Organization as the foundation of professionalism. Quentin talked about scaffolding, how you have a scaffold established before you start writing. And that scaffold supports your efforts to looking like a pro. In graphic design, it's exactly the same thing. We call our scaffold the grid. And we'll talk about why that's so important, before you start a project, giving yourself this grid to work around. Take a look at this ad. It's okay, but there's something wrong with it. I'm wondering if you can see what it is. A problem, as I see it, is that if I draw lines along the edges of elements in this poster, in this flyer, I'll say that nothing's lining up. It's kind of a random concoction of elements that have dropped into the page kind of wherever they fit. And the problem is, it looks unprofessional. The fix? We simply line things up. We find common axes, every opportunity we can find to line things up. We take it, and when we do that, we draw lines along the edges of our elements. We see things now are lined up. And that is called the grid. The grid is a really cool thing. It goes a long ways toward helping us make our work look better. It's easier for the audience to understand what it is we're trying to say and read through our message if we compose according the grid. If we just drop elements onto the page randomly wherever they fit, which is really what a lot of poorly designed work does, the results look chaotic, and they look rough, and they don't look thought out. So, why not take every opportunity to use horizontal and vertical axes to line things up? The results will be 90% better just thinking about alignment and thinking about the grid. Even with documents, if you're laying out some kind of a document and you're not aware or you're not keeping in mind the idea of using alignment, your document runs the risk of looking ill-ordered. It looks as if it were just kind of thrown together haphazardly. That's not what we want. We simply line things up. We make sure all text is either flush left or flush right. And it's a 100% improvement. If you've been to a national park or a national historic monument, a or historic site here in the United States that's run by the National Park Service, and you stop at the visitor information center, you've probably pick up something that looks like this. This is what the National Parks uses. And it's built along a thing that's called the unigrid, which was developed in 1977 to help the Park Service organize a huge amount of information across a broad range of facilities. And it all looks the same, and it all looks different. In this case, the grid gives the Park Service a tremendous amount of latitude in how they can populate their individual print pieces, but it also gives them a tremendous amount of consistency. I recommend before you even start on any kind of a design project using a grid. Before you even put any content on the page, think about your grid. You'll find that using a grid makes your work look organized, well mannered. It's much easier for your audience to understand and to read through because you've given them a sense of flow and harmony. Even if you sketch, and I know a lot of people like to sketch before they start projects. Designers I know will often sit down with pencil and paper before they even sit down at the computer. If you find that you like the sketch and you’re sitting down with a piece of scratch paper and a pencil, start still with a grid to organize your thought and to organize your content. So, what is a grid exactly? Well, it can be real or it can be imaginary. I know a lot of folks, myself included, a lot of times we don't literally build a grid, but we know that it's there. It's an imaginary scaffold that we line things up with. We make certain that there are common axes both vertically and horizontally. Or, if you're using a program like PowerPoint, you can use lines, boxes, those sorts of things, drop content in, line it up, and then you can delete those of course right before the file is delivered or presented. The grid is one of those things you can find any number of ways to include it in your work, real or imaginary. Just make sure it's there. The other great thing about a grid is it's recyclable. So, if you find something that works for you, like for PowerPoint slides or for designing report covers or whatever, you can use it over and over. Just change out the content. This is also called a template. When you build a template, templates are built using grids. So, recyclability, ease of use as a designer, the grid does all the heavy lifting for you. Best design practices number 2, a good design should always start with a grid.