3.6 How to Set Up Grids

Hi and welcome back to affinity design a quick start. If any design has a really good grid system which we're going to go through in this lesson. It's quite versatile and it's also got some really good tools for things like doing icon design and it also has things like isometric grids for doing graphics for games. All right, so we're gonna start by showing the grid. So, head up to the View menu, and then check the Show Grid sub menu. So that brings up the default grid. Now, to change the way that this great is laid out, you wanna go back up to the view menu and then go down to the Grid and Axis Manager. Now by default use automatic grid will be checked. So if you want to change things around, you just need to uncheck that checkbox. All right, so first let's have a look at how you can set up a grid to create icons. How 64 pixels by 64 pixels is a pretty common size for icons. So we can head down here and we can set the horizontal spacing to 64 pixels. And then here, we can set the vertical spacing to 64 pixels. So now each one of our squares is the right size for an icon to fit inside it. But what we can also do is increase the amount of space in between each one of these grid cells. So we're just up that to 24 points. And now we can fit exactly one icon into each one of these little grids squares. And we can take that even further to help us work with our layout a bit By increasing the number of divisions. So we can make smaller grid inside our grid. So let's say that we set the divisions to 32. And now if we zoom in, We can see that we've got several lines here that are breaking down each one of our grid cells even further. So when we're trying to align all of the different nodes and points in our icons, we can snap to each one of these lines. We can do the same thing horizontally. So that we've got a really nice little self-contained grid for each one of the icons that we produce. So that icon grid layout is just using the standard mode of grid. But you also have several other predetermined types of grids that you can work with. For example, you might be working on graphics for an isometric video game. So you can head up here and you can choose isometric nd now your grid will be converted into an isometric layer. So we'll just drop that gutter back down to zero and we've kept our grid divisions there. So we've got a really nice framework that we can use to stop letting out isometric graphics. Without having to worry that the angles and the perspective that we're trying to lay out are incorrect in any. Now where these grids that we've just gone through really come into their own is when they're used in conjunction with snapping. And that's what we're gonna learn how to set up in the next lesson. I'll see you there.