Comments on: Grid Systems – Making grids in Illustrator 2

By: Иван Сычев

Иван Сычев — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 11:44:25 +0000

Бедность учит, а счастье портит.

By: John del Rosario

John del Rosario — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 10:19:01 +0000

oh, that’s cool.

i’ll be waiting then. thanks!

By: Sigurdur Armannsson

Sigurdur Armannsson — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 22:45:56 +0000

Right now the spreadsheet is kind of a mess as I left it few months back. What I need to do is to clean it up a lot and write some text around each formula so it makes sense to anyone else than me.

But when I can get back to that and finish I am pretty sure I’ll make it available in some way or another. I really didn’t think that far, but it’s not a bad idea. Sorry to keep you waiting but I am a bit short of time these days. I will, when the time comes, advertise that properly.

Thanks for your interest.

By: John del Rosario

John del Rosario — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 07:27:03 +0000

Hi,

thanks for this great tutorial.

you mentioned you put the equations on a spreadsheet.

can you make it available for download?

By: The Grid Calculator : font.is

The Grid Calculator : font.is — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 21:25:03 +0000

[…] may have seen what I wrote about the Grid Calculator in other articles. If not, this standalone calculator is a tool to speed up calculations when you are making […]

By: Sigurdur Armannsson

Sigurdur Armannsson — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 21:07:31 +0000

Carlo. This was an error of my behalf which I have corrected. It should and does now read: Click in the upper left corner were the rules meet and drag to the upper left corner of your page to move the zero point of the rulers.

As you experienced, double-click moves the zero point to the lower-left corner.

Thanks for pointing that out. And great to hear that you like these articles. It’s always great to hear readers comments.

By: carlo

carlo — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 16:07:42 +0000

With these two articles you really make me understand how in practice I can use grids on my designs.

I love modularity and smart standardisation in every thing from business cards to objects, i.e. in everything design is about.

So I have to thank you because these articles are really well written and very understandable even for ‘beginners’ in this field.

I have only a very little problem in illustrator: when I double-click on the top-left corner of the rulers it seems it doesn’t happen anything, the vertical ruler still starts from the bottom instead of top. Is it a CS4 feature? I use CS3, but i don’t think this is the point.

Anyone can solve this?

By: Deano

Deano — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 02:48:02 +0000

Sigurdur -

Excellent article demonstrating only some of the hard work and thought processes that go into the constructive use of a well designed and defined grid system.

Thanks for the link to the Typografins Väg book. Looks like that will be heading into the typographic section of my collection — hope it’s available in English (I’ve sent a request to the author and will post here when I have a reply).

@Grez -

We all have all encountered clients who, in their blissful ignorance but with all good intentions, request everything as big as possible and see white space not as an integral part of a design but as a waste and an opportunity to up the size of type, logos and pictures. It’s up to us as designers to educate these people, be ready to expect these sort of comments and go into presentations armed with rational reasoning and arguments to support our supplied design solutions. There will always be clients who believe they know better but if you trust in your skills as a designer and can back up your solutions with good examples of proven work that support your submissions you should always be able to get your “perfect design” approved. After all, you are the expert, that is why the client is paying you all that money in the first place instead of doing it themselves — maybe they are just testing the water to see how convinced you are of the viability of your submission. I understand that clients are our bread and butter and I admit that it took me a long, and painful, time to realise and enforce this type of thinking upon my clients as I am a designer first and a business man and negotiator second — but stick with what you supply whenever you can and trust in your skills as a designer/typographer and you won’t go far wrong.

Best of luck and regards to all — Deano

By: Grez

Grez — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:01:22 +0000

Noted on the point sizes. I often feel the throughout the design process (after clients changes, more content added then further more removed, re-prioritizing typographical hierarchies and so on) that the initial grid either becomes a hinderance or obsolete. The simpler and more flexible the better — to accommodate for these things.

I look forward to the third article!

By: Sigurdur Armannsson

Sigurdur Armannsson — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 19:33:32 +0000

Yes, there are other grids that are much more difficult to calculate. However using these methods, especially this one becomes very easy and fast after you have made a few.
I made this a tiny bit more complicated by adding the row thing into it here, but I feel it’s very important to point out few of the not so obvious things that I stumbled on. And in the end a better understanding makes it much easier to bend and bow the system.
And yes, I guess you have to calculate each time. But then again, it’s the leading we calculate, so the client probably has some space to enlarge the type without you having to recalculate the leading. Personally I love to use rather large leading, like 11pt type on 16pt which leaves me some freedom to change the type size.
Trust me, with in a few calculations it will not matte if you are freelance or employed. Plus the rest of the job will most likely go faster with a good grid.
I have planned the third article where I want to take on a simple, but nice system. It will be rewarding to get one like that after all this struggle.
I am about to go for a vacation but let’s say sometime in August. Hope to finish it by then. It takes me an awful long time to write these articles.
Thanks for commenting. Remember to grab the wallpaper I just made. (Actually using this grid system 12 columns, 5 rows).