Exercise: Layout analysis

- [Instructor] Here's an exercise that you can try out at any time; and, in fact, you can even refresh it as things move on. What I'd like you to do is find some magazines that you like, and then carefully remove any staples from the binding of the magazine. Try and get this spread out as intact as you can. Ideally, stick it to a piece of card or foam core board. Then with as fine a ruler as you can get, measure all of the different distances inside of that spread.

Start to compare them as you do that. Print out some web pages and try and identify the grids that they're laid out on and see where the points of interest are in a page. The things that you can't see you sometimes find by extending lines, so use about two or three different colors of pencil ideally to do that. This will help you to understand how people are employing page layout techniques even though they may not be obvious at the time, because there's that old adage if you're doing something well, no one notices you're doing it at all.