Design By Grid Grid based design for websites is becoming more popular, but the technique is still somewhat unknown.

Design By Grid is a resource to promote websites designed with grids, and the tools and techniques used to make websites with grids.

Swiss Legacy focuses on typography, swiss graphic design and the use of a grid when designing.

Now, you may ask, what are you talking about? What’s the relationship between my design files and money?

As an independent or freelance designer, many times the only person you can rely is yourself. Hire a production artist to complete your project? Maybe, maybe not. The project budget may not allow you to take on outside help. You can rely on your print vendor to preflight your files but once you’ve released files, you want to be able to say, “boy, glad that’s done!” and move on to the next project. Besides, what you enjoy

Makes sense, right? But many times, both as a production artist and a prepress operator, I received design files that were the wrong size. needed just a little help. Files were passed on to me

But During the creative process, if your not used to working this way, that’s fine but strive to deliver final art at the final trim size of your delivered printed piece.

Try to create documents at trim size.

There’s no other way to spin it. Fonts are the ying and the yang to your design. Many times the typefaces you choose can be the final spark, the realization that you’ve struck gold with your design.

But fonts can be one of the most frustrating aspects of your design. How many times have you gotten the phone call from your vendor, asking you for missing fonts.

of preparing your files for

Here’s a quick tip regarding file naming and how OS X can help.

I’m sure this has happened to you. You have a large project with a multitude of files. It would be nice if all of the files had a similar name, especially Illustrator or Photoshop graphics. You can copy and paste in the Finder but that may not be very convenient if you have to open each file in the respective application.

So here’s the tip. Once you’ve completed it, save the first file, noting its location on your hard drive. As you save each file you complete thereafter, click the previous file’s name in the Save As… dialog. It will change the current file name, matching the previous with the same name. Now simply change a character or two to distinguish it from the rest. You avoid having to type out the entire file name each time. This is especially handy if your agency or studio requires job or project numbers included in file names.