Why grids matter for design buyers?

Almost every designer is well versed in the benefits of grids, but for marketing professionals and other design buyers, grids may seem like ‘inside baseball’

They’re a wonderful tool that provides structure to all kinds of designs – from traditionally printed books to websites.  Grids are one of the many things that set a professional design engagement apart. As a design buyer, you shouldn’t be expected to know anything about grids.

However knowing just a little about the role of grids in the work you commission can help you become a better buyer. Understanding the use of grids in your work can help streamline production, maximize ad revenue and help ensure the most effective display of your content. You may even want to ask your design team to show the grid(s) used in your designs.

Below we’ll look at a few areas where having a better understanding of the role grids play in your work can have a major impact on your project’s outcome.

Grids and Content

As a design buyer you can ensure your designer develops the most effective grid possible by making sure they’re aware of all of the types of content you plan on displaying. For a website, it’s not just about specifying support for say videos or tables.

It’s just as important to specify how you plan on using content. Using text as an example, a grid can be designed with columns that support placing client testimonials alongside articles making for an elegant solution. What’s important is that you’re in communication with your designer at the planning stages of a project conveying your needs.

The grid also allows you to easily visualize potential changes before they happen, making it a great tool for rapid prototyping.  You can get a good idea of how adding or changing a feature or content will affect your layouts.

To aid your own planning you can ask your design firm to send you an image or PDF of your grid to assist in your own editorial planning.

Grids and Advertising

If your website includes advertising, then grids matter even more to you. There is a direct correlation between the flexibly of a grid and the number and sizes of ads it can support.
A well designed grid can enable you show more ads and ad formats without interfering with your content. A good designer can work with you to ensure that your grid is only as complex as you need it to be without sacrificing functionality.

Just by specifying the ad formats you need your grid to support, you can maximize the potential for ad revenue. If your site is serving ads that use standard IAB size formats you can indicate which formats you want to support and how many ads need to be displayed per page.  For instance you could make a request that “Each page must be able to support the display of a leaderboard ad and a wide skyscraper formatted ad”.

If these considerations aren’t addressed at the onset of design planning you could wind up with a design that doesn’t provide you with the support you need.

Design Grids on Social Networks

As social networks begin to mature, design standards are starting to emerge enabling the creation of common design grids. Grids take on somewhat of a different form in every medium, but they still fulfill the same objectives. Facebook is a prominent example of an area where grid based design is rapidly emerging.

While it may seem like Facebook changes their design standards every other day, they recently settled on a 520 pixel wide layout. This standardized width means that grid systems can be developed for the design of Facebook pages and one of the first is the 520 Pixel Grid System (http://www.520grid.com).

Understanding the usage and more importantly the potential of grids in the social networking space can help provide a framework for developing your own brand presence. It means that you’ll be able to commission the design and develop Facebook pages. Typically that results in quicker production, more fleixlbe layouts.

Grids and Future Growth

A challenge faced by design buyers is that they’re often just learning their own requirements for a project as its being commissioned. As long as you’re upfront about this with your design team, they can work with you to develop a grid that can grow with you. That is part of the beauty of grids—their functionality and usability.

At the end of a day, the grid is a tool. And like any other tool the better you understand how to use it the more helpful it can be.