On the left side of the layout screen are the "operation" buttons. Their fucntions define wat you want to do, such as "place a trace" for example.
On the top of the layout screen are the board set up buttons or operational properties.
The default layout is for 2 sided boards.
When you place a component on the board, such as a dip16 connector, it is outlined in yellow. Yellow is the silkscreen layer color.
Red is used for the traces on the top of the board and green is used for traces on the bottom of the board..
To avoid overlapping traces on the same side of the board, simply select the layer color to use before placing a trace. If you want to connect an upper and lower trace together, select and place a "via hole" of the proper size, between an upper and lower trace.
For complex designs where your eyes may start playing tricks on you, you can temporarily hide any of the 3 colors by disabling its display using the buttons on the lower left of the panel.
Like anything else, this process requires some initial learing how to operate the program, but it is a quick learning process and 1 or 2 small designs will be sufficient to get the hang of it.
The rest of the trick to any good layout involves some artistic ability and foresight (such as where to place the chips) and you may find that from time to time you may need to change items on the schematic (such as which element to use on a multi-gate chip) that best suites the physical layouts on the board. This is especially true on trace intensive layouts such as complex parallel bus layouts.
Dialtone