IN MAKING the move to responsive web design, one of the potential hurdles is the rather awkward maths for calculating the percentage-based widths necessary for fluid layouts. If, for example, you’re designing with a 960px grid in Photoshop and you have six columns, each 140px wide, you divide 140 by 960 to get your percentage-based width: 14.583333%. Now, I don’t know about you, but numbers like that look a little scary. It doesn’t matter that there are great calculation tools built into TextMate to do the maths for you; the point is that the final figure looks like an arbitrary number with no immediate relation to either the container’s pixel width (960) or the element’s pixel width (140).”
“Compare that to a container that has a width of 1000px. 1000 is a nice, easy, round number. Dividing by 1000 results in clean percentages and better still, dividing by 1000 is something we can do in our heads: just remove the zero. A 140px column inside a 1000px container is 14%. A 500px column in a 1000px container is 50%. 320px is 32%. Easy!”
A better Photoshop grid for responsive web design » Blog » Elliot Jay Stocks.
