Modular grids

The modular grid

3

To achieve a visually pleasing whole, it’s important to think about the vertical as well as the horizontal divisions of a page when designing a grid. In order to establish “hanging points,” or points on the page, from top to bottom, at which material can be placed, we’re going to create a modular grid above the grid we created in Tutorial 2.

1 As this grid consists of five horizontal columns, it makes sense to divide the vertical portion into five as well. This will give us a 5 × 5 modular grid, which provides a high degree of flexibility. Draw a box that matches the depth of the text area and divide it by five in the Control panel/Measurements palette. If you type a forward slash immediately after an existing measurement, followed by the number you wish to divide the value by, the software will resize the box as required.

Ideally, the vertical division that results will fit exactly between the top margin and a line of the baseline grid. In our example, it hasn’t. This can be explained by the fact that the first line of the baseline grid is always slightly smaller than the other divisions, as it matches the text’s cap height rather than the full 13pt of the baseline grid.

Drag the bottom of the box upward through two lines of the baseline grid until it snaps on to the baseline-grid guide. Taking this as our proposed vertical division, we’ll now see if it distributes evenly within the established text area.

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Once again, we can use boxes drawn temporarily above the grid to establish visually whether or not our proposed divisions will work. If you prefer, you can do this by calculating the values yourself, or indeed by using an application such as Art Director’s Toolkit from Code Line Communications, but this method is easily carried out using just the layout file and a few extra clicks of your mouse.

2 Duplicate the box and position the new box below the first box, taking care to ensure that you’ve aligned it with the baseline grid correctly.

The space between each box is more than a single line of the baseline grid because of the difference between the cap height of the text and the full 13pt between each line. The spacing is equal to these two values combined.

As you can see from the illustration above, achieving an equal number of vertical divisions with the total number of lines currently present in our baseline grid isn’t possible, and we’re left with a stray single line at the bottom of the text area.

There are two options available to us. The first is to make the lowest module one line deeper than the others. The other is to increase the bottom margin by one line to make each vertical module equal. For the purposes of this tutorial, I’ll opt for the second option and increase the lower margin by 13pt, this being one full line of the baseline grid.

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3 Simply open the Margins and Columns dialog [Layout > Margins and Columns...] in InDesign or the Master Guides dialog [Page > Master Guides...] in QuarkXPress, and type +13pt after the existing value in the Bottom field. This will automatically adjust the bottom margin to the new 98.004pt value required, and the maximum text area of

InDesign dialog

the baseline grid will now correspond perfectly to the five vertical modules we’ve created.

QuarkXPress dialog

4 To finalize the working grid, add guides to demarcate each vertical module. Select the topmost temporary box and snap a guide to the bottom edge.

Next, select the second box and snap a guide to the top edge. Once you have these two guides in place you can duplicate them using Step and Repeat to add the three remaining pairs of guides.

Working with a modular grid enables you to designate and define specific zones of pages for different kinds of function. These could be, for example, headline space, boxed information, tabular material, and so on. As with the baseline grid itself, don’t be tempted to overengineer your modular grid as too many modules can lead to confusion and, ultimately, to a lack of functionality.

Copyright © RotoVision SA 2007