The beauty of page layout programs is the ability to quickly rearrange elements on the page. Don't like the way it looks? Move it. Text too small to read? Make it bigger. A click, a drag, a whole new look.
But before you start moving things around though, it helps to have an idea of where you want to put it -- a plan. In this series of lessons we've been doing one thing at a time. In reality, you'll probably be going back and forth from selecting graphics to arranging the page to resizing the graphics to changing the type to moving the graphics around, and so on.
Chances are that when you first started your card, or at least by the time you began narrowing down your clip art choices, you had a fairly good idea how you might arrange everything on the page. If you chose a single large graphic you knew that you were limited to putting the text above or below, or perhaps on top of the image. If you had a lot of text to go on the page you knew that there wouldn't be room for dozens of images. You had a preliminary plan for your card.
Let's formalize that plan into a grid. For our simple greeting card we'll stick with a few simple uniform rows and columns that roughly define where our text and images appear. In the sidebar image, you'll see 3 typical greeting cards laid out in 3 rows, 2 rows, and 2 columns as well as the grid used for Grandma Baker's Back to School greeting card.
You can set up your own grid by drawing boxes or using the non-printing horizontal and vertical guides in your software. While the margins you set help you keep your graphics and text from running off the edges, your grid or imaginary columns and rows help you keep the elements balanced on the page.
Experienced designers may work with very complicated grids, especially when working on more complex documents than a simple greeting card. For a beginner, sticking with a basic layout of 2 or 3 equal rows or columns or an even number of squares will be less confusing.
Not every inch of your page, nor every inch of every row or column, has to be filled with clip art or text. You can also use your grid to help balance out the white space (empty places) on your card. The greeting card we're building in this class has a grid based on 12 squares. Three pieces of clip art plus 3 chunks of text fill up 6 squares. By treating the empty space as if it were simply 6 more squares we can balance the white space with the rest of the card.
Create a Greeting Card > Lesson 7 Definitions | Instruction | Assignment
