960 Grid System

Any person who is attempting to create a new page layout and wants to be somewhat organized in doing it, will have to start adding guide lines to their graphic designing program before they even start actually designing. The purpose of this is having containers, margins, paddings, widths and heights before they can put content to the design.

To make the designing task a bit simpler, the 960 Grid System was created. The projects proposes a new standard based on a width of 960px for a website, and a group of 12 or 16 columns of fixed size, separated by 20px spaces.

You can find on the website a downloadable kit in which you will find:

• An empty outline on pdf format that you can print and draw on it.
  
• Base files for Photoshop, Fireworks, OmniGraffle and Visio.
• XHTML Strict + CSS code made for those templates.
  

While using this does not imply that your design will be completely resolved, it certainly does help when you need to find a place for each of the components in your layout.