Where did all the design grids go?

“astonished at how many professional designers do not use grids” reading these 10 words piqued my curiosity. Reading the comments sent my mind down a rabbit trail. I assumed user set grids were something widely adopted and used in the design practice, but apparently they may not be. Why is this? As a discipline many of us designers pride ourselves on pixel-level detail, we nerd out about border radius, type rhythms, and white space. So why the pushback on grid usage?

Grid systems provide structure and organization that benefit both designers and consumers. They help establish clear visual hierarchy by providing consistent spacing and alignment. They create natural focal points to guide our eyes through content. A grids’ systematic approach can help us create visual balance within our designs.

To understand some of the pushback let’s look at the evolution of design tools.

Early digital era (1990s-2000s)

• Programs like Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator offered basic guide systems
• Designers had to manually calculate and place grid lines on the canvas
• Grids were static and breaking them meant rebuilding from scratch
• Primarily focused on print-based fixed layouts

Web Design Revolution (2000s-2010s)

• Introduction of CSS frameworks like 960.gs and Bootstrap brought standardized grid systems
• Tools like Dreamweaver integrated grid overlays
• Grids were still relatively inflexible
• Required significant manual coding to implement

Modern design tools (late 2010s-Present)

• Tools like Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD introduced smart on-canvas features
• On-canvas guides automatically display spacing and alignment between elements as you drag them, making it easy to maintain consistent spatial relationships.
• Auto-layout helps manage the position and spacing of elements based on defined rules and relationships
• Components and constraints that maintain grid relationships
• Smart grids available on the artboard, element or component level

The shift has been from grids as static guidelines to dynamic systems that actively help designers create better layouts. Our modern design tools are simply smarter at helping us use a pseudo grid systems without realizing it.

But my question is “are we relying too much on design tools to do the heavy lifting?” I don’t have the data, but my hypothesis is that adoption of configurable grid systems in our modern design tools is low. Setting this requires upfront work, and users are already given helpful on-canvas tools.

But here is a challenge for you. Try setting up a grid system in your next design. See if it helps increase your efficiency, improve your polish, and elevate your designs. Grids are a foundational tool that may be overlooked. Modern tools have solved a lot of problems for us, but they may have also made a foundational tool easy to ignore.