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Grid Sys­tems : Cal­cu­late grids for lay­outs in InDe­sign with the help of the Easy Grid Calculator

One of the tools I have used while cal­cu­lat­ing a grid for a lay­out was an Excel file I had used to exper­i­ment with dif­fer­ent kinds of cal­cu­la­tion meth­ods. A col­lec­tion of over a dozen dif­fer­ent cal­cu­la­tors for find­ing out dif­fer­ent ele­ments of the grid. I finally glued the dif­fer­ent parts together and placed online as the Easy Grid Cal­cu­la­tor, free for every­one to use (dona­tions wel­comed of course). The Easy Grid Cal­cu­la­tor should save you a lot of time con­sum­ing cal­cu­la­tions and allow more time exper­i­ment­ing. Now it is time to dive into what this cal­cu­la­tor is all about.

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6 links to help you get into grid based design

I got a request from a designer who wants to get started with grid based design, or at least wants to know what it is all about. The ques­tion was like this: Can you rec­om­mend a good primer on grids? Seems to me all mate­r­ial I find on it is way beyond what I’d call basic.

The ques­tion was asked on Twit­ter, so my answers were lim­ited to the 140 char­ac­ter bound­aries. There­fore I split the answers into six sec­tions like this:

Grid design 01. Let’s start with this nice expla­na­tion on base­lines, the key ele­ment (a PDF): http://bit.ly/c2jlBc

Grid design 02. When you have selected your main lead­ing you should adjust it to the page using : Easy­Grid­Cal­cu­la­tor

Grid design 03. This Easy­Grid­Cal­cu­la­tor helps you make a grid and columns based on your leading/baseline.

Grid design 04. When fin­ished cal­cu­lat­ing you can think of every­thing in doc­u­ment grid units and the fun starts.

Grid design 05. Links to what I have writ­ten about mak­ing grids in Illus­tra­tor: Grid Sys­tems InDe­sign comes soon.

Grid design 06. Good source with links about design­ing inside grids: Design­ing With Grid-Based Approach

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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The Grid Calculator

You may have seen what I wrote about the Grid Cal­cu­la­tor in other arti­cles. If not, this stand­alone cal­cu­la­tor is a tool to speed up cal­cu­la­tions when you are mak­ing grids.

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Wall­pa­per : Geigy Chemicals

A chem­i­cal can shown with this arti­cle on AisleOne inspired me to make this wall­pa­per which is free for you to down­load and use on your com­puter. Size is 1920x1200 px.

Wall­pa­per download.

Grid Sys­tems – Mak­ing grids in Illus­tra­tor 2

There is hardly a one grid sys­tem that works for every­thing or every­body. Dif­fer­ent needs call for dif­fer­ent grids. Grids that involve cer­tain rules, like pro­por­tions being by the Golden Rule are very com­plex to cal­cu­late and really dif­fi­cult and time con­sum­ing to adapt to any page size. Con­tinue reading…

Grid Sys­tems – Mak­ing grids in Illustrator

Design­ing within a grid sys­tem involves defin­ing the mate­r­ial you are going to work with, defin­ing the page size, mak­ing a pro­por­tional grid onto the space and then fit­ting your design into the grid. Hav­ing a good grid sys­tem will speed up the work process so it’s always wise to spend a lit­tle time on the grid first.

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