Web and Graphic Design HQ

Here’s a simple tip for improving the look of your desktop publishing: use “invisible grids” in your alignment for a good visual presentation.

Here’s a small image of a typical graphic layout that hasn’t really had much care put into it:

As you can see, the elements just sit on the page, nearly randomly. Nothing is really in alignment. Here’s a quick fix:

The blue lines are only here to show you an invisible “grid” on the page, to make for better alignment. Here there are 4 alignment situations helping improve the presentation:

1. The headline and the Date/Month text on the right share the same “baseline” — the bottom edge of the lower-case letters that don’t descend, like “m”, “a” or “x”
2. The headline, body copy and author’s sign-off all share the same left alignment margin on the page
3. The margins on the left and right are now equal: there is the same amount of room between the left edge of the page and the word headline, and the right edge of the page and the end of the date/month text
4. Finally, the date/month text’s right-hand edge is in alignment with the right-hand edge of the body copy.

While this is just a very basic example, I see ways all the time to use a simple alignment grid to help improve presentations. This applies to graphic and text elements on the page. In some ways, this is still a fairly “boring” layout — but with the visual alignment taken care of, it certainly looks more professional.

In a future post, I’ll present some more interesting uses of an invisible alignment grid, but I wanted here to get across the basics.

Here’s another simple example, using a grid, to help make a good presentation: