• Let's Practice

Let’s open the Illustrator file linked below to practice creating a layout with an informal grid. Start with activating one of the following families on Adobe Fonts.

• Baskerville URW
• King's Caslon
• Adobe Garamond Premier
• ITC Franklin Gothic
• Adobe Acumin
• Gill Sans Nova
• ITC Avant Garde
• Futura PT
• Rockwell Monotype

The whole idea of the informal grid is that we set one page element after another, starting with the most important. So let’s set the title.

These are some variables you can work with:

• size
• weight
• width
• case
• greys
• strokes
• columns
• diagonal
• italics
• reversed
• tracking

Now we’ll set the sub-title. It needs to appear noticeably less important than the title. Alignment is important here. That’s the informal grid at work.

The last item is the block of body copy. Make sure to set proper leading and reasonable hyphenation.

Once you’re done, save your work, then save a copy of your file as a Print Ready PDF file.

We’ll do a quick critique of the result.