Author
Nathan Ford
Born and raised in Texas, Nathan now lives just outside Cardiff, Wales. He is the creative director at Mark Boulton Design, and is also the creator and product lead on Gridset, a simple tool that makes designing advanced grid systems for the web a breeze. Catch his occasional thoughts on all aspects of the web at Art=Work.
Also from this author
The method I outlined in my recent article, “Content-out Layout,” is actually the culmination of quite a few different influences. If you’re interested in a deep dive, I have compiled this list of the most useful thinking on the web about ratios, grids, and fluid design. Enjoy!
Grids serve well to divide up a predefined canvas and guide how content fits onto a page, but when designing for the web’s fluid nature, we need something more responsive. Enter ratios, which architects, sculptors, and book designers have all used in their work to help set the tone for their compositions, and to scale their material from sketch to final build. Designers can apply a similar process on the web by focusing on the tone and shape of our content first, then working outward to design fluid, ratio-based grid systems that invite harmony between content, layout, and screen. Nathan Ford takes the next step toward more sophisticated, content-focused layouts on the web.
