#Grid indesign plus
When you start a new file in InDesign, you are immediately asked to choose your trim size (usually dictated by practical matters such as standard trim sizes or conventions of your book’s genre), define the number of columns plus the space between them, and set your margins (the grid’s outer frame). (After a decades-long career, I still have designs I’d like to use but have not found the right project to use them on!) The design must match the content of the book. If you have any preconceived ideas about how you might like to design this book, now is the time to drop them! Please, please don’t try to squeeze a book into an unsuitable design just for the sake of expressing something that’s in your head. How complex is this book? Do you need multiple columns? Do you think you’re going to be squeezed for space? Will you have (or do you want) plenty of white space? Any problem solving you can do at this early stage will help you later on. Make a list of all the kinds of elements in the manuscript: sidebars, extracts, illustrations of all kinds, poetry, tables, various levels of headings, footnotes, etc.
#Grid indesign how to
#indesign #bookdesign Click To Tweet How to construct a layout grid in InDesignīefore you begin devising a grid for your design, you must consider the nature of the book you’re working on. You'll have lots of options for combining text, captions, and images into an attractive layout. Using a layout grid in InDesign is a great way to create a dynamic book design. Cyan horizontal guide lines are used on pages with the large photos, which sometimes bleed and sometimes do not, but which always stop at that upper guide. The emphasis is on the height of the large photos at the top, which are equal throughout the book. The book above ( Made for Walking by Julie Campoli) has a layout grid that is not based on equal column widths. Dark blue and red lines show the column(s) and other grid lines, all of which are of course invisible to the reader.
All of the examples below are from real books.
Some examples of layout grids in real books Museums and artists do not normally allow cropping of images without written permission. You might have to use some awkward cropping to make this happen, so if your images show original artworks, you could get into trouble. The only practical drawback to this kind of grid is that images must fit nicely in the modules. To achieve a neat modular grid like this, you will probably have to fiddle with your leading and/or margins to achieve a line count per page that will divide evenly. In addition, captions can be aligned to the grid, either below or to the side of images. Images will be cropped to fill one or more modules. In this case there are 6 vertical divisions with 7 lines of text in each. A grid with both verticals and horizontals is called a modular grid.Īny modular grid, like the one above, should use the baseline grid (shown in brown on the verso page) to assist in breaking up the vertical space into equal sections. Horizontals in a layout gridĪdd horizontal lines to your layout grid if you want a more controlled look. Or you can use one that includes horizontals also. You can decide to use a grid that uses mainly verticals this gives you almost total flexibility for illustration sizes. Notice how the white space is used to emphasize certain areas of text. (Designers always think about negative space it’s part of the fun of the job.)īelow you can see a firm column grid that allows different widths of text on the same spread. The amount of space between columns (column gutter) determines ease of reading, but also add to the white space. All of the margins hold the text in place like a frame and often make up the bulk of the white (or negative) space on the page. The columns in your layout grid are indispensable, even if there’s only one of them.
#Grid indesign license
So grids give pages structure, but as you’ll soon see, they also give the designer license to get creative. Once movable type was invented in the West, the individual metal (or wood) letters needed to be held together on the press with a strong metal frame. Think of a grid as an invisible frame that holds the letters neatly in place. Grids have been around ever since the beginning of books, even handwritten ones.