Comic grid

The other day I was listening to Make It Then Tell Everybody and there was a discussion about having a grid to hand for putting comic page layouts together. I'm starting to put pages together for a comic so I thought I'd put one together for myself. As a starting point, I've got a compound grid of 3x3 and 4x4 which gives two standard options.

The great thing about combining these two simple grids is it provides a really flexible framework for putting together loads of different panel layouts. Here are a few I quickly smashed together.

On the left is using the 2-panel width of the 4x4 grid and the 3-panel height of the 3x3 to create a straight forward 2x3 but moving along, you can see how the grid can be broken up to create a wide range of page layouts and this really is only a tiny sample.

I've been using this on a comic I've just started working on and it's really helping me get things moving. In the past, I'd laid panels out pretty ad-hoc, spending lots of time adjusting dimensions and gutters. This grid has reduced that time a lot for me. I'm able to thumbnail, figure out the best panel sizes within the grid and the concentrate on what's going in the panels.

Most people probably already have their own grid or way of laying out pages but if you've been wanting something to help you out, I've put the grid on Dropbox to download for free.