There are two way to create layout in fuelCMS. One way is to create a file with the same name as your view file.
In this file you add the layout variable:
$vars['layout'] = 'yourlayout';
I don’t like this way because we are creating a file we don’t really need and we are adding a little more confusion to the architecture of the application. By using the following code at the top of your view file you can set the layout.
fuel_set_var('layout', 'yourlayout');
By doing it this way the next engineer will know just by looking at the view file exactly what layout it is using.