Great Catalog Design for the Design Impaired

Take a transparent piece of plastic, draw a grid of lines on it (like a checkerboard), place it over a catalog spread, and you’ll discover that most of the images and copy margins line up perfectly (or almost perfectly) with one or another of the lines.

An accident? Absolutely not. Designing over an invisible grid is a tactic that even the best designers rely on to create layouts that just feel right.