react

Recoil.js — The New, Better State Management Library for React

The why

The baseline grid has traditionally been used in print design to create vertical rhythm. In my day to day work designing web experiences, I haven’t encountered that many use cases where such rhythm was obviously needed to make the alignment better.

To me, using the 4px baseline grid is a balance between visual accuracy (for users) and design efficiency (for me). In the Problem section, I talked about how measuring from text bounding box would introduce extra space. At the end of the day, user can’t see the bounding box. So it doesn’t really make sense to use this approach especially if it creates visual imbalance and doesn’t benefit users. On the other hand, ignoring the bounding box and measuring using the baseline grid is able to achieve better visual accuracy. See below for a comparison between these two approaches. As we can see, when the same set of spacing values (32px, 12px, 32px, 32px) is being used, the design measured using the baseline grid reflects the intended spacing much more accurately.

One might say, if measuring from the bounding box yields too much space, then for example in the first card, reducing the first spacing value from 32px to 28px or 24px would make “Seattle”’s top and left padding look equal. But at that point, it becomes a guessing game; you would never know for sure unless you count the pixels. On the other hand, the 4px grid approach provides a more accurate and predictable way to know it’s ~32px (taking into account the 1–2px error introduced by rounding).

In terms of design efficiency, this might seem like more work, but because of the grid, the design tool (Sketch or Figma) can help snap elements and type baseline to the grid, so aligning and spacing become relatively easy. Below is my workflow using the baseline grid to lay out text.

Alternatively, you can choose not to use the grid and manually measure from the cap height (as shown in the gif below), but it would require zooming all the way in and out of the pixel grid. Plus, the size of the container that holds your text might not be a multiple of 4px.