left corner, below the document window, choose 5 from the menu to see page 5.
If you look in the Layers panel now, you'll see the same named layers, but that content for the Text layer is different.
In InDesign CC, the layers are shared across the entire document, but only the content for the active page or spread is shown in the Layers panel.
Now if you need to delete a layer that you're not using maybe, you can click the Delete selected layers button.
Know that if you delete a layer, you will also delete the content on that layer for every page.
Now that you know how to add and rename layers in your documents in InDesign CC, you can start to organize artwork in projects you create.
