font.is

Grid Sys­tems – Mak­ing grids in Illus­tra­tor 2

There is hardly a one grid sys­tem that works for every­thing or every­body. Dif­fer­ent needs call for dif­fer­ent grids. Grids that involve cer­tain rules, like pro­por­tions being by the Golden Rule are very com­plex to cal­cu­late and really dif­fi­cult and time con­sum­ing to adapt to any page size.

I recently found a sys­tem that attempts to fit every need. This grid sys­tem is devel­oped by Mar­cus Gärde, a Swede, who wrote the book called Typografins Väg or The Way of Typog­ra­phy. In the book he released this grid sys­tem. As far as I know the book is only avail­able in Swedish but as you can see this award win­ning book is beau­ti­ful inside out. I am going to get a copy.

In the book Mar­cus explains among other things his grid sys­tem and it is also explained on his com­pa­nies web­site. Not every­one likes to get involved in com­plex cal­cu­la­tions. For those and every­one else who likes sleek tools, a very nice Grid Cal­cu­la­tor is avail­able from Design­ers Book­shop (click the ad in the side bar) as an stand alone appli­ca­tion and soon to be a Pro ver­sion, a plug-in for InDesign.

After I read the arti­cle I set up the cal­cu­la­tions into Excel. Then I found about the Grid Cal­cu­la­tor and I was curi­ous to know what the Grid Cal­cu­la­tor offered so I bought a copy. I think it is well worth it. Hav­ing it handy saves a lot of time and cal­cu­la­tions. Although it aims mainly at InDe­sign you can just as well use it to make grids fast in Illustrator.

The beauty of this sys­tem is that the paper size you are work­ing on is always the basis for the grid. It does not mat­ter if you are work­ing in let­ter size, A4, busi­ness card, etc., the sys­tem always works. The doc­u­ment grid behind every­thing is using the same ratio as the paper size.

The best way to get into the sys­tem is to buy a copy of the Grid Cal­cu­la­tor from the Designer Book­shop, watch their videos and you are on your way. Not only will it speed up the cal­cu­la­tion of this grid sys­tem but is also a help­ful tool to cal­cu­late for other systems.

The sec­ond best way—if you have the time but no money to spend, is to dive into the descrip­tion on Bach­Mar­cus web­site. I hope this arti­cle will add as a help to you for a bet­ter under­stand­ing on how this grid sys­tem works.

Let’s take a look at the cal­cu­la­tion method. You’ll find it in red on the site. Set it up in a spread­sheet. That will make the effort reusable. This is the way the sys­tem is out­lined on the web­site with my minor adjust­ments and explanations.

Orig­i­nal lead­ing = OL Paper width = W Paper height = H New lead­ing = L Paper width:Paper height = W:H Paper height:Paper width = H:W New lead­ing width = LW

Same as = :: Ratio = :

Orig­i­nal lead­ing is the lead­ing you have in mind to use. Put this into a spread­sheet, one in each field and in the next field to right you put your num­bers in. Set Illus­tra­tor with right-clicking on the Ruler to show all mea­sure­ments in points and use H and W num­bers in points. Then below you put your for­mu­las in.

For­mula to cre­ate a pro­por­tional grid for accord­ing to the paper size.

H/OL= Y ≈X (round Y to the near­est whole num­ber) H/X = L L(W/H) = LW L:LW :: H:W (This means: Ratio between New lead­ing L and New lead­ing width LW is the same as the ratio between the height H and the width W of the page.

(To set up a for­mula in a spread­sheet like Excel you start by typ­ing equa­tion mark and then click on the fields you want into the for­mula and type / or * between the references.)

In one for­mula field (Y) you put: =H/OL This divides the paper height H with the lead­ing you have in mind OL. The result will in most cases be a num­ber like 68.13467. In the next field below called X you type the near­est whole num­ber. Note: If you are clever with Excel you can let it do this for you with =ROUND(Y;0)

Now you take the rounded num­ber, X and divide it into the height of the page/paper H. You do it by mak­ing a new field in Excel and have it get =H/X The result is the new lead­ing L which you will use as we go fur­ther on and which evenly divides the lead­ing from top to bottom.

The same num­ber of lines are used across the width of the page. What ever the pro­por­tion of the page is, por­trait or land­scape, the grid will reflect the shape of the page. It’s called New lead­ing width in this sys­tem, LW. To cal­cu­late LW in points you need yet another field in Excel and in there you put: =L*(W/H).

What I feel miss­ing here is a for­mula to work out this grid from another angle. To my expe­ri­ence I don’t always have a cer­tain lead­ing in mind. My start­ing point could as well be that I like this sys­tem (which I do actu­ally) but wanted to use a grid of 6 columns and 9 rows. This means that I need from the begin­ning a num­ber of lines that can be divided by 9, plus the lines needed for the top and bot­tom mar­gins. What lead­ing fits that number?

With the Grid Cal­cu­la­tor you can eas­ily play with this and quickly try out dif­fer­ent lead­ing and num­ber of lines. Use num­bers that can be divided by 9 and add, lets say 4 lines for the top mar­gin and 5 for the bot­tom mar­gin (just an exam­ple). This might give you 36+9 lines or 45+9 lines. You get the point. Then play around with the lead­ing field until you get what you want.

If you still haven’t got the money, go into Excel again. Copy the whole for­mula and paste it to the side. Don’t use the first part of the for­mula (H/OL=Y) or delete it alto­gether, but put your own fit­ting num­bers in to the X field. If you used the round­ing for­mula, clear the X field with the Delete but­ton. The remain­ing fields cal­cu­late what you need accord­ing to the X field.

On Design­ers Book­store web­site is a video which explains how to set up this grid in Illus­tra­tor. This very sim­ple, but I think it can be done in a bit cleaner way using the same tech­nique I explained in the first grid arti­cle, using Effects > Dis­tort & Trans­form > Trans­form. This effect is an advanced ver­sion of Step and Repeat, which is miss­ing in Illus­tra­tor. The advan­tage is that you keep the guides inside the art­board and you don’t have to dupli­cate over 100 times to make the grid.

I want to show you how to set up a grid using this method. To make this a bit more com­plex but at the same time more inter­est­ing, I am going to use 7 columns and 9 rows. This is not shown on the web­sites and I am not sure it’s in the book either. This will also show you a lit­tle twist on that system.

Another impor­tant issue I men­tioned slightly before, is that when you want a cer­tain num­ber of rows, the num­ber of lines you are going to work with has to be a mul­ti­ple of that row num­ber minus one (-1). For 9 rows the line num­ber has to be 17, 26, 35, 44, 62, etc. You can see the rea­son when you count the lines in one row and one gut­ter. When you come down to the last one there is no gut­ter below. Mean­ing that gut­ters are always one less than the rows or columns.

Lets con­tinue with this example:

As you see in the video, using 12 point lead­ing which recal­cu­lated to 12.027 pt gives us 70 lines on an A4 page, which is not a mul­ti­ple of 9. 72 lines how­ever is a close round­ing and can be divided by 9 (9x8). We also need to add lines for the top and bot­tom mar­gins and lets stick to a total of 10. Now we have 82 lines in total and we like to divide them from top to bot­tom. Obvi­ously the lead­ing will be a lot less than 12 points, or down to 10.3 points. We have to find some­thing that closer fits our needs.

Let us then try 62 lines, (remem­ber: (9x7)-1) plus the 10 for the mar­gins. Now we are up to 72 lines in total (X) and that’s more like we are get­ting there. Cal­cu­lat­ing a new lead­ing we get: L. H/X=L, or 841,89 pt / 72 = 11.69 pt lead­ing.

And for the ver­ti­cal grid lines – new lead­ing width LW, we cal­cu­late L*(W/H) like this:  11.69 pt * (595,28 / 841,89) = 8.26 pt.

Few things to note:

1. You don’t have to use 10 lines for the top and bot­tom mar­gin. It’s up to you and your taste. Pick another num­ber and recalculate.
2. When decid­ing on the col­umn num­ber you have to have in mind that the text area you need to use ver­ti­cally for the columns got to be divid­able by the num­ber of columns, minus one. Just like the space for the rows. That is, if you need to have the left and right mar­gins even, like you might want for a poster. In books and mag­a­zines this not as much of a prob­lem. In our exam­ple we are using 7 columns and that divides nicely to 62 units (63–1).
3. You see in this exam­ple, the lead­ing has gone down from 12.03 to 11.69 points. It may seem a lot but the dif­fer­ence is only 0.119 mil­lime­ters! But in any case, if you don’t like what results you get, just cal­cu­late again.

Now we have all the num­bers we need for now and can start mak­ing the grid in Illus­tra­tor. Illus­tra­tor only offers Grid with all sides even so we have to make our own.

First we make an A4 page in Illus­tra­tor. Put the Rulers on, Cmd+R. 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. Hav­ing Smart Guides on is also use­ful. Cmd+U, and same short­cut to turn it off later if you want to.

Since we have cal­cu­lated every­thing in points it’s most con­ve­nient to stick to points in Illus­tra­tor, at least while we set up the grid, even though you are not used to work with points. I know this is in a way dif­fer­ent to what I may have said in the first arti­cle you will see that it’s handy this time.

Select the Pen tool, P. Click in the upper left cor­ner and hold­ing down the Shift key, click in the right cor­ner of the page. This makes a line along the top edge of the page.

Check the color. Only use stroke color, no fill. Make the stroke .25 pt and option­ally sub­due the black stoke color down to 15% black.

Go to Effects > Dis­tort & Trans­form > Trans­form.

To start with, acti­vate the Pre­view checkbox.

In the Copies field type 72

In the Move/Vertical field you type: –11.69 (since we are using points in Illus­tra­tor there is no need to type in pt.)

The result appears instantly in the back­ground. Nice?

If you for curiosity’s shake, take of the Pre­view in Illus­tra­tor you will see that there is only one line along the edge. The other lines only appear in Pre­view Mode.

We need a ver­ti­cal line along the left edge of the page. This time you have to be care­ful not to acci­dently join the lines. I usu­ally avoid this by start­ing at the bot­tom and do the sec­ond click not all the way to the cor­ner and then use the white arrow (hit A) to drag the end point to the end­point of the hor­i­zon­tal line. This is the time you will like the Smart Guides.

The nice thing is that if one is not too pre­cise and want to fix it later, there is only one line you need to cor­rect. The other 72 lines will follow.

When the line is ready we go again to the Effects > Dis­tort & Trans­form > Trans­form. This time we fill in the Pre­view check but­ton, 72 copies and Move / Hor­i­zon­tal: 8.26 (pos­i­tive number).

This is a great time to make a few new Lay­ers. Option–click on the New Layer icon in the Layer Panel and make and name these layers:

Doc­u­ment Grid, Boxes, Grid, f-lines. (Skip the Base­line layer. It’s not needed although it’s in the pic­ture.) Remem­ber to uncheck the Print check­box in the dia­log window.

The names and use of the lay­ers get explained as we go along. One thing though, one of the lay­ers we made will have yel­low label color. Change it now to orange or some­thing else. It’s a ter­ri­ble label color and hardly ever useful.

As you see now Layer one has this blue dot which is because either one or both of the lines are selected. For a future step, make sure only the top line is selected and drag it while hold­ing down the Option key all the way up to the f-line layer. Click the Lock (Pad­lock icon) check box beside the eye to lock that layer. Click on the eye icon to hide what’s on this layer because as you see on the lay­ers icon, this line has an effect on and would con­fuse us if we didn’t hide it. We will come to back to this f-line later.

Next step is to select both of the lines in Layer 1 and drag those up to the Doc­u­ment Grid layer.

When the lines have been moved between the lay­ers and while both are selected, go to: Object > Expand Appear­ance. This expands the effect we put on the lines before and we have now actual Illus­tra­tor lines.

While the lines are still selected, hit Com­mand + 5 or go to: View > Guides > Make Guides.

Note: After Make Guides the lines should turn to this cyan color. If not, your guides are not locked.

What we now have is a Doc­u­ment Grid, very sim­i­lar to InDe­sign Doc­u­ment Grid which we can base few impor­tant lay­out fea­tures. The grid is accord­ing to our cal­cu­la­tions and each square has the same pro­por­tions as our page. As I said before, this could be any size of a page. Only our cal­cu­la­tions would differ.

Col­umn work is next. If you remem­ber, we decided to use a total of 10 Doc­u­ment Grid units for the mar­gins at the top and bot­tom. That left us with 62 lines for the height of the text columns. We still have not decided on the mar­gins width, but the plan was to use 7 columns. I know that 7 columns is not very com­mon fig­ure, but it hap­pens and can look really good.

As I men­tioned before, if we are going to have the same width of mar­gins on both left and right we have to use a num­ber of Doc­u­ment Grid units that the num­ber of columns divides into, minus one. We know we have 72 units across the page. The clos­est options we have here, when we have sub­tracted one are: 69 (70–1), 62 (63–1) and 55 (56–1).

62 sounds like a good start. Not the least because we are also going to use 62 lines for the height. This is absolutely no rule to obey, but seems to fit nicely in our case.

To make the text area grid with guides we are going to use a box and split it. Select the Rec­tan­gle tool and begin to draw.

Drag the rec­tan­gle from the upper cor­ner of the 5th square from top and 6th left and drag it down to the upper cor­ner of the 6th square from the bot­tom and 5th from the right edge. If you fail in any way you can always cor­rect the sides with the white arrow and they will snap to the near­est grid line.

Another way is to click with the Rec­tan­gu­lar tool any­where and fill in the dia­log box the L (11.69) and LW (8.26) units (points) and mul­ti­ply with the num­ber of lines we need to cover. Like this: W: 11.6962 and H: 8.6262. Then move the rec­tan­gu­lar let it snap into place.

With that box in place we can start to make the columns and rows. Go to Object > Path > Split Into Grid… Fill in the cor­rect num­bers there, Num­ber of rows, Num­ber of columns and both the Gut­ters. For the Gut­ters you use our famous num­bers 11.69 and 8.26 (comma or period depends on your local sys­tem). The fan­tas­tic thing about this is that every­thing falls into place! You can try other num­bers just to make sure it will not fall into place.

Hit the OK but­ton. We need one more step before we check into the Add Guides checkbox.

After you hit OK and the dia­log box closes, you Group the boxes together, Cmd + G and then you go back to Object > Path > Split Into Grid. Now you can check Add guides.

The rea­son I asked you to do this side step is because we will def­i­nitely want to have the boxes in one layer and the guides in another one. Actu­ally you can throw the boxes away but it’s not a bad idea just to keep them on a sep­a­rate layer and hide them there while you are get­ting used to mak­ing grids. This is up to you.

At least for now we do it like this, move the boxes to the Boxes layer and the grid­lines to the Grid layer we have ready in the Layer panel.

Hide the Boxes layer by click­ing the eye icon and hide the Doc­u­ment Grid layer too in the same man­ner. We will need it later on.

Select the Grid layer and shorten the lines to the width and height of the page. Do this by select­ing the hor­i­zon­tal lines with the white arrow and type in the W field 210 mm. That is con­verted to points. Do the same for the ver­ti­cal lines but type in 297 mm. Of course, if you are used to points use points by all means.

When all the lines fit inside the page we make them into guides with Cmd + 5.

If you already read the first arti­cle about grid mak­ing in Illus­tra­tor you might remem­ber that at this point we would make the base­line for the text. In this sys­tem it is already there. The Doc­u­ment Grid has the base­line built in.

How­ever if you turn the Doc­u­ment Grid layer on you will see that since we have all the lines in the Doc­u­ment Grid layer and the Grid layer as guides there is no way to see where the columns are or any­thing for that mat­ter. Illus­tra­tor does not allow more than one color for guides. The Doc­u­ment Grid has now served its pur­pose more and less but we def­i­nitely want to keep it.

Lets make it look more like the Doc­u­ment Grid of InDe­sign. Turn all lay­ers off but the Doc­u­ment Grid layer. Unlock the guides by uncheck­ing the View > Guides > Lock Guides. Select all and do: View > Guides > Release Guides (Option + Cmd + 5). The lines should still be in 15% black and you can lock them with Cmd + 2, or lock the Doc­u­ment Grid layer. Both, if you prefer.

Turn the Grid layer on and together with the Doc­u­ment Grid layer we get this nice look­ing grid.

Ear­lier in this arti­cle you see that the pic­tures show a Base­line layer. Using this sys­tem we don’t need any extra base­lines. They are already included in this sys­tem in the Doc­u­ment Grid. If you for some rea­son want to make them and keep on a sep­a­rate layer it’s fine. You can then choose between the Doc­u­ment Grid and the Base­lines when one suites you bet­ter than the other. Refer to the first arti­cle to see how it is done and keep in mind that you use –11.69 pt for the ver­ti­cal copy­ing and 62 for the num­ber of lines.

But wait—there is more.

This grid sys­tem has a thing called f-line. The f-line is a line to align the pic­tures you use not to the fine grid we already made but to the type we are going to use. The grid is based on the lead­ing we are going to use. In our exam­ple it is 11.69 points. That’s fine for align­ing the pic­tures bot­tom but if we used the same grid for align­ing the pic­tures top they sit too high.

The key here is the height of the let­ter f. Thus the f-line name.

Let’s assume that we are going to use 10 pt type in a job on this grid. We need to get the height of the f to cal­cu­late the f-line. Select the Type tool in Illus­tra­tor and click once on the paste­board (out­side the art­board) and type the let­ter f in 10 pt and of course in the font you are going to use. Switch to a Selec­tion tool, select the f and make it an outline.

Here we see in the Trans­form panel that the height of this let­ter f is 7.216 points. Now we have what we need for this cal­cu­la­tion. The f char­ac­ter sits of course on the lead­ing / grid line and the f-line sits at top of the f. 11.69 pt — 7.216 pt is 4.477 pt. The f-line is then off­set ver­ti­cally by 4.477 points.

The Grid Cal­cu­la­tor appli­ca­tion has f-line cal­cu­la­tor built in. That is, we always have to find the height of the f first but lead­ing is already cal­cu­lated so get results for the f-line quickly. As you prob­a­bly have seen by now in the Grid Cal­cu­la­tor video for InDe­sign, the f-line is set all over the page. In our exam­ple I am assum­ing that our pic­tures will be used inside the columns and the rows. That means we only have to use one f-line for each row, that is, for the top of the pic­tures. Besides that means less clutter.

If you click the eye icon of the Doc­u­ment Grid layer to turn it off and make the f-lines layer vis­i­ble by click­ing its eye icon, you remem­ber that we made a copy of the hor­i­zon­tal line we were using for the Doc­u­ment Grid and put it in the f-layer. The only thing we needed to do if we wanted to have the f-line all over the page (might be use­ful in some other grid you make later) we select this line, go to Obe­jct > Trans­form > Move and put –4.477 pt in the ver­ti­cal field and we are done.

But we only want one f-line for each row. Here is how we do this.

Turn the Grid layer vis­i­bil­ity on. In the f-lines layer we take that top line (there is only one line although you see many. Effects, remember!)

Obe­jct > Trans­form > Move and type in the Ver­ti­cal field: –11.69*4 This moves the line 4 units down until it aligns with the top of the top­most row.

And then again: Obe­jct > Trans­form > Move and now type in the ver­ti­cal field: –4.477 This is the first f-line. All the other lines fol­low and now descends off the page.

While we have the line selected why don’t we change the color of it. I would like mine to be 70% Magenta.

Effect > Dis­tort & Trans­form > Trans­form has already been applied to this line before to make the 72 lines, so beware! Putting a dou­ble Effect is gen­er­ally not a good idea. Instead we go to the Appear­ance panel and click on the Trans­form word there to open up the Trans­form dia­log win­dow. This is the way to change Effects that have pre­vi­ously been applied to an object.

We know by sim­ple count­ing that there are 7 lines in each row and we also know that we have 9 rows. Fill in like this: Move Ver­ti­cal: –11,69*7. Copies 8 and have Pre­view on. This time there is no need to expand the lines using Expand Appearances.

This is the fin­ished grid sys­tem. You can turn vis­i­bil­ity off and on any of the lay­ers and merge lay­ers if you feel like. Same method applies for any paper or page size which makes it very adapt­able and nice to work with. It will take you a lit­tle while to make the first grid but very soon you will be mak­ing this kind of a grid in two or three min­utes. The Grid Cal­cu­la­tor is, as I men­tioned a few times, a great tool to speed up the process and fun to play with because you can roll out many dif­fer­ent options in a snap.

Here is an exam­ple of the f-line fea­ture and below there are a few dif­fer­ent views of the same file. This is just some­thing I put together to make the example.