Grids

- [Tony] Now that you've grasped the basics of layout and composition, it's time for us to have a look at grids, which are an essential feature to give you a sense of proportion in the page and help you to build your layout. Let's have a look at some of the anatomical features you'll come across, the first of which is the margins, which gives you a way to position your main layout within the design space, but also some functional reasons as well. If you were working on a book or magazine, for example, you definitely need margins on the outside edges of the pages because that's where somebody would actually hold the page.

Columns can help you to divide up the horizontal space in a layout and gutters the space in-between those, give it a way to pace out those columns. Don't think that you have to stick content exactly within there. Like with everything else, these are just guides. Talking of guides, there's something else that can be introduced to space out your layout into different divisions of the page and you can add flow lines to those that give you a way to examine the way you're going to present content to the reader in a flow.

When you join those things together, what you end up with are sectors. The sectors can also be expanded out into visual spacing areas and somewhere that you're going to put particular kinds of content. For example, if this was a technical publication, I might have small annotations down one side just arbitrarily, but they can help you in any way to work out and make sense of where you're going to position elements.

Do use grids, they're there to help you, but remember what I said, they're a guide, not a strict rule set.