Grid Sys­tems – Easy Grid Calculator

Cal­cu­lat­ing a grid for a lay­out can be time con­sum­ing. It’s not only the cal­cu­la­tion itself but plan­ning and lay­ing out the whole thing is a task that even­tu­ally will take some time. How many columns is fairly easy to decide on but decid­ing the mar­gins, top and bot­tom may prove to be harder.

Spend­ing time on mak­ing the per­fect grid will save you time in the end and in most cases also make your design look bet­ter in a much eas­ier way. How­ever, try­ing to reduce the time spent on cal­cu­lat­ing the grid is worth while. Peo­ple often feel so pressed to start the job that they don’t think there is time to do the math.

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For some time I have col­lected var­i­ous exper­i­ments and meth­ods in Excel files. I always had in mind to share some of it with you. In the mean­time The Grid Cal­cu­la­tor, a stand­alone appli­ca­tion has been intro­duced and The Grid Cal­cu­la­tor InDe­sign plug-in is already in pre-release and will be released pub­licly soon. The cal­cu­la­tions for the Doc­u­ment Grid units in these tools are based on the Bach Gärde method. That is; the Doc­u­ment Grid is based on the pro­por­tion of the page which is being worked with.

The Grid Cal­cu­la­tor InDe­sign plug-in is by the way awe­some because it not only cal­cu­lates the grid but also sets the whole thing up in InDe­sign ready to go and ready to be saved for later use.

Another tool is Gride­li­cious, a web­page cal­cu­la­tor pre­sented by Arlo Guthrie at Arlo Design. Gride­li­cious is inspired by The Grid Cal­cu­la­tor using the pro­por­tional Doc­u­ment Grid, but recently also added cal­cu­la­tions for even square Doc­u­ment Grid. That is; the doc­u­ment grid is a square with even sides (less than 0.1% off). Access to Gride­li­cious is free.

Now I join the band­wagon. Easy Grid Cal­cu­la­tor is here . It is not easy to make it look very dif­fer­ent from Gride­li­cious but I am pretty sure Arlo will for­give me that. But there are also a few differences.

Easy Grid Cal­cu­la­tor has all of the major grid cal­cu­la­tion fea­tures. Cor­rect lead­ing cal­cu­la­tion based on page size and orig­i­nal lead­ing and Image­line cal­cu­la­tion based on the height of the lower case f (Reg­u­lar, not italic).

But it is also pos­si­ble to play with num­ber of columns and rows and fid­dle with the units in the Mar­gin sec­tion to let every­thing fit and the mea­sure­ments for the mar­gins are cal­cu­lated at the same time. I will explain every­thing in detail in a later arti­cle but a sea­soned grid user will most likely get this idea at once. The size of the text box is also a sub­ject for that arti­cle or maybe a sep­a­rate one. It’s a lit­tle and cool secret which I will let you in on very soon.

For now, it is prob­a­bly best to take a screen shot of your fin­ished cal­cu­la­tions and paste into InDe­sign or Illus­tra­tor for ref­er­ence. The Easy Grid Cal­cu­la­tor is still in progress and more fea­tures will be added later.

But here you have it: Easy Grid Calculator

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