Typographic Grid

Grids refer to a combination of invisible lines, vertical or horizontal, that divide a page into sections and help organize content, including type, images, and UI elements. Essentially, grids manage space and information, encouraging consistency and visual hierarchy.

Clear and logical organization of headings, subheads, body text, images, and other content makes it easier for users to read and understand information without straining their memory. Plus, this orderliness ensures credibility in the data and induces confidence.

Grids are falsely considered to be necessarily rigid and symmetrical. It's more important to maintain the principles of balance and harmony when setting up grids. After all, the most beautiful things in nature aren't precisely symmetrical.

Essentially, a grid's anatomy is made of two basic vertical components — columns and gutters. Columns define the widest areas that hold content within the grid, while gutters refer to the space between columns. Technically, each grid also has margins — gutters on the outer edges of the content.

The bigger the number of columns, the more flexible the layout becomes. On the other hand, it gets harder to manage. You can let your content dictate the number of columns or stick to traditional numbers — 12 on desktop, 8 on tablet, and 4 on mobile.

To achieve a nice balance between elements both horizontally and vertically, it's recommended to keep the gutter width the same size as the baseline height (for desktop and tablet) or at half of the line-height (for mobile).^[2]

Essentially, grids are just a tool, and this should be kept in mind while designing. Grids should be built around the content, not the other way around.^[3] Otherwise, you could limit yourself and your designs instead of creating something unique and tailored to your product.

To make content-oriented grids:

• Establish your goals: Think of your brand personality, emotions you want to evoke, and user needs that you assume your product will cover.
• Select and combine typefaces: Based on the previous steps, you pick typefaces that will convey the right mood and help your users navigate the product effortlessly.
• Prioritize your content: Depending on content groups and their priority, set up your grid: select the number of columns and define vertical and horizontal rhythms.

Baseline grids are horizontal lines (baselines) evenly spaced across your design that you can use for aligning content and typography horizontally. Designers also use baseline grids to ensure adequate vertical spacing between elements. Material Design guidelines use the baseline grid to determine type size and line-height parings, as well as margins and padding.^[4]

While baseline grids may be a good solution for static websites, they aren't always helpful with dynamic user interfaces where users constantly add new media or content. The best approach here is to concentrate on keeping a clear, consistent vertical rhythm (line spacing and spacing between text boxes) on the page.

Multi-column layouts refer to one or more vertical blocks of content separated by gutters. You're more likely to encounter these traditional typography arrangements in newspapers and magazines. They use columns to break up complex, long text passages within a story to increase readability and scannability.^[5]

However, multi-column layouts aren't the best when breaking up text content. A single article split into multiple columns requires a lot of scrolling up and down, making it hard for users to follow the topic.

A much better solution is to use a one-column layout for a single article. To improve its readability, you can divide text into paragraphs, ensuring they have enough spacing between each other. With more columns, layouts become more flexible for arranging diverse content. For example, some magazines use two-column layouts, placing text to the left side and imagery to the right.^[6]

While the column grid breaks a page down into vertical sections, the modular grid adds a horizontal subdivision. Intersecting columns, rows, and gutters form a matrix of cells — or what designers refer to as modules.

Modular grids provide much more flexibility than baseline grids, allowing designers to anchor layout elements and typography to a specific rhythm. You can arrange text in as many ways as you want, expanding it to one or multiple modules and aligning it the way you like, and it doesn't necessarily have to be set flush left.

Willem Hendrik Crouwel, a Dutch graphic designer, type designer, and typographer, once said: "The grid is like the lines on a football field. You can play a great game in the grid or a lousy game." Undeniably, grids are a fantastic tool for designers to map out the plan of a layout. However, your eyes and common sense should be the main instruments when arranging content.

When designing a product, you shouldn't be restricted by the grid. Always keep the principle of proximity in mind, and be free to break from a grid if you need to separate unrelated items or reduce space between related groups. You can also use unconventional text alignment or a hero image that does not span over all columns to create a twist of unexpectedness that grabs user attention.