Free Poster Layout Grid Generator

The condition is divisibility. Row boundaries fall at even fractions of the live height; baselines fall at even fractions of the same height. They coincide only when the baseline count is a whole multiple of the row count.

At this overlay's defaults that works out: six rows and 24 baselines gives exactly four baselines per row, so every row boundary lands on a baseline and a block can start and end on both systems at once.

Change the rows to five and leave the baselines at 24 and it stops working: 24 ÷ 5 is 4.8, so row boundaries fall between baselines, and any block aligned to a row is misaligned to the type inside it by up to four fifths of a line.

Counting the cases makes the size of the trap clear. The baseline slider runs from 8 to 80 — 73 values — and with six rows only twelve of them are multiples of six. Pick a baseline count at random and you have about a one in six chance of the two systems agreeing.

Nothing in the drawing tells you which case you are in. Both grids look correct because both are correct; they simply do not relate. That is exactly the kind of near-miss that makes a layout feel slightly unresolved without anyone being able to point at it.

So the practical rule is short: choose the row count first, then choose a baseline count that is a multiple of it. Four or five baselines per row is a normal working relationship for poster-scale type.

The weight difference between the two systems is what makes working with both possible at all. The baseline sub-grid is drawn at 45% of the main line weight, which is enough to read as subordinate.

If both were at the same weight the page would be a mesh and you could not see the block structure through it, and the block structure is where the layout decisions happen. The type positions are a consequence, not a decision.

The poster and editorial overlay page covers that tradition, beside the rest of the design template category. The bleed rectangle addresses the physical side. A printed poster is trimmed after the sheet comes off the press, the trim has a tolerance of a millimetre or two, and anything intended to run to the paper's edge must be drawn past it or risk a white sliver.

The dashed rectangle sits outside the live area at a fraction of the margin, marking where past-the-edge begins. It is a reminder rather than a specification — the actual bleed allowance is set by whoever is printing, and 3 mm is the common European figure.

The three named zones — headline, image and body — are labelled at the vertical positions a conventional poster puts them: the headline in the upper region, the image through the middle, the body toward the bottom.

That arrangement is a convention rather than a rule and it is worth being clear about which. Its logic is that a poster is read at two distances: from across a room, where only the headline and image register, and from a metre away, where the body becomes legible.

A poster that ignores the convention entirely can be excellent. A poster that has not decided which of its elements is the across-the-room element is usually not, and the zones' real function is to make you notice whether you have decided.

The two-distance problem is the constraint that makes poster design different from page design. A page is read at one distance; a poster has to work at several, and the type sizes have to be separated far enough that the hierarchy survives at the far one.

A practical consequence is that poster type scales tend to be much more extreme than editorial ones. A headline four or five times the body size looks excessive on screen and reads correctly on a wall, which is why posters designed on a monitor at 50% zoom often come back timid.

The column count for a poster is usually lower than for a page. Four is a common working number; twelve is available here and is more useful for editorial spreads than for posters, where a twelve-column division at poster scale gives columns too narrow to hold anything on their own.

The Swiss poster tradition is the reference for all of this, and its practitioners — Müller-Brockmann, Hofmann, Ruder — worked almost entirely with grids of this kind. What is worth taking from that work is not the aesthetic but the method: the grid was decided first and the design happened inside it.

Müller-Brockmann's own account is explicit that the grid is a way of making design decisions objective rather than a style, and the posters that came out of the approach look nothing like each other despite sharing the method.

For contemporary work the same grid does duty across formats. A poster, a programme cover and a social crop of the same design can share a column and row structure even at very different sizes, because every setting here is proportional.

The margin measured against the short side rather than each axis separately keeps that portable: a proportional margin means the same grid at A2 and at A0 is the same grid, and a poster series printed at two sizes stays a series.

The most productive use of the overlay is checking rather than constructing. Lay it over a finished poster and look for type that sits half a baseline off, or a block that ends a quarter-column short. Both are invisible in isolation and both are what makes a layout feel not-quite.

The grid draws over your own layout rather than exporting a fixed template because the divisibility check is only meaningful against a real design. A blank grid with agreeing systems is easy; the question is whether your layout is using them.

The export sizes itself from the paper format and the DPI you choose rather than from your screen, so a grid exported at A2 and 600 DPI prints with accurate positions. SVG keeps both systems editable as separate line sets. The baseline rhythm generator draws the type system on its own, when the blocks are already placed.

Everything runs in your browser. Images you load are never uploaded, because there is no server for them to reach. The drawing, the transform and the export all happen on your own machine.