Our goal is to somehow align the baseline grid with the horizontal grid. That said, InDesign allows you to do simple math right inside the program making it a godsend for those of us that start to get the jitters when we need to add or subtract.Ĥ. I am not a math person and have been known to mess up very simple equations. Hopefully that last sentence doesn’t scare you away. We’ll make some adjustments to our document to this but first some math. What you will notice is that the baselines do not match up with the horizontal guides we established in step 2. To view the baseline grid go to the VIEW menu > GRIDS & GUIDES > SHOW BASELINE GRID, this will bring up a horizontal grid of blue lines that are spaced apart at 12pts or 1p0 – this can be adjusted to any increment we desire via the PREFERENCES > GRIDS setting, but we’ll leave it alone for now. The use of the baseline grid keeps type in adjacent columns and between headlines, pull quotes, captions etc… aligned. This grid will determine the leading (space between baselines of text) in your document. The next thing to consider is the baseline grid. The grid won’t lock you into these proportions – like the vertical grid there is a high degree of flexibility and variety – but it will provide opportunities throughout the layout to return to it.įor our first example we’ll define 6 rows with a gutter of 1p0.ģ. Here is where our desired proportions can come into play with the layout, if you are thinking long and tall, then perhaps fewer divisions is what you may want use, if you are thinking about squares, then perhaps maybe more divisions. The grid doesn’t have to be apparent in your final layout, but it gives the document some underlying structure as well as a framework to experiment within. Setting up a horizontal grid will provide a sense of consistency, rhythm and proportion to your layout. Within this tool we can define rows as well as columns.
IN DESIGN GRIDS HOW TO
This following tutorials will talk about creating grids in InDesign and also about how to use a proportion of our own invention to establish a grid. Every designer should investigate and use them they are cool, they work and they create harmony. There are endless ways to split up a page via grids Golden section, rules of thirds, complex grids etc. We can build any underlying grid based on this basic motivation. Reflecting on this one core aspect will help establish the building blocks for our design work. For whatever reason this proportion made sense to him, perhaps because at the time he was similarly proportioned. What shape rectangles are you attracted to? What width line represents our idea best? What rectangular shape do you want to have as the driving force in your work? Another art school friend of mine used to make work – no matter what materials he was using – that was always long and sinewy. If we take this conversation back to grids (and I swear we’ll get to the InDesign stuff very soon) how do you rationalize your own aesthetic? What do you respond to – especially within a design context – that will give your work a sense of individuality that can be relayed back into standard design conventions? One way to begin thinking about this is to reflect on our own sense of proportion. Our art and design work is a true reflection of us and not beholden to a universal defining principle imposed by outsider’s rules (an art school friend of mine and I called this non-ism-ism) Within the last 60 years or so the pendulum has swung back and forth so many times that what we are left with is simply responding to what we like. Just as trends can be reactions to what has come before, aesthetics do likewise.
IN DESIGN GRIDS FULL
I won’t go into a full discourse of the style (I am by no means an expert) as art historians, scholars and design geeks can do a much better job of it. Even though the grid can be cold and limiting, the work is full of expression and represents the culture of the time. At the time it was dynamic and refreshing as well as a clever use of mathematics in conjunction with aesthetics. In the 50’s the international style or Swiss style began to impose an ordered and rational way of organizing information on a page. For that reason, I like using grids as I see it as an opportunity to act as both lawman and outlaw, I can be both the cops and the robbers. I find myself falling somewhere in the middle – there’s an inner geek inside of me that loves to find a clever way to break up space, but there also the anti-establishment side of my personality that likes to break rules and push the boundaries. Grids are beloved by some and bemoaned by others – some find the rigid parameters invaluable to harmonious design, others find it limiting and constricting.
Grids act as the skeleton or backbone of most design work and are considered integral to the process of balancing aesthetics with information exchange.
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