My Grid System

Below are the thumbnails I produced for some of the topics for spreads the group I was in came up with. I started with the 6 that I definitely want to do, allowing for the other 4 to be split across 2 spreads, and the the other spreads can be used for an introduction and contents page.

I produced these thumbnails without looking the grids I unpicked in the previous post, which, in retrospect was a bad idea, as now I have to produce a grid that can contain 2, 3 and 4 columns, which logically means a 12 column grid. That seemed a bit much to me given how the width of the pages.

To avoid this, I decided to produce the 3 grids separately on the same page as shown above. The red lines being the 2 column grid, the blue lines being the 3 column grid, and the green lines being the 4 column grid. The black ones being the margins for all 3. This however confused me too much, so I re-did it differently.

This time I narrowed the gutters from 10mm to 5mm because I felt that the gutters were too wide compared to the columns. I also decided to combine the 2 and 4 column given that they were the main ones I'd be using judging from my initial sketches. I then drew in the 3 column grid in the same pencil as the outline and margins. I was a lot happier with this one.

I drew the grid on some tracing paper and then sketched on one of the simplest of my layouts on top of the columns. I left a bit of a gap in the top left for some sort of title.

I then put over another sheet and drew on the simplest one, which was split equally into 4 rows to see how well the rows from the previous spread aligned and how much I'd have to change the previous spread or add more rows to the grid . 

Then I put over a third sheet of tracing paper and drew on the most complicated spread, which was the first one to combine the 3 and 4 column grids as well as using diagonal lines from corner to corner to split the page into 6 sections of 60 degrees to represent the colour wheel. This layout surprisingly fitted into my system, although my drawing of the circles and the diagonal lines were just me guessing at things, so the layout might have to change slightly based on the angles of the lines, causing the grid to become more complex.

Lastly I put another sheet over and drew on the grid again without any layout on top it so it was clear to me where the lines were. There were a couple of extra horizontals in there, but generally I was quite impressed at how the grid turned out, and I will use this to base the layouts for my InDesign spreads on.