Grids an Layouts

Grids & layouts.  1 April 2024

Happy Monday to you all! Today, I’d like to focus the post on discussing a couple of the fundamental tools used by Graphic Designer – Grids and Layouts.

Now don’t be put off by the topic, grids can be seen employed in a number of fields such as town planning, Glasgow, Paris, Austin Texas and New York City are all based on a grid system, which make these cities easy to navigate in, but that well planned and organised towns and cities can do ‘more with less’.  This statement can also apply to the newspaper industry, when we think of how newspaper editors filled the pages of traditional newspaper with articles and images, well-structured and organised pages meant that more could be fitted on the page.

Using a ‘grid system’ in graphic design is one of the first things designers learn. There are numerous types of grids out there, some used as far back as when cultures began communicating visually using the written word, documents such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Book of Kells, are perfect examples of early texts where grid systems are evident in use.

Many early manuscripts used basic grids, now most commonly referred to as ‘Baseline grids’ or ‘Helper-lines’, pencilled in to help the scribe keep his writing even and equally spaced out on the page.

So, when we deliberate over - what is the purpose of a grid in graphic design? it is simply to help organise designs/layouts on a page; document or poster etc, to ultimately aid readability, create order/ visual hierarchy to the piece, and keep the viewer’s attention.

Grids come in all shapes and sizes, but today, I will concentrate on six of the most well-known and more commonly used.

Manuscript Grid

Column Grid

Hierarchical Grid

Modular Grid

Baseline Grid