grid

Matt Gipson and Charles Moad, Indianapolis Museum of Art, USA

Abstract

Grid-based Web design and the corresponding tools provide an accelerated path for Web designers, developers, and content authors alike with the added benefit of providing a cleaner and more structured presentation to website visitors. By borrowing this design approach from print publications and applying it to the Web, a common and simplified language can be utilized by all members of a website team. Free templates are available online to serve as starting points for creating sites with a fixed number of columns (usually twelve or sixteen). Designers are then freed to focus on style more than layout, developers can create powerful layouts simply by assigning CSS classes expressing column size, and content creators can use simple tools to create rich text and image layouts using the same column convention. All parties involved can speak a simplified column number sizing system as opposed to pixel dimensions. We show how the Indianapolis Museum of Art has been using this technique to optimize our Web development efforts in addition to WYSIWYG and WIKI tools that enable content authors.

Keywords: grid, Web, graphic design, layout