How to design professional content using grids

How to design professional content using grids

Written by:
Carolina Marquez

Feb 18, 2015
Featured

Grids are a useful tool when you want to maintain alignment and a clean and balanced design for virtually any type of visual content.

It seems like they are just meant for professionals, but quite the contrary they can be fairly easy to understand.

Here are a few simple tips that will give you better insight on using guides to improve your content's formatting.

You can also refer to this short video tutorial on how to use Grids.


Assign Your Core


Using grids is a great method to  zone different parts of your canvas (stage area), and to be able to distinguish between each section as different areas.

As a result you can focus on creating one part at a time, using the alignment principles we've discussed in a recent article.

For some reason most people tend to always center everything, both horizontally and vertically, and sometimes the design is not perfectly centered.

In these cases, it's better to have a visual guideline to make sure where the core resides. In this example, you'll see the "center" is a little more to the right than the canvas real center and an imaginary guideline is shown to represent it.

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Place Your Text


Depending on your design, you may need to use more or less text to support it.   Naturally the main reason we create rich content is to visualize a specific message, but as same time you don't want the entire piece to look like a block of text.

As a result but we recommend you experiment with different fonts and sizes and select your words carefully (remember the Less is more principle).

Using grids and guidelines will help you placing your content in a balanced manner.  For example in this image, we used two horizontal guidelines and three vertical lines to position each word.

3

Create a Focal Point


Grabbing the attention of your audience is not only important but it's pretty much the primary goal in design.  Using grid guidelines can help make the process easier.  In this example you'll see how using the grids to our advantage we emphasized the center and focus area where the message resides.

4

Create Collages


Grids are useful when we're creating something with different pictures and elements. You can create the distribution using the guides and then place your elements. This will improve the balance, and will make easier for you to place your elements, texts and pictures. In this image we combined pictures and colors in the grid.

5

Organize Your Elements


Organization is important in clean design.  Let's say you are creating a presentation slide, or an infographic.  When placing your content on the stage, you want to make sure the text layers are balanced so the information flows more easily to the user; in other words it's inviting enough where your audience can easily read what you've written.

Using grids you can divide the canvas before you begin placing content on your stage.  See the example below we created, and how you can easily read the message without having to spend much effort reading it.   You can also read more about using typography to improve your content's design and driving your message.

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Remember, Visme allows you to turn on grids right in the dashboard and helps you to improve content placement.    Learn more here. 

 

Align Content with Grids Using Visme


What do you think? Anything you'd like to ask or recommend that you think can also help users when utilizing grids?  Share below. 

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    About the Author

    Caro is a internet marketer, blogger and a design enthusiast. She joined the Visme.co team on 2014, and she's been working with the tool ever since! She likes to share tips and tricks to make design and marketing easy and reachable for anyone!