Photoshop for Designers: Designing with Grids and Guides

Course details

Designing with grids is an essential part of any designer's skill set. Guides, grids, and their related tools bring structure and consistency to designs. By suggesting visual relationships, they can also speed workflow and inspire the artwork itself. In this course, designer Nigel French introduces the fundamentals of guides and grids in Photoshop, showing how these tools can improve the way you use the application. Explore how to create, precisely position, delete, and show and hide guides. Learn about the different types of grids, and the "intelligent" features such as Smart Guides, snapping, the GuideGuide plugin, and the New Guide Layout tool. Discover how to set up your own modular layout grid, and then explore the different types of crop overlay grids, from the Rule of Thirds to the Golden Spiral.

Learning objectives
Grid types
Creating guides from shapes
Creating a baseline grid
Adding breakpoints
Building crop overlay grids
Grids in action

Concepts

0. Introduction

01 - Welcome
02 - How to use the exercise files

1. Grid and Guide Tools

03 - Basic guide options
04 - Canvas guides and artboard rulers
05 - Grid types
06 - Smart Guides and Snap To options
07 - Create guides from shapes
08 - How to print a grid
09 - Work with the GuideGuide plugin

2. Creating Layout Grids and Guides

10 - Use the guide layout tool
11 - Create a baseline grid
12 - Create breakpoints

3. Crop Overlay Grids

13 - The rule of thirds crop overlay
14 - Grid crop overlay
15 - Diagonal crop overlay
16 - Triangle crop overlay
17 - The Golden ratio crop overlay
18 - The Golden spiral crop overlay

4. Grids in Action

19 - Create a photo grid
20 - Make a puzzle by slicing an image
21 - Create a contact sheet

Conclusion

22 - Next steps