Arranging panels and workspaces in Layout by Zaweba
Set up the panels in Layout by Zaweba the way you work: dock, group, float and save them as workspaces such as Typography, Book or Printing and proofing.
Docking is how Layout by Zaweba keeps a lot of tools within reach without burying the page. Panels sit on the right of the window, and there are plenty of them: Pages, Layers, Links, Swatches, Colour, Gradient, Stroke, Effects, Character, Paragraph, Styles, Tables, Text wrap, Align, Pathfinder, Transform, Info, Navigator, Glyphs, Preflight, Library and more.
Nobody needs all of those open at once. The point of the panel system is to show the ones that matter for the job in front of you and tuck the rest away.
Collapsing, grouping and floating
Each docked panel can be collapsed to its title, so it takes almost no room until you click it open. Panels can be reordered by dragging, so the ones you use all the time can sit at the top.
You can also group panels as tabs in one block. Swatches, Colour and Gradient make a natural group, as do Character and Paragraph. A grouped set takes the space of one panel and you flick between them with a click on the tab.
When one column isn't enough, panels can go into a second dock column. On a wide screen that is often the best arrangement: page tools in one column, type tools in the other. And any panel can be dragged out to float on its own, which suits something you want next to the spread you're working on, such as Align when you're lining up a grid of product photos.
Workspaces for different kinds of work
Once the panels are where you want them, a workspace saves the arrangement and restores it later. That means you can set up the screen differently for different stages of a job and swap between them in a moment.
Layout comes with built-in workspaces named Essentials, Typography, Book and Printing and proofing. Essentials is a sensible starting point when you're learning the app. Typography suits long stretches of setting text, when Character, Paragraph, Styles and Glyphs earn their place. Book is aimed at long documents. Printing and proofing brings the checking side forward for the end of a job, when Preflight, Links and Swatches matter most.
Your own workspaces sit alongside these. A designer who builds catalogues might keep one with Tables, Links and Library to hand, and another with almost nothing open for checking spreads at a large zoom.
A workspace routine that keeps panels useful
Start from a built-in workspace and change it, rather than building from scratch. Open what you reach for, collapse what you only glance at, close what you never touch, then save the result under a name that says what it's for.
Resist floating too many panels. A couple are handy; a dozen hide the page and wander about when the window changes size. Docked and grouped panels stay put.
Switch workspace when the job changes rather than dragging panels around mid task. Laying out pages, setting a long story and checking for print are different kinds of work, and the screen can reflect that.
If the arrangement ever gets into a muddle, picking the workspace again brings it back to how it was saved. That alone is a good reason to save one as soon as you've found a layout you like.
Panels are where most of Layout by Zaweba's depth lives, so a few minutes spent arranging them repays itself on every job afterwards.
