Grids, Guides, Proportions and InDesign Math

You can get obsessed with grids. Grids act as the skeleton or backbone of most design work and are considered integral to the process of balancing aesthetics with information exchange. Grids are beloved by some and bemoaned by others – some find the rigid parameters invaluable to harmonious design, others find it limiting and constricting. I find myself falling somewhere in the middle – there’s an inner geek inside of me that loves to find a clever way to break up space, but there also the anti-establishment side of my personality that likes to break rules and push the boundaries. For that reason, I like using grids as I see it as an opportunity to act as both lawman and outlaw, I can be both the cops and the robbers.

In the 50’s the international style or Swiss style began to impose an ordered and rational way of organizing information on a page. At the time it was dynamic and refreshing as well as a clever use of mathematics in conjunction with aesthetics. Even though the grid can be cold and limiting, the work is full of expression and  represents the culture of the time. I won’t go into a full discourse of the style (I am by no means an expert) as art historians, scholars and design geeks can do a much better job of it.

Just as trends can be reactions to what has come before,  aesthetics do likewise. Within the last 60 years or so the pendulum has swung back and forth so many times that what we are left with is simply responding to what we like. Our art and design work is a true reflection of us and not beholden to a universal defining principle imposed by outsider’s rules (an art school friend of mine and I called this non-ism-ism)

If we take this conversation back to grids (and I swear we’ll get to the InDesign stuff very soon) how do you rationalize your own aesthetic? What do you respond to – especially within a design context – that will give your work a sense of individuality that can be relayed back into standard design conventions? One way to begin thinking about this is to reflect on our own sense of proportion. What shape rectangles are you attracted to? What width line represents our idea best? What rectangular shape do you want to have as the driving force in your work? Another art school friend of mine used to make work – no matter what materials he was using  – that was always long and sinewy. For whatever reason this proportion made sense to him, perhaps because at the time he was similarly proportioned. Reflecting on this one core aspect will help establish the building blocks for our design work. We can build any underlying grid based on this basic motivation.
There are endless ways to split up a page via grids;  Golden section, rules of thirds, complex grids etc..  Every designer should investigate and use them; they are cool, they work and they create harmony. This following tutorials will talk about creating grids in InDesign and also about how to use a proportion of our own invention to establish a grid.
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1. We’ll start off with a new document and establish a series of columns to divide up the page. Since this tutorial is geared towards my editorial design (magazine) students, we’ll create a new document with a page broken into 12 columns. This amount of columns provides us with a high degree of flexibility; a page can be broken into 2, 3, 4 and 6 columns, we can make a two column main area with a separate side bar area, we can do asymmetrical pairings (7 and 5 columns for instance) etc… there are a great number of possibilities within this arrangement.

In the columns section, the gutter width refers to the amount of space between the columns. This can be tight or loose, or non existent (set to zero) depending on what your desired proportions are.

For now we’ll stick with the default margins of 3p0 (1/2 inch) but we will change them later to accommodate the way we want to break up the page horizontally.
The vertical column grid is not a rule that is set in stone, there are cases where 6 columns would suffice, or 9, or even 13 (if you wanted to give your layout some serious flexibility and asymmetry) In the early stages of the overall layout it is worth experimenting with blocks of placeholder text and solid blocks of color (instead of actual images) to determine what might work best.
2.  Setting up the horizontal grid. When we started the document we were only asked to determine the vertical sections, the horizontal sections are defined via the LAYOUT menu > CREATE GUIDES tool.

Within this tool we can define rows as well as columns. Setting up a horizontal grid will provide a sense of consistency, rhythm and proportion to your layout. The grid doesn’t have to be apparent in your final layout, but it gives the document some underlying structure as well as a framework to experiment within.
Here is where our desired proportions can come into play with the layout, if you are thinking long and tall, then perhaps fewer divisions is what you may want use, if you are thinking about squares, then perhaps maybe more divisions. The grid won’t lock you into these proportions – like the vertical grid there is a high degree of flexibility and variety – but it will provide opportunities throughout the layout to return to it.
For our first example we’ll define 6 rows with a gutter of 1p0.
3. The next thing to consider is the baseline grid. This grid will determine the leading (space between baselines of text) in your document.  The use of  the baseline grid keeps type in adjacent columns and between headlines, pull quotes, captions etc… aligned.  To view the baseline grid go to the VIEW menu > GRIDS & GUIDES > SHOW BASELINE GRID, this will bring up a horizontal grid of blue lines that are spaced apart at 12pts or 1p0 – this can be adjusted to any increment we desire via the PREFERENCES > GRIDS setting, but we’ll leave it alone for now. What you will notice is that the baselines do not match up with the horizontal guides we established in step 2.

We’ll make some adjustments to our document to this but first some math.

Hopefully that last sentence doesn’t scare you away. I am not a math person and have been known to mess up very simple equations. That said, InDesign allows you to do simple math right inside the program making it a godsend for those of us that start to get the jitters when we need to add or subtract.

4. Our goal is to somehow align the baseline grid with the horizontal grid. They are both the same width – 1p0 – and the document has roughly the same amount of baselines within each horizontal section – nine. In order to make this work, we’ll have to do some adjustments to the top and bottom margins.
5. For this particular document – one with 12pt baselines, 12pt gutters between horizontal sections and 6 sections the following simple math will take place. Take the number of sections (6) and multiply that by the amount of baselines desired within each section (in this case 9) this will give us 54. Then add the number of horizontal gutters (5) for a grand total of 59. Essentially what we want to do is divide the vertical working area (the space inside the margins) into 59 units, or in this case 59 picas or 59p0. When we look at the document the way it stands now – the overall height is 66p0 (11 inches) with a 3p0 margin at the top and bottom giving us a 60p0 working area. To accommodate our desired horizontal subdivisions we’ll distribute the extra 1p0 into the margins, in this case we’ll adjust the bottom margin to be 4p0.
(LAYOUT menu > MARGINS AND COLUMNS)

Then we’ll go into the LAYOUT menu > CREATE GUIDES again to delete the existing guides and place in some new ones.

Make sure to check Remove Existing Ruler Guides and also ensure the guides are fit to the margins.

What this means is that we can begin our layout and and rest assured that there will be some sort of uniformity in our document and that text and images will fit cleanly into our predetermined spaces (our proportions)

6. Here are some further considerations to make. First, for this particular document keep the leading for all text in increments of 12 OR if you want further possibilities, set the baseline grid to 3pts and use increments of 3 for the leading. Second, to keep the text aligned with the baseline grid you will have to ensure that the align to baseline grid option is checked on the paragraph panel for any text that you want to align to the grid.

Third, for all offsets in the paragraph rules settings, text wraps etc… try to keep to the same baseline distance – whatever it may be – this will further ensure uniformity in the document. Fourth – in regards to column gutter width –  it may prove difficult to read columns of text separated by a thin gutter. To remedy this, use the OBJECT menu > TEXT FRAME OPTIONS to divide a large text box into columns and to set a wider gutter width for those columns.
Also, remember, rules are meant to be broken, so establishing this grid structure is extremely worthwhile but the occasional surprise or deviation from it can make the overall document exciting and dynamic.

7. OK, one final example to finish off this post, this is the part where we’ll talk about InDesign math.  Let’s say we want to use a baseline of 14pts or 1p2 for the document and again want to divide the document into 6 horizontal sections. Set up a new document with all of the defaults intact; 3p0 for margins etc. Go to the InDesign menu on a MAC or the EDIT menu on a PC and choose PREFERENCES > GRIDS. In here we can change the baseline to 14pts. Also change the start to zero and relative to the top margin.

Then go to the LAYOUT menu > CREATE GUIDES and make 6 rows with a 1p2 gutter fitted to the margins. You will notice that nothing lines up at all. Again, count the number of baselines within one horizontal division (8 in this case) and multiply that by 6 (the number of sections) then add the number of gutters (5) for a grand total of 53. So, for the document we want 53 divisions at equal spacing of 1p2. At this point most of us will pause and scratch our head thinking to ourselves how do we do this multiplication? This is where InDesign math comes in to play. In your document make a rectangular shape of any size, with the object still selected go up to the measurements bar at the top of the screen and for the Height (H) value type in the following 53*1p2 (53 sections times 14 points) Indesign will then do the math for us resulting in 61p10. Then subtract 61p10 from 66p0 (the height of the page) – you can do this directly in the measurements box as well – to find the total amount of top and bottom margin space, in this case 4p2. Now we know that we can change the top margin to 2p0 and the bottom to 2p2 to accommodate our desired baseline and number of horizontal sections. Go to the LAYOUT menu > MARGINS AND COLUMNS to make this adjustment. Then go to the LAYOUT menu > CREATE GUIDES to delete the existing guides and make 6 new horizontal guides with 1p2 gutters.
It should be noted that there is nothing sacred about using a whole number for leading, there are certainly times when a leading of 0p11.5 or 0p10.25 would work – the math can all be done the same way within InDesign.

Questions, comments or corrections? Put them in the comments box below.