Baseline grid in InDesign & Text grid
Baseline grid in InDesign & Text grid
Baseline grid in InDesign and the Text grid are different. You can create actual baseline grid lines that do not show when printing, but are a design guide. A text grid is set up using a style the book designer creates. It should be consistent, as in a novel, or in a coffee table book, you may have several styles, but they are all built off of graphic design basics that you can read about in the Plan part of this book.
Creating a grid in InDesign
Although this book is not teaching InDesign, creating a baseline grid is something to include in this book. It is helpful in book design, particularly for books with a great deal of body copy.
There are two kinds of grids. They are a baseline grid and a document grid. The baseline grid is to align columns of text and rows of text. The document grid looks like graph paper, having squares. You can customize either grid style. But when a baseline grid is set up, it will be on every spread. It cannot be assigned to any Parent.
There are two examples of baseline grids in the feature image at the top of this post. The grid lines in the examples do not match up to the text lines, but are helpful in planning columns, white space, and placement of images. They can also be set to have a grid line for every line of type which is different than these example pages.
SETTING THE GRID LINE TO BE THE SAME AS THE TEXT LINE
This text which is much smaller in the feature image at the top of this post, is 11/16. This means that the text is 11-point and the leading is 16-point. In this example, set the grid to 16-point also. If the pages are complex, using headlines, subheadings, numbered or bulleted text, use half of the leading, or 8-point. I find it helpful to also add a new body text Paragraph Style that is half the leading or 8-point for this document — 11/8. This would only be used to add a half line of space.
Remember to toggle between Normal and Preview to view or hide the grid lines.
IMAGES
As a rule, make images the same content size throughout the book, because the key is consistency. Perhaps a page layout calls for one large image and a column of text. If using the same style on subsequent pages in the book, make sure the image occupies the same size space on each page, and the text column is the same width and type size on each of the same style pages.
Alternatively, let’s say that you are working on a photography book, and even the rectangular photos are different sizes. Try making them all the same width and in the same placement. That means the top and side margins will be the same, but allow the height of each photo to be different.
Be careful not to come to close the edge of the page. To judge for yourself what is too close, print out the page with trim and bleed marks. It is different seeing the trimmed page versus seeing it on the screen.
MORE MORE THING
Never crop a photographer or artist’s photos or even bleed them off the page. Always discuss this with the client before cropping or bleeding an image. In conclusion, enjoy playing with graphic design rules and creating your own style for baseline grids in InDesign or your own text grids!
