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A List Apart: Articles: Fluid Grids

Fluid Grids
by ETHAN MARCOTTE

Early last year, I worked on the redesign of a rather content-heavy website. Design requirements were fairly light: the client asked us to keep the organization’s existing logo and to improve the dense typography and increase legibility. So, early on in the design process, we spent a sizable amount of time planning a well-defined grid for a library of content modules.

Over the past few years, this sort of thinking has become more common. Thanks to the advocacy of Mark Boulton, Khoi Vinh, and others, we’ve seen a resurgence of interest in the typographic grid, and how to use it on the web. And frankly, the idea’s been a smash hit: a million CSS frameworks have bloomed, with sundry tools to complement them, each built to make grid-based design even more accessible to the average designer. And why not? Afte”